27 April

When I drive through the Australian countryside, I notice how almost completely unoccupied it is. Apart from the odd farmhouse, the countryside is as good as empty of people. That’s not an accident. Like the Americans and their native peoples, we drove people off the land, often killing them in the process. Some of the killings would count as genocide, they were massacres. Now called the Frontier Wars. Read this, we knew we were doing it too, people admitted we were taking the land. Only recently has that recognition stopped. It’s a story that is going to grow over time, a national stain. And when you read some of the accounts of the countryside at the time of our arrival, we’ve destroyed the greatest wonder of the world, in all of history. No other civilisation has lasted more than a few thousand years, ours was tens of thousands of years old. An unimaginable treasure, destroyed, the whole world needed to learn how they did it.