Them and us and NAIDOC

Yet we expect them to adopt our culture and become a black white-fella, without any effort on our part to reciprocate by becoming a white black-fella.

It is a perfectly normal thing to be aware of differences between individual beings. None of us, not even twins, are exactly the same as each other.

Similarly, it is just as natural for national groups to behave as tribally as they have since the beginnings of mankind, and to be highly suspicious of strangers. In many instances, it was a normal behavior to invade other lands and vanquish the residents..

Many Aussies are descended from English forbears whose cultural feelings of superiority applied to any race of non-British descent.

This outlook of presumed racial superiority was exampled in the 2006 book, "Lesser Breeds", which focused on racism as displayed in the popular culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

Its propositions were accepted widely by a populace conditioned to believe that all things British, including its people, were best, and its manifesto was exemplified by attitudes towards the Chinese, Arabs, Blacks and Jews. It compared how popular racism was naturalised, what issues it raised and fed off, and what this said about British people at the time, much of which still exists.

It has taken all those years since our land was first gained by Britain to develop today's multi-cultural society, said to be one of the foremost in the modern world.

Yet our fairly recent history has been sullied by deliberate attempts to wipe out our original inhabitants. The aftermath of these genocidal forays left a nation reluctant to accept a society blended with our originals..

I've had the personal joy of close visual and verbal contact with some of our first people.

During a filming expedition along the Canning Stock Route which runs from West Australia to the Northern Territory, I was struck with the resplendent visual messages of ancestral paintings in a massive cave complex a few kilometers short of Durba Springs. This sacred site was cathedral-like in size, tranquility, and the rich historic paintings going back countless centuries.

The drawings spoke to me – they recounted a vast history of the lives of these desert dwellers, and it needed no special understanding of aboriginal art to pick up the subtlety, the meaning, and the nuance of every precious image in this hallowed site.

In the Sydney region we are lucky to have sandstone geology as a display 'canvas' for huge amounts of Aboriginal carved art. Our northern beach regions have sites where images were cut into the yielding stone, and a bit further inland, in the magnificent Blue Mountains, you can come across caves painted with ochre outlines as well as regular paintings of hands. Many of these are now accompanied by simple explanatory signage, courtesy of National Parks and Wildlife Service, interpreting what the creators are communicating.