Leaving Darwin we headed three hours south on the Greyhound Prison Bus to Katherine, a strange town largely inhabited by Aborigines. Katherine is the nearest town to Nimbuluk National Park, which contains Katherine Gorge, a gorge system made up of thirteen gorges.

We took a two hour boat cruise taking in two of the gorges, and being a very sacred place to the Aborigines heard a few Creation Time legends, as well as some Didgeridoo (known as Yidaki to the Aborigines, a German gave it the name Didgeridoo) courtesy of our guide, Don.

The Northern Territory's population is about 25% Aboriginal, compared to the national average of about 2% (400k out of 20m), and since the Aborigine Land Right's Act they now own over half the land of the Northern Territory, including many of the national parks (including Uluru & Kakadu), which they lease back to the government and co-manage.

After visiting places such as Darwin, Alice Springs and Katherine though, it's difficult not to be disturbed by the massive gulf between the settlers and the indigenous people. As many of the Aboriginal communities are dry (no alcohol) communities due to past problems with alcohol, many of the people who are drawn to the towns or cities have social or alcohol problems, so walking through the towns you will see people sitting on the streets drinking, begging or shouting (what we imagine is abuse).

The settlers seem to despise and distrust them mostly too, as all toilets are locked from the outside so you need to get the key from staff, and white people have made racist comments to us about them on a number of occasions, calling them "their favourite black people" or saying "sneaking around like a black fella". The only taste of Aboriginal culture tourists get are to see drunks and layabouts in the cities, and as many of their stories and much of their culture is secret, it is hard to learn more about it.

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We wrote the above on the way to Broome in Western Australia, which is known for Cable Beach, a beautiful beach over 20 kilometres long where you can take sunset camel rides. Everyone had told us how beautiful it was and how relaxed it is, but we arrived after twenty hours on a bus to ridiculous humidity and heat, and again Aboriginal people loitering, arrogant and smelling like they hadn't washed for days. In the supermarkets they had no manners as they ignored people serving them politely and even knocked into an old guy as they walked past.

After the way the Aborigines were treated over the years we totally sympathised with them, especially after hearing about the government stealing their children from around 1900 to 1960 if they suspected they weren't 100% Aboriginal, although all that changed last night.

We know you shouldn't judge people on one bad experience, but so far we haven't had one pleasant experience after seeing hundreds of Aborigines, and as we walked out of a Chinese restaurant to walk back to our hostel and felt glass shatter over our legs as a drunk Aborigine fella threw a bottle which landed inches from us, all sympathy drained away. 

Luckily a taxi picked us up and told us how he'd been beaten up a number of times and the police do nothing.  When we got back to our hostel we rang the police, who simply said "OK, we'll take a look".

I'd like to think we tried to embrace the Aborigine culture, but suppose there is too much recent history there for the masses to get on.  It seems the Australian government is trying to make up for things by giving them back their land and leasing it from them, but it seems that all that does is gives the community an income without actually working, so they don't contribute and often are just drunks. 

Now we know there are communities outside of the cities which are fine, but our experiences have been nothing but bad.  Hopefully as time goes by things will change, but unless the government does something to build bridges constructively, who knows how that will happen.