Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

…in the early stages, the whites were kept very effectively away from the Aborigines. And whites will tell you quite blankly, I’ve never met an Aborigine in my life, so how could they know about us, how could they feel for us? It was done deliberately. They didn’t want friends of the Aborigines coming out and upsetting the jolly old white Australian apple cart you know, rocking the boat.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands and they are gone forever. What is the history of your America, your Australia and New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive.

What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality.

Never to have seen anything but the is to have lived on the fringe of the world.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course.

To categorize some people as indigenous and others as alien, to argue about the identity of the first inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to try and sort out these categories for the remote past, is to attempt the impossible.

In this year the aborigines of the Island began to annoy the settlers to a degree that required some active measures of the Government to allay the outraged feelings of this ill-fated race of human beings. These poor bewildered creatures had been treated worse than were any of the American tribes by the Spaniards. Easy, quiet, good-natured, and well-disposed towards the white population, they could no longer brook the treatment they received from the invaders of their country. Their hunting grounds were taken from them, and they themselves were driven like trespassers from the favorite spots for which their ancestors had bled, and had claimed by conquest. The various tribes which formerly were at war with each other, about this time seemed to forget their private differences, and their great aim was to protect themselves from slaughter, and to be revenged! The stock-keepers may be considered as the destroyers of nearly the whole of the aborigines—the proper, the legitimate owners of the soil: these miscreants so imposed upon their docility, that at length they thought little or nothing of destroying the men for the sake of carrying to their huts the females of the tribes; and, if it were possible in a work like this to record but a tithe of the murders committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader's blood run cold at the bare recital. In self-defence were these poor harmless creatures driven to desperate means, their fine kangaroo grounds were taken from them, and thus were they in want of their customary food; and when every other means of obtaining a livelihood was debarred to them, necessity compelled them to seek food of their despoilers.

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

A great many people really care very little for their own compatriots, but they hate anything foreign.

Those whom we most love are often the most alien to us.

[O]nly in Australia was the settler population then defined as non-indigenous – there are not non-indigenous Americans or non-indigenous New Zealanders. 'Non-indigenous' implies a people without roots in this place; it elides the fact that settlers have been here for eight generations, that they have formed a distinctive polity and are not indigenous to anywhere else; they regard Australia as their home. On the other side it elides the fact that most Aborigines are descendants of settlers and the original indigenous population. The formulation in fact casts modern Australia as if it were 1788: one group has just stepped off the boat and confronts the traditional owners of the country.