Sean Ulm

Now you have this picture of the real history, human history.

How are you going to take it around the country and discuss it with all the people who might have different views of what history might be?

You know, this is almost a revolution in a concept of Australia.

And I've often mentioned the fact that one of the best guides of how to get an answer of this sort of seeming clash, but it's not really a clash, is when you see the many examples of Aboriginal people and, if you like, straight professors of science working together in various places right around Australia.

And you've got a person whom I've often mentioned before in Albany in Western Australia, who used to be the head of Kew Gardens, an Australian head of Kew Gardens, actually.

And he's going with mainly Aboriginal women to look in the huge area in the West around him about traditions in understanding the local area, the soil and such like, and the plants and any number of other clues as to what best fire to have.

So that's going on and other experiments and you've been there yourself around Cairns in the northern Queensland part.

You have a great deal of clues of medical matters that come from trees and so on which being followed up to explore the chemical nature of those different plants so that you can even exploit them and have some local industries up there.

You know, people are working together and it shows how the meshing canter

take place practically.

Two examples to finish with, but one which doesn't arise from the book, but the question might be in the back of someone's head.

I remember an occasion when Hugh Morgan from Western Mining, South Australia, who is, shall we be blunt and say, a somewhat conservative person, and who's been interviewed by my colleague then, Ramona Cavall, and he said, OK, well, if...

Indigenous people have been in this country for all those years.

Why didn't they invent the wheel?

You know, the standard object of a civilised and innovative culture.

And of course, if you want wheels, it helps to have roads or something like it.

But the other example, sometimes conservative, he was called, Harry Butler, because he worked looking at the effects of industry on islands and so on.

There's, in fact, a Harry Butler Institute at Murdoch University.

And once I talked to him about, you mentioned rangers, he said that people he met...

in the Northern Territory whom he worked with and whom he knew, were some of the most brilliant natural historians he'd ever come across.