Today, almost everything has changed and has not changed.

For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology last year was important. They and their white allies had worked tirelessly for the mere word to be uttered. The resistance was formidable; white supremacist politicians, journalists and academics damned the "black armband version of our history". And when Rudd finally said it, the Sydney Morning Herald described the apology as "a piece of political wreckage" that "the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away ... in a way that responds to some of its supporters' emotional needs".

There is to be no compensation for those thousands of Aborigines wrenched from their families as children, known as the stolen generation. The previous, openly racist government's "intervention" into Aboriginal lands in the Northern Territory is being consolidated. In 2007, on the pretext that Aboriginal children were being sexually abused in "unthinkable numbers", the government of John Howard suspended the Racial Discrimination Act and sent the army and "business managers" to take over black communities.

Within a year, barely reported statistics revealed how bogus it all was. Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, a maximum of four possible cases of sexual abuse were identified. The Australian Crimes Commission found no evidence of paedophile rings. What they found they already knew: poverty and sickness on the scale of Africa and India.

Since Rudd's apology, Aboriginal poverty indicators have gone backwards. His "Closing the Gap" programme is a grim joke, having produced not a single new housing project. An undeclared agenda is straight from Australia's colonial past: a land grab combined with an almost prurient need to control, harass and blame a people who have refused to die off, whose genius is their understanding of an ancient land that still perplexes and threatens white authority. Whenever Canberra's politicians want to look "tough" they give the Aborigines a good kicking: it is a ritual as sacred as Don Bradman worship or Anzac Day.

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