Australians have far too much in common to divide over a treaty

Unfortunately, the record was mundane: a hunter-gatherer people met its match in a far more sophisticated group of later arrivals. Around the world, all hunter-gatherer people have suffered that same fate.

The romantic view pushed at our children, and which they seem to be rejecting, could do with a correction. Fortunately, good people have taken the trouble to go to earlier records of the relationship between Aborigines and later arrivals.

Published last week, Voices from the Past: Extracts from the Annual Reports of the South Australian Chief Protectors of Aborigines, 1837 Onwards, by Alistair Crooks and Joe Lane, is an excellent place to start.

The first Protector of Abor­igines for South Australia had been appointed before the first colonists had left London. The Protectors were ombudsmen, and they acted on behalf of the Aborigines in their dealings with government and colonists.

Long before Behrendt's great-grandparents were born, these Protectors struggled to find solutions to the same problems that baffle the most ''sympathetic'' of today's policymakers.

The year 2018 will mark the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's first Endeavour voyage to Australia. It is clear that an Aboriginal people occupied Australia at that time and that their descendants have done so ever since. A dignified statement of this in a preamble to the Australian Constitution is worth pursuing. Anything else is a try-on.