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of shame and intrigue about them . . . among the Australian intelligentsia is a remarkable thing.
    Returning home I had been struck by the same thing. It seems obvious and yet it is not so simple an issue to grasp. If you look at it and see simple white liberal guilt you will be misreading the political landscape as confidently as the Europeans misread the physical land of 1788.
    When I talked about the issue to Jayme Koszyn of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, she asked me, how many Aboriginal people do you actually know?
    One.
    One?
    There were only 700,000 Aboriginals living off this country when white people first arrived. Today there are 400,000 (in a population of 18 million) but you can live and die a white Sydneysider and never meet an Aboriginal. And yet we are obsessed, have always been obsessed, with the original inhabitants, even while we anticipated their passing, while we labelled them 'doomed', stole their land and children too.
    Thinking to find an exact measure of this obsession, I searched through the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogues in the New York public library. It was in its postage stamps, I figured, that a country represented itself to the world and my recollection of my childhood stamp album was that Australian postage stamps had been filled with Aboriginal portraits and motifs.
    In the library I discovered that the 1930 two-penny stamp was exactly as I remembered it - the hunting Aboriginal. I also had picture-perfect recall of the two-shilling crocodile of 1939 and the Aboriginal of 1946. But that was it. What I had remembered was all there was to know. In all the years from Federation until 1955 there were no other depictions of indigenous people. There were many, many of George VI, Princess Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, Captain Cook, Matthew Flinders; there were dukes and duchesses and the Melbourne Cup - in short a portrait of a self-doubting corner of the British Empire.
    You would think, to look at these stamps, not that we were obsessed, but we were forgetful of the facts. The Romans celebrated the barbarians they led away in chains, but not my ancestors.
    As Kelvin had said so passionately, we had fought a war of occupation, at the same time pretending that the land was not used, barely inhabited.
    Yet even the most racist amongst us must grant the Aboriginals intimate knowledge of this hostile land, and that is where they gain their author-ity in our imagination.
    They knew how to live off this land, and we did not, and still do not. In report after report the first settlers described the fertility of the soils. (I find myself surrounded, wrote Francis Grosse, with gardens that flourish and produce fruit of every description.) This was madness. The soil was ancient, leached, sterile. When they saw parks, which they described repeatedly, they were seeing what they wished to see, a mirage of the deep soils that the ice age had bestowed on Europe. Here there had been no glaciers to grind the rock to soil, and if there were only 700,000 people inhabiting the entire continent, it was because that was what the continent could sustain.
    The term El Niño was not in the vocabulary of Governor Phillip when he set his motley crew ashore, but the meteorological pattern it labels had been in force for thousands of years and the land was subject then, as it is now, to erratic swings of weather, droughts, floods. It did not matter how you rendered it in oils, or how optimistically you described it in your letters home, this was not Europe, or America for that matter.
    The truth is that Sydney Cove was only fit for blackfellows, or only blackfellows were fit for Sydney Cove. They did not need a ship to provision them, and if no ships had come from England for another 50,000 years a lot more of them would have survived.
    Our white ancestors, by contrast, were left unprovisioned for just two years, and in that time their crops failed and then they lived with the terror of starvation. This story has