"The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar."

“The majority of Australians are now paying the price of a policy that is eager to please each ethnic minority at the expense of the great majority. If the people of each minority should have the right to establish here a way of life familiar to them, is it not equally right - or more so, in democracy - for the majority of Australians to retain the way of life familiar to them?”

“Those who one-sidedly depict the early European history of Australia are endangering one of the gains of recent years: the willingness to examine the long years of traditional Aboriginal history with sympathy and understanding. Just as the history of European Australia can be denounced from a one-sided point of view, so too can the history of black Australia be depicted by the one-eyed as a story of savagery. To revert to such denunciations would be a loss to all Australians, black and white.”

“When in Hobart in May 1853 the ship St Vincent sent ashore the last consignment of convicts, Tasmania had received almost as many convicts as New South Wales during the long history of transportation. Western Australia now remained the only penal colony and it received its last convict ship on 9 January 1868. For eighty years convicts had been shipped to Australia, and a total of 163000 had set out on that voyage from which few returned. In the modern history of Europe there was rarely a planned deportation on a more ambitious scale until the era of Stalin and Hitler.”

“The idea is still widespread that Australians were among the world's most persistent racists until the White Australia policy was abolished. But in 1900, and long after, almost every part of the Western world was wary of large-scale immigration from poorer, low-wage countries whose reigning culture was different. Asians at times were wary of outsiders. Between 1860 and 1914 it was safer to be a Chinese gold-digger living in Australia than to be an Australian, especially a female missionary, living in China.”

“The multicultural policy has, at times, tended to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging divisions and weakening social cohesion. It has tended to be anti-British, and yet the people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants.”

“We have long believed that during the time of the Aborigines' domination their landscape did not change. At times it changed dramatically. The basalt plains of that part of Victoria, which was later named Australia Felix, were violently affected by volcanoes. For most of the people living close to the ocean - and for some who had never seen it - a more shattering change was the rising of the sea and the drowning of their hunting grounds. Nothing in the short history of British Australia can match those physical changes.”