AUSTRALIA'S oldest family business owes its foundations and longevity to an unlikely friendship between a teenaged white settler and one of history's most feared Aboriginal warriors.
And the makers of the nation's most important piece of indigenous television are hoping that the 200-year-old relationship and others like it will finally inspire a new, collaborative approach to Australian history.
David Suttor, is the sixth generation of his family to till the rich alluvial soils of Brucedale, 10 kilometres outside Bathurst.
Family legend has it that his great-great-grandfather William was directed to the spot by the Wiradjuri warrior Windradyne in about 1822.
When Windradyne came to the door in the dead of night two years later, seeking revenge for the murder of family members who had trespassed on a potato patch, it was only the 18-year-old William's friendship and fluency in Wiradjuri that spared him and the Suttor line from a string of bloody murders that followed.
"The story goes that William spoke to Windradyne calmly and in his own language," Mr Suttor said this week, "and I would imagine he said something
like 'We've been friends and I haven't been doing the poisoning', and I would imagine that he would have been upset that it had happened."
Windradyne attacked elsewhere, martial law was declared in the west, and within three months what the Sydney Gazette called "an extermination war" had claimed up to 50 black lives and probably as many white ones - men, women and children alike.
When Windradyne finally surrendered, the Gazette described him as "without doubt, the most manly black native that we have ever beheld". His grave is on a windswept hill at Brucedale, protected by a fence and a heritage listing and accessible to the Wiradjuri, who visit about once a month.
Bill Allen, a descendant of Windradyne, has taken his children, grandchildren and groups to the sacred site and said other Wiradjuri such as the NSW Community Services Minister, Linda Burney, and the TV presenter Stan Grant had drawn inspiration from it.
The story of the six-generation relationship between David's and Bill's families features in the first episode of First Australians , a program six years in the making that will screen over seven weeks on SBS from tomorrow night.
The series tells the story of indigenous Australia through the eyes of key characters such as Bennelong and Eddie Koiki Mabo, from the appearance of the First Fleet in 1788 to the disappearance of the terra nullius legal fiction in 1992.
It aimed to inject some indigenous perspectives into mainstream Australia's sense of itself, and may spark a fresh round of historians debating the value of "black armband and white blindfold" views of frontier history, said its producer, Darren Dale..
But its stories are not about "good guys and bad guys", and should be seen as part of our shared story, he said.
One of Australia's leading indigenous historians, Marcia Langton, was a senior consultant on the production and said the research for the series was "phenomenal".
"Now the nation has actual narrative histories that are rigorous and reliable and tell the history based on the records.
"For too long the nation-building narrative has rested
on the proposition that Aborigines suffered … Of course it's true but it's much more complicated than that.
"We need a national history that's accessible to everybody, that is indeed a story but also tells all of the complications [and] isn't simplified for ideological purposes."
She said it was the most important TV history documentary - better than acclaimed accounts of America's civil war and civil rights eras. "In my view, this series exceeds those two both in the virtuosity of the television making, the excellence of the documentary skills brought to it, … the rigour and the range of historical sources and the length of the historical period covered."
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