Going by what we learned at school, the Aboriginal people had some funny ideas. They had this thing called ‘going walkabout’, which was part of being a nomad. They went to one place and ate all the food they could find, and then they went off somewhere else and ate all the food there. They didn’t build proper houses because they were always going walkabout, and they had to go walkabout because they didn’t know about farming. They hunted and gathered, that was all. Two hundred years after Sturt had recorded his puzzlement, our Social Studies textbooks hadn’t made much progress in understanding the first Australians.

Between the lines was the message that they had more or less disappeared. It was sad, but an inevitable consequence of the fact that we were more robust (not dying of measles and the common cold) and more advanced technologically, having guns rather than wooden spears. Darwin had decreed, and how could we argue? The fittest survived.

I’d learned quite a bit since those days in that stuffy classroom at North Sydney Demonstration School. The 1967 Referendum that gave the Aboriginal people the vote, and counted them in the census for the first time, took place when I was seventeen, and that made me do some thinking. You mean they didn’t count as humans before? You mean they weren’t allowed to vote?

Students only a few years ahead of me at university had gone on a ‘freedom ride’—modelled on the ones in the segregated states of the USA—to outback towns. I admired them but knew I’d have been too timid to go. In 1988, the sacred national day, Australia Day, which celebrated the landing of the First Fleet, was declared a National Day of Mourning by Aboriginal people, and many of us non-indigenous sympathisers joined them on a march through the streets of Sydney.

But when I tried to fit together the few things I knew about the Aboriginal people with Solomon Wiseman settling on the Hawkesbury, all I got was a confusing static of contradictions.

I needed to get educated.

But how? Perhaps I should meet some Aboriginal people and ask them. But which ‘Aboriginal people’? I knew enough by now to know they were not the uniform bloc we’d learned about at school. Should I talk to urban mixed-descent Aboriginal people, like the woman on the Harbour Bridge? Or those I’d seen in documentaries, the people living out among spinifex and red dirt, walking barefoot and killing goannas?

And what was I going to ask? Please give me a quick lesson on Aboriginal culture? Or even worse: Would you mind telling me about the things that my people did to your people?

That would make me just another whitefeller wanting to get something: not a dot painting dirt cheap, not an authentic boomerang, not even a hundred acres of land, but stories.