Adapted from a poem inspired by Sherman Alexie’s “Bird Watching at Night”.
There is a professor on the hill – perhaps you have met him. He sits in a sunlit seminar room, his concern for Indigenous Australians arranged before him like exhibits in a case he is about to argue. He names the oppressors with the precision of a taxonomist: the colonial settler, the pastoral squatter, the mission superintendent, the welfare bureaucrat. He is, in the technical sense, correct about all of them. And yet something is missing from the room. Something like the actual experience of living inside the history he catalogues so fluently. Something like the complexity, the conflict, the adaptation, the humour, the stubborn and irreducible life of the people whose suffering he has made his professional subject.
That gap – between the narrated Indigenous experience and the lived one, between grief performed by its witnesses and grief carried by its inheritors – is where this essay begins. Because to write honestly about the experience of Indigenous Australians since colonisation is to hold several things simultaneously: the documented, measurable catastrophe of colonial dispossession; the internal complexity of pre-colonial societies that were never simply peaceable kingdoms; the contested and genuinely difficult debates about what explains contemporary disadvantage and what might remedy it; and the resilience, wit, and sovereignty of cultures that were never, despite everything, extinguished. The professor on the hill sees only one of these things clearly. He is, as a consequence, only partially right – and partial rightness, deployed with total confidence, is one of the more reliable ways of getting things importantly wrong.
What Existed Before – And What That Means
The standard opening move in essays like this one is to describe pre-colonial Aboriginal society as a kind of paradise interrupted. The continent was home to between 300,000 and one million people, organised into hundreds of distinct nations with sophisticated systems of law, language, ceremony, and ecological management accumulated across at least 65,000 years of continuous habitation. All of this is true. The Wiradjuri nation, whose country stretches across central New South Wales along the Lachlan, Murrumbidgee, and Macquarie rivers, governed millions of acres through intricate kinship systems and diplomatic relationships that European settlers almost entirely failed to recognise as governance at all. Aboriginal people were not merely inhabitants of the land – they were its active managers, using sophisticated fire regimes that shaped the very ecology Europeans later claimed to be discovering.
But intellectual honesty requires going further than this. Pre-colonial Australia was not static, harmonious, or free of violence and conflict. Aboriginal societies had their own wars, territorial disputes, and cycles of retribution. The arrival of humans on the continent approximately 65,000 years ago was itself associated, over millennia, with the extinction of megafauna – a reminder that human impact on environment is not exclusively a European invention. Different nations competed for resources, raided neighbouring groups, and negotiated complex inter-group relationships that included both alliance and enmity. The Wiradjuri were not universally at peace with their neighbours. No human society is.
Why does this matter? Not because acknowledging pre-colonial conflict diminishes the horror of what colonisation did – it does not, and no serious person argues that it does. It matters because the alternative, the romanticised vision of a continent existing in perfect ecological and social harmony before 1788, is itself a form of condescension. It denies Aboriginal people their full humanity, which includes the full human capacity for internal conflict, political disagreement, and social change. Societies that existed in real time, grappling with real problems, are more impressive – not less – than mythologised versions of themselves. The 65,000 years of continuous habitation is astonishing precisely because it involved human beings dealing with each other, with scarcity, with change, and with all the difficulties that attend any complex society. To flatten that into a pastoral idyll is to replace one colonial myth with another.
It also matters for understanding the early dynamics of colonisation itself. Some Aboriginal groups initially attempted to incorporate the settlers into existing systems of trade and alliance. Others resisted from the first moment of contact. Alliances shifted. Some groups, at various points, provided intelligence or assistance to colonial forces against traditional enemies, before discovering that the settler project was not interested in Indigenous allies but in Indigenous land – and would eventually dispossess everyone regardless of prior cooperation. The history of the frontier is more politically complex than a simple binary of coloniser and colonised, not because this complexity exonerates the colonial project, but because understanding it accurately is necessary for understanding how the dispossession actually worked and why resistance, despite being real and sustained, ultimately could not hold the line against superior military technology and deliberate biological contamination through introduced disease.
What Actually Happened: The Dispossession
With that context established, the facts of colonisation remain damning enough without embellishment.
Smallpox moved ahead of the frontier, killing up to half of coastal populations before most Aboriginal people had even seen a European face. Pastoral expansion displaced communities from water sources and hunting grounds that were not merely economically important but cosmologically significant – country is not property in the European legal sense, but relationship, and severing that relationship carried spiritual as well as material consequences. When Aboriginal people resisted – as they did, consistently, and with considerable strategic sophistication – the colonial response was military. Massacres occurred across the continent: at Myall Creek in 1838, where eleven settlers were eventually convicted for killing twenty-eight Wirrayaraay people, an event notable precisely because prosecution was so rare; at the Battle of Pinjarra; at Waterloo Creek; at Coniston. These were not isolated incidents. They were the mechanism of settlement, repeated across a continent over the better part of a century.
By the early twentieth century, the violence of the frontier had evolved into the structural violence of the mission system and the Stolen Generations – the systematic removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families under government authority, placed in institutions or with white families, often never to return. An estimated one in three children in some communities were removed between 1910 and 1970. The purpose was stated explicitly in the language of the era’s administrators: to absorb Aboriginal people into white society until the race had, in the phrase used by Western Australia’s Chief Protector of Aborigines A.O. Neville, “bred itself out.” This was not accidental harm produced by well-intentioned welfare policy. It was a programme of cultural destruction with an explicit goal, pursued with bureaucratic thoroughness, and it produced intergenerational trauma whose effects are still measurable in the health, incarceration, and child removal statistics of today.
The professor knows all of this. He lists it carefully. He is right to name it.
Explaining Today’s Disparities: A More Difficult Conversation
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people die, on average, eight years earlier than non-Indigenous Australians. They are incarcerated at a rate thirteen times higher than the general population. Indigenous children continue to be removed from their families by child protection services at rates that, in absolute numbers, exceed those of the Stolen Generations era. Suicide rates in some remote communities, particularly among young men, constitute a crisis that would be treated as a national emergency if it occurred in any other demographic.
The professor’s explanation for all of this is historical – and history is clearly part of the explanation. The destruction of economic bases, the severing of cultural transmission through the removal of children, the deliberate suppression of language and ceremony, the trauma of dispossession compounded across generations: these are not ancient history. They are living causation. A child whose grandmother was removed from her family, forbidden to speak her language, and denied the transmission of cultural knowledge she would otherwise have passed on is dealing with the consequences of events within living memory, not the distant past.
But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that historical causation, while necessary, is not sufficient as a complete explanation – and that some Aboriginal thinkers and leaders have said so themselves, often at considerable personal cost. Noel Pearson, the Cape York lawyer and activist, has argued for decades that passive welfare dependency – not as an original condition but as a policy-induced outcome – has itself become a destructive force within some Aboriginal communities, operating independently of but compounding the original harm of dispossession. His argument is not that historical injustice is irrelevant. It is that communities cannot wait for structural justice to be fully delivered before addressing the internal behavioural and social dynamics that are also killing people now. Warren Mundine has made related arguments about the failures of land rights and Native title as development frameworks – that the transfer of legal title without economic development capacity has sometimes produced legal victories that leave communities materially unchanged.
These are not comfortable arguments. They have been misappropriated by people who wish to use them to avoid accountability for historical and ongoing injustice. But the fact that an argument can be misused does not make it wrong, and the fact that conservative politicians occasionally cite Pearson does not make his analysis invalid. The most serious engagement with Aboriginal disadvantage acknowledges that multiple causal streams – historical dispossession, ongoing structural discrimination, policy failure, and internal community dynamics – operate simultaneously and require different responses that cannot be reduced to a single explanatory framework.
There are also genuine debates about what actually works. The evidence on remote community policy is complicated and contested. The Northern Territory Emergency Response, introduced in 2007 in response to the Little Children are Sacred report on child abuse in Aboriginal communities, suspended the Racial Discrimination Act, quarantined welfare payments, and imposed federal control over community governance. Aboriginal leaders were divided: some saw it as necessary intervention in a genuine crisis; others saw it as a new iteration of the same colonial logic that had produced the crisis in the first place – government intervention without consent, stripping community agency in the name of protecting community members. Both positions contained genuine insight. The policy itself produced evidence supporting both critiques.
The professor does not engage with this complexity. His narrative requires Aboriginal people to be the victims of clearly identifiable external oppressors. A more accurate account requires him to sit with the discomfort of problems that are partly structural and partly internal, that require both external accountability and internal agency, and that cannot be solved by naming the right enemies with sufficient academic precision.
The Immigration Question: Symmetry Required
The poem at the heart of this essay contains a pivot that the professor – and those sympathetic to his general position – tend to handle poorly. Having catalogued the destruction of Indigenous Australian culture by colonial settlement, the professor turns to immigration, specifically Muslim immigration, as a comparable civilisational threat. The Blak man in the room laughs.
The laughter is just. It identifies a real contradiction: the professor cannot simultaneously mourn the destruction of Aboriginal culture through an uncontrolled foreign influx and warn against contemporary cultural change through immigration without noticing that he is deploying structurally similar arguments to opposite ends. If the civilisational case for restricting immigration is inherently colonial logic, it was that logic when it was used against the First Peoples of this continent. The professor does not appear to notice the echo.
But – and this is where analytical symmetry is required – the speaker’s laughter should not be taken as a complete dismissal of the immigration question itself. The question of how societies manage cultural change, maintain social cohesion, and negotiate the tensions between established communities and new arrivals is a genuine one, present in every multicultural democracy, and it deserves serious engagement rather than reflexive dismissal.
Australia’s multicultural project has been, by many measures, genuinely successful. The continent has absorbed waves of immigration from Britain, Ireland, southern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa without the levels of communal violence that have attended similar processes elsewhere. But success is not the same as absence of tension, and the dismissal of all concerns about integration as simple racism prevents the kind of honest conversation that actually produces better outcomes for both established residents and newcomers. The legitimate question is not whether cultural difference creates challenges – it does, as it always has – but whether those challenges are being addressed through inclusion and genuine civic engagement, or through exclusion and the performance of threat.
What makes the professor’s version of this argument laughable is not that he has concerns about cultural cohesion. It is that he has applied his analytical framework so selectively – catastrophising about Muslim immigration while having just finished cataloguing how European immigration destroyed Aboriginal culture – that his intellectual consistency has become impossible to take seriously. The Blak man’s laughter is not an argument that immigration raises no legitimate questions. It is a recognition that the professor’s selective application of the civilisational-destruction framework reveals something about who he thinks culture belongs to, and who he thinks has the standing to defend it.
The Diversity of Indigenous Opinion
One of the least examined assumptions in public discussion of Aboriginal Australia is that Indigenous people speak with a single political voice – or that they should. They do not, and the assumption that they should is itself a form of the colonial logic that denied Aboriginal people full political subjectivity.
There is genuine, substantive disagreement among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about almost every major question of policy and politics. On sovereignty and treaty: some, following the Uluru Statement from the Heart, argue for a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament as a first step toward formal treaty-making; others, including some senior Indigenous figures, argued that the Voice proposal was too modest and should have been preceded by treaty negotiations; still others, like Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, argued that a race-based constitutional body was the wrong mechanism entirely and would entrench division rather than promote reconciliation. These are not simply sellouts versus authentic voices. They are different readings of history, different assessments of political possibility, and different theories of change held by people with equal standing to hold them.
On remote communities: there is profound disagreement about whether the future lies in maintaining connection to country in remote settings, with all the economic disadvantage that currently entails, or in facilitating movement to urban centres where economic opportunity is more accessible but cultural connection is harder to maintain. There is no consensus answer. Different communities, different families, different individuals have made different choices, and those choices deserve respect rather than the imposition of a uniform policy preference from either Canberra or the academy.
On the role of traditional culture: there are Aboriginal people who see the revival of language, ceremony, and law as the foundation of any genuine recovery; others who are more secular in their orientation and see cultural revivalism as one pathway among several rather than the necessary precondition for all others. There are Aboriginal Christians and Aboriginal atheists, Aboriginal conservatives and Aboriginal socialists, Aboriginal people who find the Tent Embassy’s continued existence inspiring and Aboriginal people who think it has become an obstacle to pragmatic progress.
The professor’s narrative requires a unified Indigenous subject – a collective victim whose interests can be represented, explained, and defended from the seminar room. The actual political landscape of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia is far more various, more argumentative, and more interesting than this. Engaging with it honestly means giving up the comfort of a story in which the right analysis, properly applied, produces a clear prescription. It means instead accepting that the people most directly affected by these questions are themselves in genuine disagreement about the answers, and that this disagreement is not a problem to be resolved by better theory but a political reality to be navigated through democratic process – including a democratic process that actually gives Indigenous Australians meaningful structural input, which has been consistently denied.
Accountability Without Pity, Complexity Without Excuse
What would it mean to engage honestly with Indigenous Australian experience without the professor’s particular failures?
It would mean taking seriously the distinction between acknowledgment and accountability. The 2008 apology for the Stolen Generations was a moment of genuine national significance, accompanied by no compensation scheme, no independent claims tribunal, and no structural change to the child protection systems that continue removing Aboriginal children at rates that dwarf the historical peak of the Stolen Generations. Acknowledgment without accountability is aesthetic. It makes the acknowledger feel better. It changes nothing.
It would mean engaging with the evidence on what actually works – not ideologically, but empirically – and being willing to follow that evidence into uncomfortable places. It would mean treating Aboriginal-led organisations and community-controlled services not as interesting experiments but as the proven model, because the evidence consistently shows that Indigenous people administering their own health, legal, and education services produce better outcomes than equivalent government-run programmes.
It would mean holding the historical and the contemporary in genuine tension – neither using history as an excuse that forecloses present responsibility, nor using present responsibility as a reason to minimise history. It would mean accepting that Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton and Jacinta Price and the Uluru Statement authors and the community Elders who have never spoken in a national forum all have things to say that cannot be reduced to each other or to a single correct position.
And it would mean, finally, making room for laughter – not as avoidance, but as evidence. The fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures can produce humour of this precision and reach, can turn the professor’s well-intentioned condescension into a scene that is both funny and philosophically exact, is itself a form of testimony. You do not produce comedy this sharp from a culture that has been successfully destroyed. You produce it from a culture that is still here, still thinking, still watching, and still, despite everything, finding the whole performance somewhat absurd.
The professor means well. But meaning well has never been sufficient. There are now more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alive in Australia than at any point since 1788. Languages that were declared dead have been revived. Country is being returned, managed, and cared for. The Tent Embassy, established on the lawns of Parliament House on 26 January 1972, still stands – a permanent, inconvenient reminder that sovereignty was never ceded and that the assertion of that sovereignty, even when it costs everything, is itself a form of survival.
It is hard to see all of this when you’re standing on the hill. The view from down here is different. From down here, the laughter makes perfect sense.
– – –
The poem adapted in this essay draws on Sherman Alexie’s original, with modifications reflecting the Australian context. Sherman Alexie self-identifies as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian.
– – –
Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, June 2026
