"The lives of Indigenous Australians today are affected by what has happened to us and our ancestors over the past 230 years since Europeans arrived.

This can be hard for non-Indigenous people to understand, particularly if you haven't learned much about Australian history at school. When people have some knowledge of Indigenous culture and the history of our contact with non-Indigenous Australians since 1788, they have a much better feel for our achievements and our persistent problems.

They are more likely to share our pride and to want to improve relationships between us as fellow Australians."

Mick Dodson

"Shared history refers to the fact that Australia has an Aboriginal history and Aboriginal viewpoints on social, cultural and historical matters."

Recommendation 290, National Report Overview and Recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody AGPS, 1991

"Sharing our history means honouring Australians who have stood up for Aboriginal rights over the years. Recognising how many other Australians have always wanted to belong to this land, for example, most White Australian art has always been basically about land ... Sharing our heritage means recognising what Aboriginal Australia has contributed to Australia: war service, the outback cattle industry, sports stars, and more recently art. Also a sense of the power of the Dreaming in Australian arts, a vividness in Australian language largely based on image and metaphor, eg. flash talk, big smoke, sit down money; elements of the Aussie sense of humour."

Linda Burney- Minister for Fair Trading, Minister for Youth, Minister for Volunteering (NSW). Former Acting Deputy Director General of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

"In 1992 the Mabo judgement offered us all an opportunity and indeed a challenge that called for a national acceptance and sharing…The judgement called for a recognition of the historical reality that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples were the Indigenous peoples of this, now shared land.

It was an opportunity for all Australians to come to an understanding of our shared history and realign the distorted relationship that has existed between us for over two centuries…This was a challenge that was not met. Instead the Governments of this country used the legislative powers that are entrusted to them to diminish Indigenous peoples’ rights within the land and introduced administrative regimes to restrict our access and use to our country, the rivers and the seas…Despite this legislative denial, there are millions of Australians that have recognised and embraced the opportunity that these events have presented to us as a nation.

They have sought to learn and understand the reality of our shared history. They have gone into their schools, their workplaces, their centres of worship and their sporting clubs and said;
Here is an opportunity for healing and understanding, an opportunity for something profoundly better than what has gone before us in this country.

They have placed the symbols of our Indigenous society along side their own in recognition that a shared country requires a society of equals with all the rights and responsibilities that this entails.

Australians of courage and vision walked across bridges in every part of this land in recognition of the fact that we are all Australians and that we do really have something to share.

After more than two centuries, despite the ne'er-do-wells we have determined that we must at last come to terms with the reality of our shared history."

Patrick Dodson