Americans and Australians. We're the same but different. What's the difference?
The truth is that I basically know you Americans through books, films, music and mass media. Does that mean I really know you?  That's an interesting question, but I think there are some general points we can agree on. The modern state we call America or the United States started as a Puritan settlement, a place of hope and liberty for religious dissenters. The modern state of Australia started as a penal colony. To give but one example of how I think this difference has worked through our two cultures - your politicians frequently appeal to or cite God in making political utterances; ours rarely do. You had a revolution. Our flag still has a colonial emblem in the corner. You declared your independence and framed a constitution around the rights of man. Our constitution was a political and commercial settlement. There is not and never has been, for example, a constitutional right to bear arms in Australia. 
We didn't have slavery as such - but 60,000 Pacific islanders were tricked and/or kidnapped to work on sugar plantations in northern Australia while the system whereby convicts were assigned to work for landowners, was compared approvingly to slavery by an Irish political prisoner, John Mitchell, who then escaped to America and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. We haven't had the calamity of a civil war, but nor have we had the sort of drama that produces a leader of the stature of Abraham Lincoln, one who is recognised as a leader of humanity and not just his country.
In claiming Australia as a British possession, the British government declared that the Australian land mass was "terra nullius" - a Latin term meaning the land of nobody. This was a lie. There were people who had been in Australia for thousands and thousands of years - Aboriginal people.  Not until 1967 were Aboriginal people included in the Australian census. A sense of absence, not presence, permeated Australia's early sense of itself and continues, I would argue, until today.
One of the great haunting dramas of colonial Australia is about two explorers, Burke and Wills, who set out in 1861 to cross the continent south to north as the flagbearers for the narrative of white occupation and then disappeared.
Near the end of that wonderful  American novel The Great Gatsby, there is that famous passage: "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
That passage, to my knowledge, has no parallel in Australian literature - certainly not in an iconic work. Australia was strange to the first Europeans in a way that America, a fellow Northern Hemisphere dweller,  was not. We had animals they had never seen the likes of before, such as the kangaroo. America was born of idealism, an idea to do with freedom. From the mouths of some Americans, it sounds like an idea of God-ordained liberty. I don't associate Australia with any idea. Australia is a place, I would argue, that is well suited to agnosticism.
I grew up in Tasmania. For more than 50 years, the island was one big prison. Anyone seeking to understand the psychology of such a place should read Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony. I grew up in a place that had no memory of either my people, the Irish convicts, or the people who were there before them. My Flanagan convict forebear, Thomas Flanagan from County Roscommon, then in a state of famine, stole meat and a sum of five pounds to feed his starving family in 1847. Fifty years later, during what is called the Victorian period, having convict forebears in your family became a source of acute social shame. Within three generations there was no memory whatsoever of their songs, stories, dances. That was the first silence I grew up with.
What remained of the convict culture was a disrespect for authority that flared spectacularly around the rebel outlaw Ned Kelly. There was also a belief that actions speak louder than words, a belief that at its best finds a Biblical echo in the idea that by the fruit of their actions we shall know the people most deserving of our respect. Traditionally, Australian culture was introvert. Viewed through the prism of your cultural exports, American culture has always struck me as thoroughly extrovert.
Within 30 years of white arrival in Tasmania in 1803, the British government had shipped the surviving remnant of the Aboriginal population to a small island in Bass Strait. There are people of Aboriginal descent living in Tasmania today, but when I was growing up we were taught that the last one died in 1876. There was no memory of their songs, stories, dances also.
The one thing that made sense to me growing up in Tasmania was the local football matches. Australian football is not the game you call soccer. Nor is it rugby. Nor is it Irish football. It is a wholly Australian game with a long and interesting history which has some parallels with the history of baseball. This is the game which absorbed me and it was through football, and the folklore that surrounded it, that I first encountered theatre, mythology and a certain sort of comedy based on character.
Later, when I was wandering the world, sport was my second language, shielding me from loneliness, whether it was by playing street soccer with kids in the former state of Yugoslavia or hitching a ride in Germany with a man from Hamburg who had no English and finding a common link in Kevin Keegan, the Englishman then playing soccer with the Hamburg club. After I returned, sport gave me a passport to enter Aboriginal Australia.
The other silence I grew up with was my father. During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army used slave labour to put a railway through from Thailand to Burma. More than 100,000 men - some say 200,000 - died laying 400km of track. My father survived that. He was left weakened, perhaps permanently, by cholera, malaria and malnutrition. He had a close friend bashed to death. I could go on ... In one of my books, I described my father, the man I knew growing up, as a hard old monk. He was gentle but he was not easily impressed. I liked him; in fact, I thought he was cool. He didn't say much but what he said always struck me as being really well thought out. But if a paternalistic father is one who tells you who you are, where you come from and where you're going, then he was the opposite. He didn't tell me who I was, he didn't tell me where I was going. I had to work that out for myself.
I did a law degree, worked in a prison in welfare. At the age of 24, I went to Ireland. I didn't understand Tasmania, the place I was from, so I thought I must be Irish. But when I got to Ireland I found I was like them - but not like them. Why? Because there was this other part of me that was Australian. In a state of some confusion, I hitch-hiked into Northern Ireland, then in a state of civil war.
I was to learn that, in that part of the world, they say they can tell whether you're a Catholic or a Protestant by looking at you. They also say you should never ask anyone their religion. Ten minutes after he picked me up, I asked the truck driver his religion. He said Protestant. He asked me mine. Sensing suddenly I may be out of my depth, I lied and said Methodist.
The truck driver knew I was lying, he knew that I was a Catholic, a word which, in Northern Ireland, is only incidentally about the practice of religion but first and foremost identifies your cultural group, your tribe, your loyalties.
Entering Belfast we passed wall murals celebrating paramilitary groups, men in black balaclavas brandishing automatic weapons. We went past a street corner, a bare, God-forsaken place. The truck driver said a man had been "executed" by the IRA there the week before. Then he said, "Where are you staying tonight?" I said, "A pub in the middle of town". He said, "Don't you read newspapers? They've all been blown up". By this time, it was dusk. Everywhere I looked I saw people rushing, anxious to get home. I started to become scared.
So, what happened? The Protestant truck driver took it upon himself to drive around Belfast and find me, this ignorant Catholic kid from Tasmania, a safe place for the night. And so I encountered a big paradox - I'd come to Ireland seeking my Irish Catholic roots and here I was being protected by one of their traditional enemies ...
I travelled the world for another two years. I ended up in the Sudan, quite ill, travelling south from the Egyptian border to Khartoum by train. I was sick when I got on the train and got steadily worse with the combined effect of desert heat and unsanitary toilets and bad water and people everywhere, even under your feet when you sat down. I met a couple of young Sudanese lads who shared their food with me in return for learning some English. Then they said they were going to sleep on the roof of the train, did I want to come? I said yes, without thinking. It was like a scene out of a western, me clambering about on the side of the train with these two young blokes on top of the carriage pulling me up by the arms. But it sure was worth it - lying on the roof of the carriage under a big African sky illuminated by millions of stars, cool air rushing over my body, train rocking  beneath my back.
I got caught up there in a sandstorm and by next morning I was back in the fetid hellhole below. We stopped at a station in the middle of the desert - there was one water pump on the platform. By this stage, I had a pain in my head rolling about like a steel ball. Everyone made for the pump. I joined the crowd and let it carry me like a tide. Eventually, it was my turn. I bent over and tried to wash my face, running a bar of soap through my hair. Pain echoed through my head and, with so many people waiting, I pulled away, the job half-done. Then I heard a voice.  A young man in a white djellabah was motioning me forward. Everything had stopped, everyone was watching.  Putting out his hand, he took the soap from my hand and washed my hair. I would describe his act as Christ-like but he was probably a Muslim.
When I returned to Australia, I still had many questions. In particular: How did I fit into this land when my spiritual heritage came from somewhere else? How and where did I belong? When I finally met people who understood the questions I was asking, they were Aboriginal people. From the start, they seemed to implicitly understand the journey I was on. They had every historical reason to view me as their enemy but I found that if I approached them in a spirit of humility and respect I was, by and large, accepted. I also found I had more in common with them than I'd imagined.  For example, my father and a number of other Burma railway veterans I got to know were people who'd seen a lot, suffered a lot and had great compassion. When I started meeting Aboriginal elders, I met people who'd seen a lot, suffered a lot and had great compassion. It seems to me that the wisdom of the elders is much the same in all cultures.
I've learned so much from Aboriginal people. It intrigues me, for example, that many Western artists from affluent backgrounds over the past 100 years have depicted the world in dark and often violent ways. Then I look at paintings by traditional Aboriginal artists, people whose lives have been subjected to violence on so many levels, and see colourful, free form, harmony. Notwithstanding the insults and injuries inflicted upon their culture, so many Aboriginal people that I have met have also been compassionate, and with that quality comes a shrewd understanding of human nature.  And Aboriginal thinking, as I've encountered it, often comes back to an idea of oneness - the sense of a common origin. It was Aboriginal people who confirmed me on my path as a writer. "You're all right, brother," I was once told. "You come from the heart." I have learnt that if you come from the heart, as best you can, you have your best chance of relating to people from other cultures.
I know the terms "black" and "white" are not used in this country any more as they once were. But during the period they were, the terms black and white in my country meant something quite different. Aboriginal people were called "blacks", but to engage with them is to engage with an indigenous, earth-based, place-based culture. The equivalent in your country are the native Americans. We hear very little about native Americans in our country.
The word Aboriginal is really two Latin words - "ab" meaning from, and "original" meaning the start. My relationship with Aboriginal people has brought me closer to my land, both the whole of its human history and its vast beauty which ranges from Hobart in Tasmania - Hobart looks like Oslo in Norway - to central Australia which looks like northern Africa and has orange sand and a great red rock that is known by the name of Uluru, an Aboriginal word meaning lasting or permanent.
Do we Australians have problems? An abundance. Do we have the same problems as you? Yes and no. We have not yet come to terms with the environmental problems of the 21st century nor with the global crisis of mass migration. Our methods in dealing with unauthorised migrants - in particular placing children in detention centres and attempting to out-source the problem by deflecting illegal arrivals to Third World countries such as Cambodia - has cost us the respect of people whose respect I would prefer to have. We do have broad consensus on gun control.
In Australia, I am part of what is called the reconciliation movement - the movement seeking to reconcile Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. In some ways things are better, but in critical ways the plight of traditional Aboriginal Australia is no better or worse than it was when I started 30 years ago. I take my faith from a statement made by Patrick Dodson, a great Aboriginal leader and the father of the reconciliation movement. He said, "The struggle never ends - the reward is the people you meet along the way".
Australia is very nearly the size, physically speaking, of the United States although our population is less than one-tenth of yours. I enjoy living in Australia and like a lot of people that I meet. There is an Australian sense of humour that is hard to explain at the best of times, and certainly not in polite company, that I love. I'd also like to think most Australians can still identify what a good bloke is.
Bloke is a word that came to Australia from England and then grew, I like to think, new meaning. A good bloke wasn't a good man. That implies virtue. Traditionally, a good bloke treated you as he wished to be treated. The measure of a good bloke was his consistency. A really good bloke was someone who was a good bloke to a lot of people. And, yes, it is now the case that a bloke can be a woman. So can a mate be a woman. A mate is someone you are obliged by a wordless oath to care for and protect. Or that's how it is for me.
One of the things that saddens me about Australia is that so many Australians choose not to explore it, but remain hemmed in by their city environments clumped around the coastline. Six months ago I went into a classroom of 18-year-old students in Melbourne, the city of 4 million people where I live, and asked how many of them knew where Darwin is. Darwin, which has a population of 100,000, is in Australia's tropical north on the lip of Melanesia. About a quarter of the kids in the classroom put up their hands saying they knew where Darwin is. I asked them how many knew about Pearl Harbour. Most of the hands went up. "It was bombed," one girl cried. And I said to them, "Do you know the Japanese dropped more bombs on Darwin than Pearl Harbour during World War II?" Nobody knew that. Not one kid.
During 1942, Japanese aircraft conducted 63 raids on Darwin, then a town of 2000 people. The first attack was planned by the same man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbour and employed 200 aircraft, bombers and fighters. There was no air defence. Ten American pilots flying Kittyhawks had just flown in from Manila. The Japanese destroyed five of the Kittyhawks on the ground, but five got up into the air and flew at the Japanese, five against 200. Forget them? I certainly won't.
The Japanese bombed widely across northern Australia, and if you drive north to Darwin from the red centre of Australia, you start seeing old airstrips built during World War II, many of them by American troops. And here's another sort of Australian story, a story Aboriginal people tell.
South of Darwin is a tribe called the Gurindji. And the Gurindji watched American troops building an airfield on their land - in particular, they watched the black American troops. What they saw was that the black troops in the US Army were treated better than the Gurindji were treated by the British pastoral company which claimed the Gurindji land as their own and then worked them as stockmen for little or no money and scraps of food. Emboldened, the Gurindji went on strike for better conditions. The strike morphed into a claim for their land. They won. It was the first big land rights victory in Australia. Their story still reverberates like a note from a didgeridoo.
My father lived to within a few months of his 99th birthday. Not long before he died he said that God was all the good people that had ever been in the world. He was moved to this statement after his grandson was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That threw him because he thought he'd seen cruelty in the prison camps, but being stricken with serious mental illness at the age of 21 to him seemed even crueller. He lost what conventional faith he had left and then, in his aloneness, found himself surrounded by all the good people he'd ever known.
In Aboriginal culture, when you leave your tribal country and enter the country of another people, you must pay respect to their spirits. The Aboriginal belief and my father's belief sort of amount to the same idea and that is why I would like to finish by saying, as we do in Australia: I wish to pay my respects to the elders of this place, past and present.