Jimmy Clements, a Wuradjuri man from down Gundagai way, walked all the way up to Canberra on hearing that the Duke and Duchess of York were set to open the new federal parliament.

It was May 1927, and Jimmy was pretty well known around the Limestone Plains, the natural amphitheatre on which the new federation’s national capital had been imposed. Like other Aboriginal men whom the whitefellas regarded as amenable, harmless or both, he wore a copper breastplate around his neck bearing the name ‘King Billy’. Supposedly symbolising the white man’s respect for the blacks, the breastplate was little more than another testimony to the Indigenous man’s subjugation to the invader.