I am currently listening to the audio book, Dark by Bruce Pascoe published in 2014. It paints a totally different picture of pre-colonial Australia than the one we are more used to, and indeed, of my year nine or ten Humanities class in high school back in the mid '80s. Listening, I sometimes think of Tanya, one of my class mates who had indigenous heritage. What was she thinking and feeling about as we were being taught that the Aboriginals were nomads that were simple hunters and gatherers. Did she have other counter stories and knowledge of her past and land?

Listening to Pascoe reading his book, it is easy to think the book is a fanciful image of lives on the lands that I live and travel through prior to them being colonised approximately 250 years ago. I remember hearing an older friend saying that the Aboriginals were far from peaceful, they were always at war between their mobs. His comment served to build upon my high school education regarding the people we call First Nation People. Yet, Pascoe attempts to paint the First Nation People as "like us, " being sophisticated and technological innovative. The book is so far removed from what I have been taught to believe. The facts it presents are so surprisingly horrific when dared to believe it is true. If believed, it puts a feeling of deep sorrow in one's heart concerning the bloody destructive and mass murder of indigenous heritage and people. How do one start to put right such wrongs.