As a country with a large proportion of recent immigrants, Australia could have valuable experience for the world in the 21st century.

Australia's oldest national magazine, The Bulletin, in its first issue of 1988 focussed a double page spread on Australia's oldest continuously operating mining town - Broken Hill.

There is a small but not insignificant tree newly planted in a garden in the Alpine region of northern Victoria, Australia.

The blend of voluntary and compulsory effort which built Australia produced its own distinctive culture of daring, enterprise, skull-duggery, bravado and basic achievement. So began great cities - Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Brisbane and later Perth and Adelaide.

The silence was almost tangible. It hung over a stony hillside scarred by the skeletons of mulga trees, a landscape stilled as if in reverence for the sacred carvings etched in the sheer red faces of the gorge.

In 1975 the Senate created a landmark in the history of Australian race relations when it passed without dissent a motion stating that before 1788, Australia's indigenous peoples possessed the whole country. It urged `the Australian Government to... introduce legislation to compensate (these) people...

In today's Australia it is no surprise that most of us find the name of one of our foremost social thinkers hard to pronounce.

Since he left school and home as a 14-year-old, Reg Blow has tried most things: railway construction, truck driving, boxing, fruit picking, share farming, to name a few.