Sydney Letter/ Padraig Collins: Between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago the people who would become known as Aboriginals came to what became Australia.
The white man arrived 219 years ago.
Forty years ago, on May 27th, 1967, white Australians finally voted in a referendum to allow Aboriginals become Australian citizens. The 90.77 per cent who voted 'yes' presumably hoped and assumed life was about to get much better for indigenous Australians.
But little has changed in many ways. An Aboriginal male born today is unlikely to see 60. His non-indigenous counterpart can expect to live to 77. Indigenous women have it better; they'll get to 65, but this is 17 years less than non-indigenous women.
In recent years Aboriginals have enjoyed great success in Australian sport. The Australian Football League's list this year includes 70 indigenous players; 12 per cent of the entire playing roster. In rugby league, 11 per cent of top rank professionals are Aboriginal.
At the South Sydney Rabbitohs club, whose heartland includes the mainly Aboriginal inner-city suburb of Redfern, one-third of the players are indigenous.
Pretty impressive when Aboriginals are only 2.5 per cent of Australia's population. But outside of this success, 60 per cent of Aboriginals are welfare dependent and 21 per cent of prisoners are indigenous.
They are also losing out in education, with only 40 per cent finishing high school. Only 4 per cent of Aboriginals have a degree, compared to 21 per cent of the overall population.
There is only one Aboriginal surgeon (Dr Kelvin Kong), 100 other doctors (including Dr Kong's twin sisters Marilyn and Marlene), 150 medical students and 50 dentists.
Dr Kong, an ear, nose and throat specialist, says the health problems he saw as a child motivated him. "When you go to school, all the non-indigenous kids aren't suffering the health problems and early mortality. Our extended family suffered three early deaths and it's quite horrific. . . then you start pondering why is this happening to our community and that spurs us on to do something about it."
He wishes he was not in the limelight though. "The ideal day will be when it's not special - when there are thousands of indigenous doctors," he said.
Many Aboriginal sports stars are also helping out with education. North Queensland Cowboys player Brenton Bowen recently helped launch an indigenous sporting academy in Townsville. A hundred male and female students will be selected for scholarships each year, with the aim of using sport to motivate them to achieve at school.
But Aboriginal languages will not be top of the curriculum. Of the roughly 250 languages spoken at the time of white settlement, 225 are either already gone or close to extinction. Within a couple of decades it is likely no more than 10 will survive. The only recent positive news for languages is that enough people (30,000) still speak Kriol in western Queensland and Northern Territory for the first Bible to be published in the tongue.
As the name suggests, Kriol emerged from early contact between Aboriginals and white settlers. Sheep never having made it to the territory, the Kriol Baibul replaces mentions of shepards with stockmen. Psalm 23, for instance, now begins: "Yawei, yu jis laik det brabli gudwan stakmen".
Across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand the Maori language is in far better shape and is one of the official languages, with the same status as English. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly the Treaty of Waitangi. Signed in 1840, it granted citizenship and land rights to the Maoris.
Getting a similar treaty in Australia used to be a priority for many Aboriginals; but with addiction and crime rife in many communities, indigenous leaders rarely speak of it anymore.
Rising star of the Australian Labor Party Warren Mundine says he supports a treaty: "But many Aboriginal people see the treaty concept as a huge and very expensive Pandora's box. We've seen what has happened to other indigenous peoples like the native North Americans, who signed treaties and ended up with nothing.
"We certainly don't want to end up in a banana republic situation like so many of the African countries which are plagued by corruption and violence," he said.
Mundine, whose great grandfather, William O'Donovan, emigrated from Co Cork, speaks of the stark reality facing indigenous people.
"A treaty is no longer on the radar. Aboriginal Australians these days are focused entirely on survival to the exclusion of just about everything else.
"Alcoholism, drug abuse, kava, marijuana are all endemic in Aboriginal communities. These are the things that are devastating the young people in our communities."
Paul Keating, who was Australian prime minister at the time, said in 1992: "If we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done".
Fifteen years on, Australia is still waiting.