Malcolm Fraser was ridiculed high and low for saying: "Life wasn't meant to be easy." His comment summed up what Aboriginal people have always found most alien about European society: the Protestant work ethic; the idea that life is supposed to be a struggle to survive to appease those dangerous fools above you in the socio-economic hierarchy.

The Kombumerri intellectual and elder, Aunty Mary Graham, says: "One of the worst things that whitefellas did … wasn't murders and rapes and the theft of land, bad as those things were. The worst thing was that they brought this terrible idea … that life was about survival; about being a convict or a soldier, 'battling' the land and just making it from day-to-day, and they have infected our people with this awful idea."

From a coastal Aboriginal viewpoint, life is most definitely meant to be easy. When barramundi and wallaby and oysters abound and the weather is warm, there is no logical reason to work more than two or three hours a day. In coastal Australia, Aborigines enjoyed the good life for tens of thousands of years while the poor in Europe starved.