This article originally appeared on The ABC’s The Drum website.

It was lunchtime, 1988. Grade two. Friday, right before sport. I’d just accidentally hit Alan Northen* in the back of the head with a seven iron whilst practicing my swing.

I wasn’t very good at sport, in fact I have it on good word I was the only student in the history of Sanctuary Point Primary School to fail kindergarten PE. Golf was the only activity they’d let me participate in because I wasn’t co-ordinated enough to hit, kick or catch a ball that moved faster than the earth’s natural rotation. I was even banned from T-Ball after I let go of the bat mid-swing and sent it flying in a furious arc towards Miss Ramsay’s nose. I’m surprised they didn’t just lock me in the library on Friday afternoons where the most damage I could do was give myself papercuts. That being said, it wasn’t entirely my fault Alan got hit in the head either. Alan always had scabs, so clearly he wasn’t very good at choosing places to stand.

Fortunately Alan hadn’t seen it was me, so I told him Luke Clarke was the culprit. As far as blame-shifting went, it wasn’t quite up there with Mary’s immaculate conception concept, but it was good. It was good because at that point Luke was running past us and towards Heather Moore with a two wood in his possession. I had a crush on Heather Moore. Not only was Luke leaving the scene of a crime with a weapon in his hand, he was cutting my grass. Alan and I agreed vengeance was in order. Matthew Macloud offered to assist.

Matthew Macloud was Aboriginal and reckoned he could put together a gang of sorts. We used to hear stories about Aboriginal gangs fighting on the oval behind the Sanctuary Point shops from time to time. Someone even got shot once, and we had no reason to doubt his posse-bility. Not wanting to be out-done, Alan told us his dad had two guns. That was even better than a gang. Way better. My dad had a stamp collection. I knew that wasn’t going to cut it. We went to church too, so I knew I could probably get Jesus on my side, but that meant telling people I went to church, and that would get me beaten-up. I went left-field and told them that my great, great, great, great grandfather was David Jones, the guy with the department store, and that I could get whatever I wanted from the store, including, like, 100 steak knives, and that was better than two guns or a gang.

This revelation was met with scepticism.

Matthew pointed out my last name was not, in fact, Jones. Alan described my assertion as ‘bull’. Matthew said that if David Jones was my great great great great grandfather we would be rich, and that we weren’t. He pointed out I was wearing shorts my mum had made, and that I’d cut the tag off the inside of the only Rip Curl shirt I owned and stuck it on the outside of the shorts, with superglue, upside down, and that if my great great great great grandfather was David Jones, I wouldn’t have had to do that. He pointed out that he had proper surf shorts on, therefore he was richer than me, therefore my great great great great grandfather could not possibly be David Jones.

It was irrefutable logic.

Like most nine-year-olds, I made a lot of stuff up about my family. At least two kids in my class had uncles who owned Ferraris. One had an older brother who lived in Sydney and ran a roller coaster shop. Eight were millionaires, two were gazillionaires, three had dads who played football for Australia before I was born so that’s why I didn’t know who they were, and at least two boys in my grade had fathers who were trained military assassins currently serving in the French Foreign Legion.

I should have just said my Dad had a bazooka and been done with it, but, on this occasion, I’d gone with the truth. David Jones was my great, great, great, great grandfather. I’d seen the family tree. He might have been an acorn in the 18th century and I was a piece of moss growing on an oak leaf which fell to the ground sometime during the Cold War, but my Mum’s, Mum’s, Mother’s Dad’s, Mother was in fact David Jones’s daughter. It was a tenuous link, but it was still a link. I wasn’t lying.

Not to be out-done, Alan Northern informed us that his great great great great grandfather was Captain Cook. Matthew Macloud had no idea who his great great great great grandfather was. He had no idea who his grandfather was either. Alan and I thought this was strange because Aboriginal kids at our school tended to have about four hundred cousins each. It stood to our reasoning that with all those cousins he should have had at least eight grandfathers. He mentioned something about his mum being adopted and steered the conversation towards the subject of the gaping wound now gushing blood from Alan’s head. It was 1988 and no one had really heard of the stolen generations yet.

In grade two I’d fainted in the Shoalhaven City Library two hours after a trip to the dentist to have a tooth removed because I could taste blood in my mouth. In grade one I’d passed out in bed because I woke up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose. I was never going to be a surgeon, but I managed to get Alan to sick bay and recommended the office ladies apply some Vaseline, like they did in Rocky. They opted for a butterfly band-aid instead. Everyone agreed that a butterfly band-aid was second only in coolness to actual stitches and Alan was greeted as a war hero on his return to the playground.

Alan recovered from his injuries that day I do believe. As far as I can gather from a Google search, he is now working at a uranium mine in the Northern Territory. Luke Clarke escaped retribution too and is, or at least was, the operations manager of a football club in Wollongong. Heather Moore, according to Facebook, is married, and still a hottie.

I have no idea what happened to Matthew Macloud, but since he’s Aboriginal, I know the following:

• He is likely to live for 11.5 years less than me.
• There is a 46% chance he is not employed.
• There is a 78% chance he did not finish grade 12.
• When I knew him as a youth, his chances of imprisonment were 28 times higher than mine.
• He is 13 times more likely to be jailed than a non-Indigenous adult (unless you are a non-Aboriginal adult and your surname is Milat, in which case, your chances of being jailed are exceptional).
• He is three times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than I am.
• He is nine times more likely to have end-stage renal disease (kidney failure) than me.
• As a 31-year-old (I think that’s how old he’d be) he is three times more likely to have committed suicide than a non-aboriginal person.
• He is six times more likely to have been arrested than me (I have been arrested**, so that statistic lacks a bit of punch, but still, on the whole, he is six times more likely to have been arrested).

All those stats are appalling, but I think the worst one, if you can choose a ‘worst’ tragic statistic, is this:

• There is a 28% chance he lives in a household which has run out of money for basic living expenses in the past year.

I’m not making that up. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2008, the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who lived in households which had run out of money for basic living expenses in the previous 12 months was 28%. And that was considered a massive improvement because eight years prior to that the figure was 44%.

Matthew Macloud was a lovely guy. We were friends in primary school and we went to Vincentia High School together for a few years. Vincentia High was only 11km from the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community and 10% of its students identified as Aboriginal. I lost track of him in grade 10 when I moved from the NSW South Coast to a private school on the Queensland Gold Coast. That was pretty much the last time I had much to do with anyone Aboriginal. According to the government’s My School Website only 1% of the students at my Gold Coast high school identified as being Aboriginal (and even then, I’m guessing the website rounds up to the nearest 1% – the actual figure is probably closer to zero).

I don’t personally know any Aboriginal people anymore. I’ve got 350 Facebook friends and none of them are Indigenous Australians. The most contact I have with Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islanders these days is when I drive past the park in Brisbane’s West End and there’s a group of them drinking VB tallies from paper bags. You know what I usually think when I drive past? I think “Why is it that every time I see an Aboriginal person they’re drinking in a park?”

Then I realise that’s a politically incorrect thought, so I make myself think “The majority of Aboriginal people don’t spend their days drinking in a park, it’s just that the park-drinking ones are the only ones I bump into. Remember Matthew Macloud? He was nice.”

And then I feel better for a bit for not being so racist and judgemental. And then I think about all the horrible statistics I know about Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders and how terrible they have it, statistically speaking. And then I think about the time I went to Uluru and how amazing and spiritual it was. Oprah thought so too. Oprah never lies. But then I think about the families I saw living in the creek bed near Alice Springs in shanty towns that would make the Delhi Commonwealth games organisers blush. And I think, ‘maybe I’m not just being racist and judgemental and maybe there is actually something going on here and maybe something’s broken and no one knows how to fix it’.

And then they’re out of sight and I forget about it because, at the end of the day, it’s a free country and it’s their problem not mine, and to be honest, I quite like drinking in the park too.

But you know what?

This is my problem. It’s our problem.

Whether your great great great great grandfather arrived in Sydney Cove in 1834 to set up a department store, or whether you’ve just stepped off a boat in Flying Fish Cove, Christmas Island, if you want to be part of Australia’s future, you’re in charge. This is a democracy. This is happening on your watch.

If you live in Australia and you’re black, you’re statistically going to die a dozen years earlier than everyone else. And there’s a 28 per cent chance your household didn’t have enough money to buy things like bread and milk this year.

These are massively real problems. They also have solutions. There actually is something you can do about it. Here are four solutions. There are more, but these are a good start.

Solution #1 – Understand the issues: Since a bunch of white boat people turned up in Botany Bay 223 years ago on Australia Day, 1788 and said “hey guys, we’ll be living here now, have some tuberculosis,” non-Indigenous Australians have showed a near complete lack of understanding about the plight of Indigenous Australians.

For the first 150 or so years after Europeans first arrived, Aborigines were treated as a second-class race of people who would almost certainly ‘die out’ sooner or later (like the 54 animal species which have disappeared since 1788). When it didn’t happen through disease, neglect and the odd massacre here and there, legislation was introduced to force the assimilation of Aboriginal people into white Australian society by separating children from their families. The intention was, to quote the 1935 Annual Report of the NSW Board for the Protection of Aborigines: “graduating the Aboriginal from his former primitive state to the standards of the white man, among whom he is gradually learning to stand as a self-respecting citizen”. White people thought they were helping. The result was cultural genocide.

Granting Aboriginal people the right to be counted as citizens in 1967, a move which should have been a great leap forward, resulted in arguably the biggest step backward since 1788. As respected Aboriginal rights advocate, Noel Pearson explained in his August 2000 speech ‘The Light On The Hill’:

The irony of our newly won citizenship in 1967 was that after we became citizens with equal rights and the theoretical right to equal pay, we lost the meagre foothold that we had in the real economy and we became almost comprehensively dependent upon passive welfare for our livelihood. So in one sense we gained citizenship and in another sense we lost it at the same time. Because we find thirty years later that life in the safety net for three decades and two generations has produced a social disaster. And we should not be surprised … You put any group of people in a condition of overwhelming reliance upon passive welfare support – that is support without reciprocation – and within three decades you will get the same social results that my people in Cape York Peninsula currently endure. Our social problems do not emanate from an innate incapacity on the part of our people. Our social problems are not endemic, they have not always been with us. We are not a hopeless or imbecile people.

Pauline Hanson argued in her maiden speech to Parliament in 1996 that “we now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness.” To her credit on that particular point, she wasn’t far from the truth. Since the 1960s Australia and America have both suffered varying degrees of ‘white guilt’ – a ‘victimhood’ notion that ‘white’ people (the term is in reference to all people who aren’t Indigenous Australians, not just people of European origin) are indebted to black people for past injustices.

The answer is therefore for white people to bear the burden of fixing the problem. When the outcome is land rights and greater respect for and recognition of Indigenous culture, or ‘peoplehood’, as some put it, it’s a good thing. When the outcome is passive welfare and other ‘handouts’ to appease a social conscience, it’s a terrible thing. As Noel Pearson puts it: “White guilt is a resource blacks in America and Australia have learned to mine.”

Until you understand the problem, and the difference between policies which work and policies which exist to appease white guilt, you’ll never be in a position to create a real solution. You’ll be in the pub arguing with your mates and you’ll either be trying to defend passive welfare, or you’ll be saying that Aborigines get too much special treatment and it should be stopped. Neither position is tenable or useful.

Read up on the issues. Go through Noel Pearson’s speeches and essays. Familiarise yourself with black history. Get informed.

Solution #2 – Don’t Be Racist: “But I’m not racist,” you’re probably thinking.

Guess what. You almost certainly are to some degree. In 2006 an Aboriginal elder in residence at Griffith University in Brisbane suffered a stroke at a campus bus stop and lay there for five hours in her own vomit before a group of Japanese students came to her aid. A thousand others had walked right on by without giving it a second thought. These people weren’t members of the Ku Klux Klan, they were university staff, students and State Government bus drivers.

You probably wouldn’t discriminate in a professional environment based on someone’s skin colour. Not only would that be illegal, it’s also morally wrong and as a society we’ve come a long way since some Australian swimming pools were segregated in the 1960s. But racism rears its ugly head in subtle ways.

Noel Pearson puts it this way: “Rather than denial or moral vanity, the optimum position for non‐Indigenous people to take is that of acknowledgement – of the past and its legacy in the present, recognising that racism is not a contrivance, that Indigenous people endure great hurt and confront barriers as a result of racism. They need to take responsibility for the fact of racism, and work to answer and counter it.”

Solution #3 – Support the Indigenous economy: If passive welfare was the single biggest step backward in Indigenous Australian history, economic independence is probably the single biggest step forward. Supporting the Indigenous economy goes way beyond ‘teaching a man to fish’. They know how to fish. Take a holiday to Uluru or Kakadu and put some money into the local communities. Buy ethically produced Aboriginal art. Well managed mining leases on traditional Aboriginal lands are a hugely important source of income and employment for the local people. Read up on which mining companies are supporting Aboriginal workers and land rights and invest in them. Mining magnate Andrew Forrest is a thought leader on this. Check out his plans.

Solution #4 – Donate to worthy causes: Plenty of charities and organisations spend time and money helping disadvantaged Indigenous communities. Look them up. Give them money. Support Aboriginal schools. Support organisations which help disadvantaged inner city Aboriginal kids get a leg up.

This Australia Day, spare a thought for those affected by the devastating floods. Flip them a coin if you can – they need it, my parents included. Polish off a few cans of our national beverage if you like too – hell, do it in a park. But if you do nothing else, get off your arse and do something about fixing the gaping, ugly disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It’s been 223 years already. If not now, when?

*Some names in this story have been changed in case my memory isn’t completely accurate and I’ve accused someone of being scabby when in actual fact they had skin as supple and smooth as a five-year-old European skincare product model.

** I was once arrested on suspicion of stealing money from a Dominos pizza store where I worked as a delivery boy. They let me go and apologised when they realised they were actually just rather bad at maths. I haven’t told my mum about that one yet. Sorry mum, it was traumatic at the time, but I’m fine now.

IMAGE CREDIT: David Jackmanson