The political parties, the media, the unions, the churches, the academics and the man in the street were all agreed: something had to be done.

Australians don't care for referendums (on that day, an electoral amendment went down with all hands in every State), so this vote signified much: in part guilt, in part hope and, for once, the "clear mandate" politicians always say they want. Above all, it reflected the demands of the post-war generation, who wanted our own Great Society here in Australia, and our own civil rights laws

Had you told us then that, 20 years on, there would be no stream of Aborigines moving through the schools and universities into the professions and few Aborigines in our Parliaments; that the living conditions of most Aborigines would be but little improved; that those health statistics would still be a national shame; above all, that the cycle of reform begun under a conservative Government would have come to a halt, in exhaustion and boredom, under a cynical Labor Government - had you said that to my generation in 1967, it's not that we would not have disagreed with you: we would have been utterly unable to understand you.

And had we agreed, for the sake of argument, that 20 years of Aboriginal policy - with all its experts, programs, expenditure, inquiries, reports and feedback - could have come to so little, what then? Why, we would have said, there would have already been a national outcry! Governments would have been long since called to account. This would be the central political issue of the day: if not on account of the Aborigines themselves, then certainly for the taxpayers, who would be demanding to know where their money had gone.

"Where did we go wrong?" is, in other words, only a part of the question. More intriguing is this: "Why aren't we asking, 'Where did we go wrong?'?"

FACT: In 1966, the stillbirth rate among Aboriginal mothers was 1.8 times the national average. In 1983 (the latest year for official figures), it was 2.9 times the average.

FACT: In infant mortality, where great gains have been made, the Aboriginal rate was still 3.6 times the national rate in 1983.

FACT: In 1971, the number of Aborigines with higher university degrees stood at nine. Over the succeeding 10 years, this had been increased to 18.

FACT: In bachelor degrees, Aboriginal numbers increased from 42 to 112: an average of exactly seven graduations a year.

FACT: In the best area of educational achievement - trade certificates -Aborigines have qualified over the decade to 1981 at the rate of 35 a year.

FACT: In 1983, of 4,825 Aboriginal students who had completed Year Eight, 538 went on to Year 12, a national retention rate of 11.2 per cent. In the Northern Territory, the number who went on to Year 12 in 1983 was just 17 (a retention rate of 4 per cent).

Now the snapshot. Actually, there are two of them, separated by 19 years.

After becoming Australia's first Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in 1968(in the forward-looking Gorton Government we thought so hidebound), William Charles Wentworth IV visited the tiny settlement of Brungle, on a back road near Tumut. He described living conditions of the 100 Aborigines there as"fairly shocking".

I went there the next day and told the readers of the Sun News-Pictorial that there was a better description: "Degrading, demoralising, wretched and inhuman." The tin shanties, I wrote, "broil their occupants in the summer, and then allow them to freeze in the cold winters ... they leak, they have no floors or windows, and none is served with running water closer than the front yard."

It was easy to describe the conditions; it was more difficult, I find on re-reading my article, to convey the prevailing despair. I was perplexed, even affronted, by the refusal of these afflicted people to believe that the future could be better than their abject present.

Hadn't there been a referendum? Didn't they now have a Minister in Canberra looking after their interests? Hadn't the minister himself come to Brungle, and hadn't they heard him say that conditions would be improved very soon?No-one would allow any of this. Even the striking manifestation of Wentworth, with his puff of white hair and squeaky voice, had already receded in their memory, so that it might have occurred a month or even a year ago, rather than a day.

"No words can really convey the despair ... etc, etc," I wrote, being neither the first nor the last European Australian to be more angry about the plight of Aborigines than the Aborigines seemed to be themselves. Can there be outrage where there is no hope?

That's the first snapshot, taken in black and white. The second is in colour, for the landscape in which Brungle sits is looking, this wet autumn, as though it had been washed, hung out to dry and then sent to the paint shop to have all the bright bits filled in afresh: sky, clouds, fields, poplars, bridges, herefords, Holdens, all waiting to be labelled, "WET PAINT."

Half a dozen houses of a strange design sit on the hill, all gleaming tin roofs and raw bricks. Planted in rows across a dilapidated paddock, they look as if their origin might be celestial. The only sign of life is a man, a youth and a small boy, all contemplating a blue trail bike. Of shanties, there is no sign at all.

The man, Ramsey Freeman, gives a laconic account of the alterations. The houses were built a year ago. They're good, got combustion stoves. Shanties?They 'dozed 'em. Yeah, heard about the time the Minister came here, got a tape about it somewhere. Not many here now. Some gone to Sydney, some gone to Tumut. Plenty of 'em in there at Tumut (a sly chuckle), livin' in the cemetery. (Shanties among the gravestones?) No, six feet down.

The bike belongs to Max here, who's 15. Max Ingram corrects his uncle, as any 16-year-old would. He goes to tech and hopes to become an engineer. There's already the offer of a job in the wind, a real job, not the local work cutting millet and picking cherries.

Max has learned more and travelled further than Ramsey (he has no fewer than seven sisters living in Redfern), and his prospects are brighter. But, Lord, the exceeding slowness of change!

Max's "tech" turns out to be a course in general studies at Tumut TAFE, designed to give high-school dropouts a level of competence in English, maths and science equivalent to School Certificate (Year 10). But before you applaud, consider. Max is 16. Even if he is successful, he will not get the School Certificate itself, that would be another year of study, followed by at least two more before HSC. And this course, with its modest aims, is in its first year and can cater for only 16 Aborigines. And Tumut is an enlightened zone in Aboriginal-white relations.

If this is where Max is after 20 years of "reform", what does the future hold for the boy in our picture, Max's six-year-old nephew, Matthew? Remedial classes for Year 11?

The second snapshot is brighter than the first, no doubt of it. Conditions, particularly housing, are better. So why did my second visit to Brungle leave me depressed? I think the answer is this: because what these Aborigines have, they have for the most part been given; and because for every Aboriginal university graduate, there are thousands of young Aborigines imprisoned in secondary and primary schools, for whom we European Australians can't find the key, and many more who aren't being schooled at all. After 20 years of effort, and expenditure in the several billions, we ought to ask: "Is that all?"

A note on how we got to where we are. When the Australian people spoke, on May 27, 1967, Harold Holt was Prime Minister. His predecessor, R.G. Menzies, had stood against such a referendum, but Holt - out of enlightenment or weakness, or both - bowed to the pressure. Insofar as Aboriginal matters attracted the attention of the Federal Government at all in 1967, they landed on the desk of C.E. Barnes, a suspicious, braces-wearing paternalist from the Country Party who, as Minister for Territories, was in charge of everything Canberra did for the "natives" and (of more significance) failed to do. Barnes's most significant achievement in office was the obstruction of independence for Papua-New Guinea.

Under Barnes, the doctrine of assimilation reached its fullest flower. Since Governor Phillip arrived 199 years ago, there have been only five ideas on how to handle Aboriginal relations: amity (falling, under Phillip himself, into neglect), punishment, protection, assimilation and self-determination. It is difficult to say which of them has been the most disappointing.

The referendum was hardly two months past when Barnes issued, over his name, a posh book which was to be "a record of the progress in Aboriginal welfare throughout Australia". It is, instead, a record of how the truth had to be twisted to maintain the facade of assimilation as a workable policy. It is a book of omissions, ("some bad atrocities were committed against them in the 1920s and early 1930s"); misleading statements, ("the Ministers added that the Aborigines should enjoy the same rights and privileges ... as other Australians"; "a number of health problems remain to be solved"); and downright falsehoods, ("by 1967, almost all discriminatory legislation has been repealed").

Along with the pictures of corroborees and cave paintings were pictures of Aborigines standing outside modern houses, holding down jobs in offices, laboratories and clinics and being taught to operate lathes. Propaganda usually tells a kind of truth, even if it is inadvertent; in this book, it lies in the picture: "An Aboriginal casts his vote".

An Aboriginal youth, chosen beyond doubt for his dreamy, "noble savage"looks and wearing a crisp white shirt, is in the customary pose (political cliche (#)5) at the ballot box. Beside him, the representative of order is watching: curved nose, Slavic jaw, severely-clipped moustache, spectacle case in shirt pocket, swept-back, brilliantined hair.

Amateurish even by the standards of propaganda, this picture is yet a perfect representation of assimilation policy: "All persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain a similar manner and standard of living to that of other Australians ... Any special measures taken are regarded as temporary measures, not based on race ..." Note that: you vill choose!

For all its heavy-handedness, assimilation was an improvement on its predecessor, protection, which assumed that there would be race-death. (As recently as 1930, the historian Hancock spoke of the "predestined passing"). The trouble was that, even by 1967, not all the bodies responsible for Aboriginal welfare had switched over to assimilation: Queensland still governed its Aborigines under a "Preservation and Protection Act" passed in 1939. What would Canberra do about it?

Under Barnes, nothing. In July, 1967, two full months after the referendum, he met his State counterparts in Perth. The referendum, it was true, had been passed. But problems remained diverse. The interests of Aborigines (no mention of politicians here) would be best served by programs administered by State authorities.

The people having spoken 9-to-1 to no avail, the next step fell to God. At the end of 1967, Holt took a swim at Cheviot Beach, near Portsea, and never returned.

Gorton became PM, installed Wentworth as his Minister, and things began to buzz. Within days, Lionel Rose had won the world bantamweight title. The strongly pro-Aboriginal Sydney Morning Herald didn't miss the connection: "Mr Wentworth will not be able to set records with the rapidity of Lionel Rose. But we should be able to expect a similar fighting spirit."

Wentworth's passion was given wide expression by a press which was wholly sympathetic to the Aboriginal cause. The Australian showed an enthusiasm for radical change that would startle its readers today. To cover the Aboriginal stockmen's strike at Wave Hill, it sent Frank Hardy, whose memorable dispatch appeared under the heading, "All the Gurindji want is their place in the sun"

Wentworth eventually got some Wave Hill land for the Gurindji, but his major reforms were frustrated; in 1971, Gorton fell to Billy McMahon, who fired Wentworth and deliberately put Aborigines along with arts and the environment, in the custody of the ineffectual Peter Howsen. Queensland's laws remained, and an "Aboriginal Embassy" materialised on the lawns of Parliament House. It was assimilation's last gasp.

The rest of the story, being more recent, is more familiar. Whitlam commissioned the Woodward Report and put a bill embodying its recommendation for Northern Territory land rights before the Senate on, of all days, November 11, 1975. He also got an Act through to override Queensland's discriminatory laws, and greatly increased spending on Aboriginal welfare.

Fraser went ahead with land rights, cut spending and did nothing about Queensland's laws. Hawke considered the demand of Aboriginal groups to have control over mining on their lands, then in the run-up to the West Australian elections, caved-in to the mining lobby and their State apologists. Land rights, which had come by now to stand for self-determination, had passed their zenith.

What now? Having shot, poisoned, incarcerated, patronised and false-promised Aborigines, white Australia is by now pretty much out of ideas. Even a cursory reading of some of the literature gives you a bleak feeling. Every change in direction, right back to Phillip's dispatch of a punitive expedition equipped with bags for black heads, has been proclaimed as a correction to the errors of the past; yet each has led to a new set of errors, or perhaps the same errors committed in a new way.

It is too early to say that self-determination has failed, but it has arrived at a paradox. Aborigines have been exercising their land rights, and going to live in the parts of the Northern Territory and northern South Australia to which they have title. Governments, with their need for labels, call this the "homelands movement" - and then rush to assure us (and themselves) that, unlike the South African policy of the same name, this is entirely voluntary.

But there is a connection, and here is the paradox. Since both homelands are remote, with sparse natural resources and with the benefits of modern civilisation available only in rudimentary form, those who live there will necessarily live different (by our lights, more primitive) lives from those of the mainstream society. This is separate development.

In a report recently published, after exhaustive inquiry, by the bipartisan House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs (and, these being the '80s, pretty well ignored by the media), the intellectual bones of the homelands policy are laid bare. Aborigines have a strong desire to move away from "artificial" communities (settlements, reserves, missions), back to their "traditional" lands and style of living where they will have more"autonomy" and "freedom." (The quotation marks show that these are the committee's words, not mine).

But there is another side. By turning assimilation on its head - and the homelands movement might accurately be called dissimilation - we are in danger of abandoning that policy's worthwhile goals: better education, better health, better understanding of the ideas and ideals of Western (surely one may now say, international) civilisation.

There is the critique voiced by the late Shiva Naipaul, who said that what we were doing was establishing an "anthropological zoo" occupied by a race preserved in a state of pristine primitiveness, falling further behind the rest of Australia at much the same pace and for many of the same reasons (lack of imagination and openness to change, racism) as Australia was falling behind the rest of the world - a zoo tended by white experts whose job was to teach Aborigines how to be Aboriginal.

My research suggests that Naipaul's critique is addressed in two ways. The first: what's so hot about Western civilisation anyway? This is put by the peace and environmental groups, who say that since we are already done for through nuclear war, radioactive leaks or dioxins.

Only slightly more helpful is the conventional response put forward by the parliamentary committee. The homelands Aborigines, it said, had no intention of doing without the benefits of European Australia; indeed their needs are set out in considerable detail: water, food, elementary education, health services, transport, houses, sewerage, airstrips and, of course, welfare payments.

But how are these to be delivered to these remote and shifting sites, and at what cost? The committee found itself unable to assess even the number of children in the Northern Territory homelands who were going without education, let alone come up with practical measures to give them that education.

The homelands movement pre-supposes more spending on Aboriginal welfare. Again and again, the parliamentary committee recommends more studies, more teachers, more health workers, more pumps, more ablution blocks, more airstrips and so on. But with the loss of interest in Aboriginal welfare in the media and the electorate, and the erosion of the Labor Party's commitment to goals of conscience, the time of more money is past.

I do not claim to have an answer. But I wonder why, in correcting the failure of 199 years to reach equality between cultures 30,000 years apart, we should now be thinking of going backwards.