Originally published in Meanjin in December 1972.

Many things divide white and black Australians. Some are manifest and widely recognized; others like their conflicting interpretations of the past are less often appreciated. Yet when white Australians celebrated the bi-centenary of Cook’s discovery of the east coast many Aboriginals mourned, and during the re-enactment of the Botany Bay landing they threw wreaths into the sea. While Brisbane commemorated the great navigator, local Aboriginals wore red head-bands and laid red flowers before a church altar to symbolize the fate of tribes which have become extinct since the beginning of European settlement. Past violence haunts the folk memory of many Aboriginal communities and influences contemporary behaviour. In Arnhem Land R.M. and C.H. Bemdt found that racial conflict was still ‘vividly remembered’, while M. Reay discovered in rural New South Wales that ‘punitive expeditions and other massacres of Aborigines occupy an important place in the history of the mixed blood groups as it is interpreted by themselves…The site of the nearest massacre is always known … to the mixed bloods these sites are land-marks.’ Other groups may view the past differently but in many parts of Australia where ‘aboriginal life now touches that of Europeans…old injuries still rankle’.