In "Pearson's Gamble, Stanner's Dream" (August 2007), Robert Manne covers the history of Aboriginal dispossession and Indigenous policy in white Anglo Australia. Why is it that I feel a sense of outrage, as the descendent of pioneering assisted immigrants to this country, at what I take to be his accusations of genocide aimed at my British roots?

His essay is a fascinating historic and contemporary exploration of white man's attitude to Indigenous people as well as Indigenous problems. Rather than casting barbs of blame at certain ethnic types, why could Manne not explore the anthropological reasons behind genocide committed by one group of people against another? Surely it would tie in with the disciplines of sociology and psychology? Both of these disciplines could be useful in exploring drinking behaviours in Indigenous communities.

For instance, in the years prior to the Holocaust most of Europe was sunk into a terrible economic depression. Work was scarce, there was limited welfare and people struggled with deprivation, cold and hunger. Likewise, in the early nineteenth century my antecedents left their homeland of Britain, fleeing poverty and starvation and the economic famine of the 1840s. They hoped for a new beginning in a land of untold wealth and for some of the luxuries of the gentry that they had heard of but had no access to.

Needless to say, it was the bourgeois settlers who became wealthy pastoralists in the new land. You know the old cliché: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The bourgeois had sufficient funds to take up huge runs, to become squatters and the future landed class, the class that produced the politicians and writers who defined the Australian political and literary culture for the next 150 years.

These were not deprived people, though deprivation existed in the towns and cities, and in the small farming communities where men and women worked to eke out an existence. These pastoralists were the squatters of ‘Waltzing Matilda' fame. They were wealthy enough to employ shepherds to herd and tend their sheep, while they enjoyed the fruits of their labour in recreational pursuits, like the gentry of old England.

What we are talking about here are societies with huge gaps between small wealthy elites and impoverished working classes, or between landed gentry and landless workers. We are talking about the history of society as it was shaped centuries ago, and still is to a certain extent - only currently we call our Australian society capitalist or post-capitalist and not feudal. And the most dominant theme of capitalism is the goal of wealth creation. Capitalist society is an extremely competitive, highly stressful society. In the past, capitalist society has been dehumanising and it still is in the way first-world capitalists exploit third-world countries for the sake of the mighty dollar.

This was the same motive which spurred on the squattocracy in the early years of white settlement here: striving to be the best, the greatest, and not noticing the pain going on all around. This dehumanising principle led squatters and their employees to shoot blacks who trespassed near sheep. It was combined with dehumanising principles within Christianity, such as the myth that there were the deserving and undeserving - those whose fate was heaven and others whose fate would be hell. Those who stole or destroyed property, the convicted transported criminals and the blacks, were deemed to have earned God's wrath. Those who purportedly killed their own babies or ate human flesh also fell into the category of people who God deemed unworthy.

In some ways society has always been consistent in its treatment of the disadvantaged poorer classes who exist on the fringe. Today, white Australians who enter prisons are almost as likely as Indigenous Australians to die young. Addiction is rife in our prisons. The percentage of prisoners with mental illness is high. One of my acquaintances, a psychiatric nurse, told me, "Most of them [inmates of psychiatric hospitals] have been sexually abused as children." Something like 50% of marriages in Australia end in divorce. What does this say about white Australian society, and what does it say about capitalism, which is the basis of this society?

If Indigenous Australians are now suffering alcoholism and violence, imprisonment and early death, aren't these the things that lower-class white Australians are suffering from also? If one in five Australians suffers from mental illness and if mental illness can be caused by childhood sexual abuse, what is this saying about white Australia?

That the statistics are far worse for black Australia is horrific and needs urgent action, but we also need to look at the fault-lines within white Australia and ask ourselves: If we can find an answer to Indigenous Australians' problems, can we apply those answers to mainstream Australia as well?

Band-aid solutions won't quell the violence and social unrest. Wholesale reorganisation of society may prove to be the only answer. Nordic countries, specifically Sweden, have reorganised their countries with an emphasis on high taxes and a pay-off of indiscriminately reliable high-quality services. If they can do it, we can too. Union officials in Australia explored Sweden's economy as long ago as 1995. Nothing came of their study. With an election in the offing, the time might be ripe for change. Let's hope so, for Indigenous Australians' sakes as well as for all our own.