Paul Keating Quotes

I lived for a couple of years when I was 9 years old on beautiful Aboriginal sacred land in a town of a thousand people in northwestern Australia. It's where the Aborigines are still very connected to their culture, the Dreamtime culture. It was really quite a special experience.

Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.

Trees always remind me of Aboriginal people.

We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

Aborigines are not just the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on the planet. They look like dinosaurs.

I have a real interest in working with younger Native artists. I think it's a very important way for Native people to communicate the realities of our culture and remember our ancestors.

My mum's from Broome, so I'm a saltwater person - Aboriginal people are either freshwater, saltwater or desert mob. So I always feel much more comfortable in close proximity to the beach, even if I'm not necessarily in the water.

There is a reason why the cultures of Indigenous Australia inspire such fascination. And that is that they represent a unique way of thinking about the world. A vision that over tens of thousands of years has risen out of the land, the power, the very being of our continent, Australia.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed.

It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

You can create something strong in art with a few notes. It is like how Aboriginal drawings have a simplicity that is incredibly rich.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests.

Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage

All history was at first oral.

It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy, but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

I feel sorry for people of good heart who have never had a chance to learn the realities of Native American everything - not just our history but the sweetness and the beauty and the reasons why were so close to Mother Earth.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

Songs are often written by people who are witnesses to history.