The long read

Four chapters,
one continent.

History is bigger than a timeline. These chapters go deeper — into Country and law, frontier and resistance, the long fight for rights, and the making of a modern nation.

Chapter I — 65,000+ BP — 1788

Country & Culture

Deep Time and the oldest living cultures

When the first pyramids rose in Egypt, people had already lived on this continent for more than fifty-five thousand years. This is the longest unbroken story on Earth.

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Chapter II — 1606 — 1901

Contact & the Frontier

Invasion, resistance and the war for the land

From 1788, a colony grew at Sydney Cove without a treaty, and the frontier spread across the continent for more than a century — and the people of the land fought back at every step.

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III

Chapter III — 1901 — 2008

The Struggle for Rights

From the Day of Mourning to the Apology

In 1901 the new nation wrote Aboriginal people out of its own Constitution. Over the next century, a movement of warriors, churches, unions and communities wrote them back in — and changed the law of the land.

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Chapter IV — 2008 — today

A Modern Nation

Federation, immigration and the long conversation

Six colonies federated in 1901 behind a wall of white exclusion. Within a century, Australia had become one of the most multicultural nations on Earth — and was learning to tell the whole truth about its past.

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