Dick Kimba visits us one evening, an historian whose focus for many years has been the Central Desert.

A big fire is built, and I am sitting downwind of the thick smoke, listening to his stories of fire and genocide.

He leads us gently, through the fire, the quotidinial element of the people of this land, whose children are brought up playing with fire, in order to respect and understand it.

He takes us to some of the brutal encounters between black and white australia, through the "dispersals" and massacres of the killing years, years which extend long into the 20th century. An intense pain courses through me from the rivers of blood this *great nation* has been founded on. How deep and intransigent is the official amnesia.

But this is an extraordinarily temperate man, who manages to tell the stories from all angles, reminding us of the social context of the time, which is not to excuse or apologise for the harrowing cruelties and injustices which have been perpetrated, but to maybe explain how such things came to pass.

It seems to me, as someone who learnt none of this at school, that it is essential to unravel the past in order to understand the present social conditions, and to work towards creating an equitable future for all who live and will come to live on this land.