In the Aboriginal way of doing things, it seemed to be different. This was a culture in which knowledge was sacred, and sacred often meant secret. Certain people—and only certain people—had the right to certain kinds of knowledge. The stories that carried the knowledge had many levels. The elementary levels could be told to children (and white people), but there were deeper layers of meaning that few were allowed to know.

I gathered, too, that stories operated somewhat in the manner of title deeds. If you’d been told the story—the full story, not the public version—about a particular piece of country, it was part of what gave you the right to be on it.

But you didn’t own it. You could use it, you were responsible for it. You were its custodian. But as an individual you didn’t own land.

In fact, you didn’t really own anything. Food, for instance. The group got the food, and then divided it out among everyone. There seemed to be no idea of competing with each other to get more food, or more land, or a better house—the things that people competed over in my culture. Even art—the ultimate expression of the individual in my world—wasn’t the expression of an individual sensibility.

This was what Mum would call ‘an eye-opener’. No matter how much I read, I still couldn’t really get my head around it all. It was so foreign.

It took a long time to realise that that was an appropriate feeling. I was an outsider to this culture. This wasn’t knowledge you could expect to go to a book and learn. The thing was to recognise that I didn’t know.

I could see, though, how blindly I’d been embedded in my own culture. I’d never recognised it as a culture—a learned thing. I thought it was part of being human to compete for things of value. Now I saw that it was part of my group’s way of being human. In my culture, the way for the species to survive was through competition. In Aboriginal culture, on a different part of the planet, the best way to survive was through sharing and collaborating.

It started to make sense of what happened between white and black two hundred years ago. Not only did both have different systems of belief about how people should behave— they often didn’t realise that they were operating within a system of belief. Each group thought its behaviour was normal. Neither could see any kind of sense in the way the other was behaving.

The land looked empty and unclaimed to the newcomers because it had none of the familiar marks of ownership: fences, roads, houses. It was perhaps understandable that they thought they were entitled to take it up.