Letter to The Editor - Australia is a British Foundation

to THE AGE
     Kim Scott, as a defender of Aboriginal culture, is right to advocate a collaborative and non-polemical approach to inter-ethnic relationships in Australia (‘Putting Indigenous heritage at heart of nation’s story’, 25/8); but his actual language (‘The colonisers grabbed the land’ and ‘people who the land was stolen from’) is polemical, simplistic and unhelpful.
     From no person living today was any land stolen and the British settlers endeavoured from the start to co-operate with the Aboriginals and to befriend them. Mistakes and wrongful actions were committed by both sides. Finally, Scott is over-ambitious in wanting to ‘put Aboriginal identity at the centre of nation state identity.’ Australia is essentially, for better and worse, a British foundation.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic