The Indigenous Inhabitants ......

I met these guys in the Kakadu National Park. I found their old rusty muddy car and I was taking a picture of its number plate (don't ask).

"What are you doing?" I heard a voice behind me. I turned round, apologised and explained myself. "Do you not know we have a dangerous dog in the car?" the man said.

I looked closely at the car back window and - holy sh*t - there was a huge dog inside watching my every move.

The story made the men laugh and they let me take a photo of them. (The white Australians I met in a bar that night said I'd been just lucky.)

I spent half of my trip in Australian outback. I saw lots of Aboriginals. I got impressed by their legends and "common knowledge" that helps them survive in places that whites can only use or destroy. I sat next to them in buses. I even talked to them. The only thing I can tell after all this, however, is they are very different from any people I have ever met.

According to the evolution theory, Aboriginals didn't evolve on the continent of Australia (they have no monkeys down there and anywhere near, you see). The scientists didn't want to abandon the theory (oh dear) and hence came with a "hypothesis" according to which the Aboriginals came to Australia some 60 000 years ago from the islands in the north, already as Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Allegedly, crossing the sea then was relatively easy then so the Abo's didn't need a deep nautical knowledge but only a bit of luck and good wind. Ouch. In truth, these people remain a kind of scientific phenomenon.

These days, we try to portray them as human beings which is a relative novelty. Britain founded the colony of New South Wales on the legal principle of terra nullius - a land belonging to no-one - which in other words meant that Australia was legally unoccupied; the settlers could take land from the natives without providing compensation. In the understanding of the whites, the land belongs to people. In the understanding of the Aboriginals, people belong to the land. Without the land, people die. All this led to regular conflicts. I wouldn't want to make any judgment here, but the violence towards Aboriginals from the white settlers is sometimes hard to believe.

It was only after the WWII when the natives formed an organized political movement fighting for land rights. This resulted in The Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976. The Law enables land claims by Aboriginals, but it operates only in the Northern Territory. In South Australia, other small Aboriginal reserves exist thanks to the Aboriginal Trust Act 1996. Anywhere else, however, the Aboriginal rights are still very limited.

Books generally say that nowadays the Aboriginals don't bother the whites if the whites don't bother the Aboriginals. What I can say for sure is that they do not want to be photographed - they believe the camera would take their soul.

I saw an Australian Aboriginal for the first time in Townsville. He was sitting on the pavement and shouted "Hello baby!" at me when I passed. I saw incredibly fat Aboriginal women waiting for buses in the middle of nowhere - their whole families waiting with them just to say good bye. These women never had luggage. When sipping coffee at a petrol station in the Simpson Desert at 3am, I talked to a guy who travelled to the South Australia on business. He was an Aboriginal. I sat next to an Aboriginal girl in a bus to Melbourne. For 10 hours and without saying a word. I was disappointed in myself, but we had absolutely nothing in common.

In my opinion, there are three types of Aboriginals: some are like the whites. They have a house or a shelter in town and run a small business, some have Australian citizenship and voting rights. Others are never met by the non-Aboriginals. They keep their own habits and rituals, live in camps in the outback, hunt for kangaroos and only if the luck is not on their side, buy their food in the local grocery shop. And then there are those who don't belong anywhere. They can usually be found sitting under a tree with a bottle of something stronger. Because what the hell! For all the goannas in the desert!