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I would like to say something about the fundamental meaning of land to the Aboriginal people. I think this is particularly relevant at the moment because I note that the honourable member for Robertson (Mr Cohen) referred to what will happen at Roper River. Perhaps I am a bit out of date, but my understanding is that the last thing the Minister for the Interior (Mr Nixon) said about Roper River was that the Aboriginal people there would be given title to the land provided they paid for it like everybody else. I could not agree with this attitude, lt seems rather extraordinary to me. We can just imagine ourselves being in the position of an Aboriginal in such a circumstance and being told that the white man will let us have back the land originally taken from us without compensation providing we can produce the white man's currency. This is the same old attitudethat the Western Christian ethos is sancrosanct and all other cultures must defer to it. After the right to live, the most fundamental right and the most fundamental need of the Aboriginal people is land. As the Yirrkala Aboriginals in Arnhem Land stated in their current claim in their dispute with the Commonwealth and Nabalco Pty Ltd, their connection with the land is timeless and inextinguishable. If any part of Aboriginal land is to be excised, it should be the standard practice to weigh the benefits to the white man against the disadvantages to the Aboriginals. Whether this every done I do not know. But 1 am certain that the importance of land to Aboriginal culture is not taken into account adequately. The concept of land to the tribal Aboriginals is, or was, very different from our own. I would like to quote briefly from a lecture given by Professor Stanner in the 1968 Boyer lectures. He said: No English words are good enough to give a sense of links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. He said also: Our word 'land' is too spare and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except wilh economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. The Aboriginal would speak of 'earth' and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his shoulder' or bis 'side'. 1 have seen an Aboriginal embrace the earth he walked on. To put our words home' and 'land' together into 'homeland' is a little better but not much. A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance. When we took what we call 'land' we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit. At the same time it left each local band bereft of an essential constant that made their plan and code of living intelligble. Particular pieces of territory, each a homeland, formed part of a set of constants without which no affiliation of any person to any other person, no link in the whole network of relationships, no part of the complex structure of social groups any longer had all its co-ordinates. What 1 describe as 'homelessness', then, means that the Aborigines faced a kind of vertigo in living. With a few exceptions, therefore, loss of land to the Aboriginal means loss of his traditional way of life, loss of the traditional ties with the past, which are essential to the whole Aboriginal culture. An examination of Aboriginal mythology shows it to be intimately bound up with all the environment of the Aboriginals - the hills, the waterfalls, the fish. Many of these have human form in Aboriginal mythology. Even certain stones have a sacred connotation. The Aboriginal culture, with its connection with the past, provides a great contrast with the European society. The more affluent white person, to use the popular parlance of sociologists, is future orientated; that is to say, he directs his activities to future comfort and security. He stays at school longer; he improves his educational status in the interests of peronal security; he may take out life assurance; he saves his money to secure his family, and so on. The under-privileged white man who is living in poverty is orientated more towards the present. Coming from a poor environment, he lacks the expectation and incentives to give much thought to the future. He leaves school earlier and saves less. On the other hand, the tribal Aboriginal is neither of these. He is orientated towards the past. The centre of Aboriginal culture is the past - and the past is inextricably associated with the land. It is not surprising, therefore, that loss of land has placed many Aboriginal people into a limbo and into a situation becoming, as Dr Coombs has said, a depressed rabble of fringe dwellers. Nothing - is more fundamental than land rights. But for those dispossessed either voluntarily or involuntarily from the land-