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“Australian History:

.... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator - Part 7

“Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity.

There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.

Make of it what you will.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it's Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aboriginal art were eroding away my will to live. It's as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows. [...] What has been done in my country I did not want, did not ask for it; white people going through my country. [...] When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him. [...] I have two mountains in that country--the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountain. I want the Great Father to make no roads through them.”
― Red Cloud

“In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.”
― Brad Jensen

“Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.”
― Brad Jensen

“If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.”
― Ten Bears Comanche Nation

“The Nyungar people, and indeed the entire Aboriginal population, grew to realise what the arrival of the European settlers meant for them: it was the destruction of their traditional society and the dispossession of their lands.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“Traveler, there are no paths. Paths are made by walking.”
― Australian Aboriginal proverb

“The more you know, the less you need.”
― Australian Aboriginal proverb

“Canada is an Aboriginal country as well as a settler country. We rarely see ourselves that way, but it is past time that we started doing so. The fact that settlers are in a significant majority does not take away from the simple fact that when Europeans made first contact with the northern half of North America, there were millions of people already here. From the Beothuk in Newfoundland â€� a population completely wiped out by disease and violence â€� across every corner of Canada to the far west and north, Canada’s first people had built a civilization, a way of life thousands of years old and rich in diversity. They were not “savagesâ€� (as they were called, in French and English), nor were they “ignorant wretchesâ€�, nor were they less than people. They had developed complex societies with distinct languages, systems of governance; they were real people with a real way of life.”
― Bob Rae, What's Happened to Politics?

“Sometimes the more you try to focus on something, the less you really see it's beauty.
- Burnum (Aboriginal Guide)”
― Samuel L. Norman, The Adventures of Grant McKingsley and The Secret of the Phoenix

“There was a feeling in him like waiting for a punishment.”
― Richard Wagamese, Medicine Walk

“Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.”
― Brad Jensen

“For your Jesus said you're supposed to give the oppressed a better deal”
― Kev Carmody

“When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.

Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others.”
― Rick Revelle, I Am Algonquin

“Writing about Aboriginal themes means joining the dots from the colonial policies of the past to the problems faced by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit today. It means acknowledging the wrongs and the pain.”
― Lynda A. Archer, Tears in the Grass

“If they follow the way of Money Chiefs, they shall die. Earth is sick and can no longer care for her children. Now, Earth’s children must care for Earth. Continue to pollute rivers and oceans â€� rivers and oceans shall drown you. Pollute sky â€� Sun Spirit shall burn you. Kill more trees â€� unclean air shall strangle you. Kill more Spirits â€� disease shall destroy you. Already, Money Chiefsâ€� skin burns. Their lungs choke on unclean air. Poisoned water spreads disease among them and all Spirits. Rising rivers and oceans shall sweep their homes and lives away. Money Chiefs think money heals broken lives. Unchanged, in the end, Money Chiefsâ€� money shall cost them their lives.
-Frederic Perrin
Rella Two Trees―The Money Chiefs”
― Frédéric Perrin

“I’ll find out whatever I can about this Frank. Would the girls go to the police if they were in danger, do you think?â€�

“I can’t say,� Shyla replied, but her head was shaking as she spoke. That was hardly a surprise. A lot of Aboriginal people were suspicious of the police, or gunjies, as Shyla sometimes called them. Through conversations with Shyla, Billie had some of the picture—how contacting the authorities about anything might lead to being arrested for something else, or having the men taken, or having the Aborigines Welfare Board take children away “for their own good.�

Stuff like that tended to ensure that trust was in short supply. That long and troubled history had not been forgotten and had created understandable tension between Aboriginal communities and the white authorities. That couldn’t simply vanish overnight.”
― Tara Moss, The War Widow

“There had been no kinder folk anywhere than the Australian natives.

We have to train ourselves to look upon the land of our birth with the eyes, not of conquerors, overcoming an enemy, but of children looking at the face of their mother. Only then shall we truly be able to call Australia our home.”
― Ted Strehlow

“I know how important it is to be proud of your identity.”
― Marlee Silva, My Tidda, My Sister: Stories of Strength and Resilience from Australia's First Women

“Aboriginal peoples, like the ancients, were not so concerned with the science of matter, but rather with the science of the mind. For to them, the universe was mind, and all that existed as physical reality was the product of mind and spirit. Everything physical and material was in essence, manifested thought.”
― Kenneth Meadows, Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel

“Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation.

The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.”
― Richard Flanagan

“The Nyungar men glanced once again at Dayup, who was just as stunned and confused as they were. He put his hands out in front of him and shook his head in despair and frustration. He truly wished that he understood the language. He turned to his kinsmen and told them, "I don't know what he is talking about."
"I take it that we are all agreed and that I have your consent, " said Captain Fremantle, nodding to the Nyungar men who stood motionless, staring blankly at him.”
― Doris Pilkington, Rabbit-Proof Fence

“How could any of the swamp people explain this comfortable face they saw on television that held a universal magic capable of mirroring the faces of countless millions of ordinary people, who like themselves, had been duped by their own sense of community into recognizing some uncanny likeness and affinity between themselves and Warren Finch?”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“My mummy, she said, 'The Aborigine is a pity, my son.' She said everyone was always insulted by her no matter what she did, so she let herself do the most insulting thing she could think of - take the poison they brought with them and go to town.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Those who lose dreaming are lost.”
― Australian Aboriginal proverb

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“We could usually tell if it was an Aboriginal car coming, because they invariably sounded like sick washing-machines. The process of selling broken-down second-hand cars to Aborigines at exorbitant prices in Alice Springs is a lucrative business. Luckily Aboriginal people are great bush-mechanics and can usually keep them going on bits of string and wire. There was one story at Docker River, of a group of young men who bought a car in Alice, four hundred miles away, and half way home the body of the car literally fell to pieces. They simply got out (all ten of them), took off their belts, tied it all together and drove happily home.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback