Australia:It is difficult today to imagine the excitement and glamour of the Australian Aborigines at the end of the 19th century. To a certain circle, of course: the anthropologist, the emerging sociologists, the psychological theorists.
Famous figures such as Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim were fascinated by the European discovery of a "Stone Age" people, whose lifestyles and, most importantly, priorities, were worlds, and aeons, away from the predominantly Christian, white, industrialist societies of the northern hemisphere.
White settlement started, officially, in 1788. By the end of the 1800s a few intrepid Europeans had delved into the lifestyles of the native people who had first appeared, blinking in disbelief, in the bushes around the bay that became Sydney Cove at the sight of the harbingers of alien invasion. These people, and their peers in other tribes all over Australia, constituted a blank sheet on which men like Freud and, later, Claude Levi-Strauss could superimpose their theories on religion, attachment, or kinship. Less than 200 years later, the Aboriginal people have lost their novelty for the rest of the world. Their condition is, largely, parlous.
From an estimated continent-wide population of a million before white settlement, there are now around 450,000. The island state of Tasmania lost its native population entirely by the end of the 19th century. The natives could not fight guns. Alcoholism, glaucoma, unemployment, incarceration, are all at massive levels compared to the new settler population. Life expectancy is 20 years less than for whites, average income is 40 per cent less. Ongoing tragedies - such as the child abuse endemic in remote parts of Western Australia - continue silently. If these things were happening in the white settler population, the public outcry would be deafening. Apart from small pockets of concern in Australia itself, and minute outbursts of interest in other countries, these people are the living embodiment of the phrase "victims of progress".
SUCH INTEREST COMES from veteran Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who has covered similar material before in Exterminate All Brutes, his book on colonial North Africa. Terra Nullius is his personal exploration of the Latin and legal expression describing the Australian continent in 1788 as empty, "no one's land".
It is a physical journey, too, as Lindqvist seeks out the lonely and impoverished places where many Aboriginal people live in glassy, glossy Australia. He drives thousands of kilometres and penetrates deep into the Outback, a place, he notes, of stripes. "In this divine monotony, it looks just as though an army of pastry wheels has advanced across thinly rolled, light red biscuit dough."
Less poetically, there are places like Tennant Creek, where a proactive Aboriginal community has been fighting the scourge of drink. The unregulated sale of alcohol in the mining town, Lindqvist writes, is described by the Jualikari Council as "a state- sanctioned act of genocide against Aboriginal people".
Along the way, the tenacious Swede notices that, in the same or similar locations, the Howard Government since 1996 has installed internment facilities for the newest of new settlers, who are treated like the oldest inhabitants. The new internees are the desperate refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan who sought solace in the continent state, only to be locked up in remote places where you wouldn't confine a bad dog. This is one of the themes of Terra Nullius, the neat way in which the newest arrivals to the "Lucky Country" are treated in similar ways, often in the same places, as the oldest arrivals, the Aboriginals.
Australia today is a peculiar place. It has a wide and thin coating of political correctness. But in the poorer suburbs of the cities as well as the saddened, parched rural areas devastated by drought, some of the old attitudes remain, and it is these that help people such as the maverick Queensland MP Pauline Hanson to get elected.
But don't dismiss all of white Australia as guilty. There has been recognition: "Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional ways of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers."
That was former Labor prime minister Paul Keating in 1992, at the launch of the Year of Indigenous Peoples. His government did much to recognise the rights of Aboriginal Australians - which, in some views, expressed by Lindqvist, helped Labor's defeat at the election of 1996.
Liberal (that is, conservative) Party leader John Howard and like-minded, self-described "realists", have attempted to marginalise and make ridiculous this empathetic viewpoint with the tag "black armband view of history" - claiming that there is always something in the past the current generation can beat itself up about.
But that is a sophistry from a man whose sophisticated grasp of politics is masked by his sparkle-free exterior. Such descriptions of the reality of Aboriginal dispossession display fine moral relativity. To borrow Al Gore's phrase, the treatment of the Australian Aboriginals is an inconvenient truth.
Lindqvist likens it to numerous parallel situations globally, including that of the Sami (Lapps) in his native Sweden. Who does apologise for the sins of the fathers, and how? This is one of the big themes of this small, readable book.
"So much more than surfing at Bondi and wine tasting in the Barossa!" gushes the introduction to yet another newspaper supplement on Australia. I feel the bile, conjured by Lindqvist's account, rise. The chant of one tribe, with a sentiment that still sums it up for Aboriginal people, drowns out the clink of sauvignon blanc glasses and the zoom of late-model cars along spotless motorways: "Poor bugger me, Gurindji."
Angela Long is an Australian-born journalist and broadcaster based in Ireland. She is researching a book on the first World War conscription referendums in Australia
Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land By Sven Lindqvist, translated by Sarah Death Granta, 248pp. £10