The European discovery rather than Aboriginal occupation constitutes Australia's pre-history. Australia - its economy, society and polity - is a construction of European civilisation. Australia did not exist when traditional Aborigines occupied the continent. Aborigines have been participants in Australian history, but that story begins with all the others in 1788.

Sections of the media, universities and schools exaggerate the bad news [about Australia's past]. This is a powerful ingredient in the present criticism of Australia Day. These critics, putting on their black armbands, now imagine that before 1788 the Aborigines lived in a kind of paradise, from which later they were brutally and deliberately expelled. Aboriginal life did have many virtues, and from the 1950s Australian archeologists, anthropologists, prehistorians and others rediscovered them. The nation owes them a debt. But the extreme concept of a paradise, wholesome and more spiritual than Australia today, has also won converts. They depict Aborigines as living in peace and harmony with one another and with nature. But the evidence, globally, is that these traditional societies suffered through warfare and that little children and women were often the victims. Massacres of Aborigines by Aborigines, however, are unlikely to find their way into the main textbooks. Their extinction of native fauna will rarely interrupt a school lesson.

If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

The multicultural lobby has little respect for the history of Australia between 1788 and 1950. In the eyes of multicultural supporters, Australia was a desert between 1788 and 1950 because it was populated largely by people from the British Isles and because it seemed to have a cultural unity, a homogeneity which is the very antithesis of multiculturalism.

Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations.

The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.

The history of Australia, black or white, is not only the struggle between peoples but the struggle between nature and people. Nature tamed many of the settlers, sometimes defeating them, but people held many victories, sometimes at high cost.

To live in Australia is to have won the lottery of life — unless you happen to be one of those whose ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years. That’s the Australian paradox. Vast numbers of people from around the world would risk death to be here, yet the First Australians often live in the conditions that people come to Australia to escape. We are the very best of countries, except for the people who were here first.

It is impossible as an Australian, as we come to the end of this century, not to feel an immense sense of surging excitement about the opportunities that lie in front of us. There is no nation on earth that has been gifted with the special combination of such assets. We are in every sense of the word a projection of Western civilisation in this part of the world. We have taken the good things from Europe, the liberal political traditions, the civility of our public life, and thankfully we have rejected the bad things of Europe, the stultifying class divisions built on tribal prejudice.

Cook was a giant of the sea. To deprive him, his scientists and his crew of high praise would be mean-spirited and would mock history. He was almost certainly the first European to sail along and report on nearly all the eastern coast of Australia. He indirectly made possible present-day Australia which, despite its many failures, is surely one of the success stories of the world. On the other hand, Aboriginal peoples will rightly insist that they, or people close to them in kinship, were the first discoverers of Australia. Their ancestors, one after the other, had sailed and walked along the Indonesian archipelago, a chain of stepping stones that were easily used when the world’s sea levels were lower.

Economic growth in Australia did not require the incorporation of a backward, unproductive rural sector. When farming later developed on the pastoral runs, it was commercial farming. Australia, as its greatest historian Keith Hancock said, was born modern. The United States, by contrast, imitated to an extent the history of Europe. In areas which had been self-sufficient there was more regional variety in speech and habit. There were pockets of settlement which for a long time remained outside the commercial world, even when access to it became possible. Backwoodsmen, hillbillies and country music were the results.

Mapmakers of Europe and navigators of the Indies once thought Australian seas washed the isles of gold. Even after navigators had seen the north-west coast of Australia it was named on one map the coast of gold. Unknown coasts were treasurelands; imagination shaped and gilded them. Then slowly Dutch and British voyagers tarnished the gilt, and Australia turned from a land of reward to a land of punishment when Great Britain dumped convicts and guards at Sydney in 1788. The imagination of the ancients had more truth than the knowledge of the moderns, but for two generations the settlers did not know that their prison had bars of gold.

The debate over Australian history .. risks being distorted if its focus is confined only to the shortcomings of previous generations. It risks being further distorted if highly selective views of Australian history are used as the basis for endless and agonised navel-gazing about who we are or, as seems to have happened over recent years, as part of a 'perpetual seminar' for elite opinion about our national identity. The current debate over Australian history would benefit from a more balanced approach, from a wider perspective and from less pre-ordained pessimism. In the broad balance sheet of our history, there is a story of great Australian achievement to be told.

[O]ur whole history has been a history of adventure, sailing wherever ships could sail. This island continent came out of the mists; it was developed by people who had the spirit of adventure. It has been found by people who had the spirit of adventure. Wherever you go in Australia, you see all the memorials, not cairns of store, but the memorials in farms and stations and factories to the people who had the spirit of adventure. And without that spirit of adventure, Australia can't become by the turn of the century the great and powerful and respected country to whose noises I would hope to listen from the grave.