These books are but two of a great mass of research emerging that will, in my view, change the very way this country thinks. In my opinion, they have the potential to represent the beginning of a new and great Australian philosophy - one that has no time or patience for the convenient prejudices of the self-indulgent and illegitimate squatocracy that has been the very meaning of the word ‘Australia' for two hundred years. This new thought means most to the young Australians and is bringing them fascination with and pride in Aboriginal culture and less shame and guilt in their own. These two books also symbolise, for me, the great anger and bitterness that young Australians are feeling against an education system that has deliberately kept them blinded to the truth of the so-called ‘bringing of civilisation' to this land. Aboriginal activists will not forge change and redress injustices as much as the young white Australian people, who are already outraged at being isolated from the deep wells of wisdom that dot the landscape of an ancient and profound culture.

The authors of these two books I have mentioned are in no way anarchists or revolutionaries; they are as academic, levelheaded and analytical as their families always hoped they would be. They have simply begun a sensible and logical step in this country's history by exposing past untruths, discovering the reality, assessing this and restating the facts intelligently.

I cannot praise these and other works of this kind too highly. Perhaps, when such ideas are introduced into our education systems, the present-day students may encourage their, what I call, ‘mentally constipated adults' to also peruse these works.

You have heard the Aboriginal point of view. Before summing up I would like to introduce you to a non-Aboriginal point of view … Last year you honoured Judith Wright McKinney with a doctorate. She is, in my opinion, the greatest poet of her generation. Here is the poem she wrote in her attempt to sum up ‘White Australia'. What she has to say is worthy of your consideration.

Two Dreamtimes

(For Kath Walker)

Kathy my sister with the torn heart,

I don't know how to thank you

for your dreamtime stories of joy and grief

written on paperbark.

You were one of the dark children

I wasn't allowed to play with -

riverbank campers, the wrong colour,

(I couldn't turn you white.)

So it was late I met you,

late I began to know

they hadn't told me the land I loved

was taken out of your hands.

Sitting all night at my kitchen table

with a cry and a song in your voice,

your eyes were full of the dying children,

the blank-eyed taken women,

the sullen looks of the men who sold them

for rum to forget the selling,

the hard rational white faces

with eyes that forget the past.

With a knifeblade flash in your black eyes

that always long to be blacker,

your Spanish-Koori face