Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.

Bond, especially Connery's Bond, was an existential hired gun with an aristocrat's tastes - just right for a time when class was a matter of brand names and insouciant gestures.

Bond, especially Connery's Bond, was an existential hired gun with an aristocrat's tastes - just right for a time when class was a matter of brand names and insouciant gestures.