For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. Bu… - Geoffrey Blainey

Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.

Why did nations turn so often to war in the belief that it was a sharp and quick instrument for shaping international affairs when again and again the instrument had proved to be blunt or unpredictable? This recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases the optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.

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.