Aboriginal people have the oldest continuous culture in the world - more than 50,000 years. The pre-1788 population has been estimated at between 315,000 to more than 1 million. Disease after settlement decimated the population. But it is on the rise - an estimated 386,000 in 1996 and 427,000 in 2001.
Fertility rates are higher, but so are mortality rates - more than twice the total population.
Life expectancy is more than 15 years less. In full . Take me for what I am Taree's dilemma, writes Andrew Stevenson, is that blacks want to be accepted on their own terms, while whites judge them by white standards. In full . To mark the end of a decade of reconciliation, Herald reporters Kendall Hill, Andrew Stevenson and Sharon Verghis and photographer Andrew Meares spent a week in Taree, on NSW's mid-north coast, to assess how race works in one community.