Introduction: These lectures, unlike several important legal judgements of the 1970's which have found that Australia was acquired by peaceful occupation and settlement, are based upon the historical premise that the country was acquired by the forcible dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia from their ancestral lands, a process that might be more fittingly described as invasion and conquest.

Lecture 1: In his Boyer lectures for 1968 Professor William Stanner took for his subject the relationships obtaining between the Aborigines and ourselves, particularly the relationships of the thirty years prior to his lecture. Unlike Professor Stanner I am not an authority on any aspect of Aboriginal culture. Some thirty years ago, however, while engaged on research upon early drawings and paintings associated with Australia it became clear to me that a conflict of attitudes and feelings existed between Aborigines and convicts from the very first days of settlement at Sydney, and that from this conflict the history of racist attitudes could be traced in our society, long before the opposition to indentured labour in the sugar industry and elsewhere, which was then the accepted view.