Even nowadays one of the most common questions heard on our streets, at parties and in pubs, after the rhetorical "How ya going?", is "Where are you from?".

"Nah you don't look Australian" is something Sydney-based photographer Amie Baines hears all too frequently. So the daughter of British parents who are, according to the 37-year-old, "half Jamaican", has teamed up with the Share Some Good campaign for her latest project.

Share Some Good was established off the back of research conducted by RMIT and Latrobe University that found more than 60 per cent of Australian adults reported experiencing some form of online abuse, 25 per cent said they had been threatened with physical violence and close to 18 per cent encountered race-based or degrading messages and comments.

Baines' contribution is a video and photographic project titled Where are You From. The video, made in conjunction with producers Sarah Estela and Jack Crombie, is an extension of her photographic portrait series that features 25 Australian women with different ethnic backgrounds, something that had its genesis 13 years ago when she began studying photography.

"I grew up in Adelaide and was the only brown kid at school," Baines said. "Australia to me is my home and my work is a reflection of my own reality and these stories are the realities of all my subjects."

Baines, who moonlights as a property photographer, has always wanted to create art for charity and this is her first foray into exhibiting. The majority of the women who serve as stars of the series are her friends and include women of Lebanese, Macedonian and Aboriginal Australian descent.

"There are some new Australians, first and second generation Australians featured. I just don't want segregation anymore. These women, my friends, are now having kids and that whole, 'Oh but you don't look Australian', needs to stop," she said.

"Our whole culture is based on diversity, our coffee culture is from Europe and the Brits bought the drinking," she joked.

In the film every woman states their ancestry.

"My mother was born out in Coonamble, in the country area, and my father is from Pakistan," one woman said.

All participants, without being prompted by the creators, said they had all been asked: "Where are you really from? You don't look Australian, you're far from the blonde hair, blue eyes, tall, surfer that Australian women are synonymous for."

"To be honest I don't know what a typical Aussie looks like," another woman said.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the majority of immigrants living in Sydney – excluding those from Britain or New Zealand – were born in China, India, Italy, Philippines and Vietnam.

Baines says the timing of the release of her project is due to the global political climate and the positive yet conflicting shift in attitudes she is seeing at home.

"It's a very personal thing for me. Discrimination and racism are not new but I see a change happening and people are becoming more open and understanding. That is despite people who hold openly racist beliefs getting into positions of power," she said.

"The most empowering thing about being in Australia right now is that it's so culturally diverse and with that we are able to learn so much."