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We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way oflife. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice-and our failure to imagine these things being done to us.... We failed to see what we were doing degraded us all.... Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we'd given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books.(Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, on the occasion of the launching of the 1993 International Year for the World's Indigenous People, 10 December 1992)

Strange things are …