“We are untethered from the past… We have been frustrated in not having the means to refer the majority to an engaging and accessible story that fills the void. Now we do,” writes columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

Three rousing cheers to the ABC. Once again, the news and cultural icon, the central counterweight of Australian civility, has provided a path through a troubled issue of our social and political times.

It has come in the form of Deep Time, an ABC News Story Lab production (at abc.net.au/news/deeptime) that purports to tell the “story of Australia and its peoples [which is] vast and deep”. 

It warns that, “it’s one you should know, but possibly one you’ve never been told. Well, not like this anyway”.

Quite so.

There are good books on the same subject – the 65,000-year saga of our first nations – such as First Footprints by Scott Cane and Deep Time Dreaming by Billy Griffiths, but they are costly and dense.

The ABC’s version is attractive, clearly written and free.

Producer Tim Leslie secured the co-operation of a great many Aboriginal elders and a range of journalists. His researchers and authors are not celebrities, but they have done a brilliant job in both fields – discovering the Aboriginal elders with “knowledge” of their culture and combining it with the great geographical and astronomical events across the millennia. And the artwork by Abby Richards supplements the story perfectly.

It uses computer technology to great effect without the need of specialist driving. The story it tells is never less than gripping. At the end, it is just not possible to walk away without enormous pride in our Aboriginal forebears in our amazing continent.

So, why am I making all this fuss? We need go no further than the heart-breaking result of the “No” vote in the Voice referendum. Sure, it was badly planned and executed by the wrong “Yes” leaders. But an even bigger cause was voter ignorance of the Aboriginal story.

There’s no point celebrating or even acknowledging those 65,000 years if nothing happened during that time. It’s no better than a mere phrase that turns the “welcome to country” into a rote gabble or worse, an embarrassing farce. 

The truth is that we are all migrants in Australia. And just because some Yorkshire sea captain sailed up the coast and landed on an island where he “claimed” it for his king, doesn’t give the British any greater claim to it than the most recent entrant from Nepal or Bhutan.

But while the British have chosen to hide or lie about their “peaceful pioneering”, the millions of European and Asian migrants arrive knowing absolutely nothing about the Aboriginal past in what’s known to scientists as the great continent, Sabul where megafauna and marsupial lions walked the earth.

In earlier decades, a Good Neighbour Policy welcomed post-war migrants and attempted to instill a sense of community (albeit without any Aboriginal involvement).

Today, that’s gone with the wind. Today immigration is curling at the fringes of violence as protestors for and against on racial or religious grounds clash in our cities.

Part of the reason is that we are untethered from the past, despite the best efforts of authors, academics and educated Australians in this 21st century. 

We have been frustrated in not having the means to refer the majority to an engaging and accessible story that fills the void.

Now we do.

Thanks to the ABC.

[email protected] 

News all day, every day at CityNews.com.au.