Bermuda resident and writer Andrew Stevenson travelled through Australia for three months and experienced a very different country from the one most tourists see. Beginning today, The Royal Gazette will excerpt parts of his travelogue every Monday this month.

My original intention, full of extravagant ideas hatched safely at home, was to buy a small plane and fly around Australia, a continent that has captivated me ever since reading about the weird Australian wildlife and how the Aboriginal people have survived in their harsh environment. I had flown my own aircraft in East Africa for five years during my mid-twenties.

The memories of flying, the freedom it entailed, are still ingrained in my mind. Australia reminds me so much of Africa, and flying about the country seemed the best way to see it. But two weeks in Sydney pursuing the practicalities of finding and buying a plane, and then selling it again, demonstrated that the notion would be both time-consuming and expensive.

Reluctantly, I dropped the idea.

Instead, I took the opposite tack, the course of least resistance. I took the backpackers bus from Sydney to Cairns and sat back and relaxed. Not enamoured with the idea of being confined to the tourist traps of the East Coast, I joined the madding crowd anyway. It was too easy and too tempting to refuse. I didn't even have to make my own way to the bus station; the Alternative Coach Network for the Like Minded Independent Traveller would molly coddle me right from the beginning and pick me up. It was hardly the romantic ambition of flying into isolated corners of Australia in a small plane, but it did entice me out of Sydney with minimal effort.

Along with a busload of Europeans and North Americans, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, we were spoon-fed Aussie experiences at backpacker enclaves: cattle stations, sheep farms, gold mines, beach resorts, all the way up the East Coast. Two weeks later, Cairns was the end of the line. The backpackers' bus would take a fresh and excited newly arrived crew of Like Minded Independent Travellers back down the coast to Sydney.

Not good at group travel at the best of times, and looking for a way to slip out of the backpacker world, I flip through the newspaper's accommodation section and find a house advertised for rent on a weekly basis. A short phone call later, I check out of the backpackers. Trevor my host is so eager to rent a room that he generously offers to pluck me out of the backpackers' enclave before I change my mind.

Ten minutes later, sitting in his van, we stop at the intersection of a wide back street in the old residential section of Cairns to let an Aboriginal woman cross the road. "I've been in Australia almost four weeks now,'' I observe, "and that's the second Aborigine I've come across. The first was yesterday being chased by a couple of cops down the Esplanade.'' "Aboriginal people should be called `Aboriginal people', not Aborigines,'' Trevor corrects me. "And even the term Aboriginal is contentious. It's the same thing as calling your Sioux, Cherokee, Navaho: Indians.' "I'm not American.' "Well, same thing applies to the Canadian Indians then. What were they, Iroquois, Mohawks?' "I, um, don't know.'' "Exactly.' We accelerate out of the intersection.

"So, what do I say if I don't know the names of an individual Aboriginal clan?'' "Don 't worry, neither do I. Most of us don't.'' "OK, so I haven't seen any Aboriginal people,'' I correct myself.

"How long you going to be in Australia?'' "Three months.'' "You've got lots of time,'' Trevor tells me. "But if you want to meet the real Aboriginal people nowadays, you've got to go beyond the black stump.'' "Beyond the black stump?'' I repeat. The streets are so wide, and so empty.

"Yeah. Back of Bourke. Into the Never Never. Back of Beyond. You know, the Outback.'' "Ah right, the Outback.'' "However, if you want to see some Aboriginal people easily, right now, take the train up to Kuranda for the day and come back this evening. It's not far, and certainly not beyond the black stump as anyone from Cairns will tell you, but it's different from what you've experienced so far.'' He looks at his watch. "In fact, if we hurry, you could catch the train.' He drops me off at his home to quickly unload my pack and as he drives to the nearby station he continues on the Aboriginal theme. Once he's on a roll, Trevor doesn't stop.

He gives me a bit of background history. "Social Darwinism was all the rage in Britain at the time Cook "discovered'' Australia,'' he lectures. Trevor, a human rights lawyer, is also a born orator. "Convicts were considered to be at the lowest scale of society and criminals were thought to be genetically predisposed to be law-breakers and there was no way to rehabilitate or reform them. Prisons were full and they were using the hulks of ships to hold the overflow of prisoners. It wasn't a leap of faith figuring out that the best thing to do was send these deviants to an uninhabited corner of the world and get rid of permanently. Some prisoners they sent to the colonies in America.

More of them, as we all know, were sent here.

"When the criminals arrived here, they beat up on the Australian Aboriginal, considered to be at the lowest end of human development, and maybe not a human being at all. They were slaughtered. Some were killed for specimens and their skulls sent back to England to be studied by curious scientists. Hard to believe, isn't it?' "When the settlers and squatters first arrived,'' Trevor continues, "the Aboriginal warriors had the upper hand. They could escape into the bush; they even used to bare their bums at the whites to taunt them. But European diseases, poisoning, firearms and probably most effectively, the Native Police killed 'em off.'' "Native Police?' "Aboriginal troops; they knew their people's ways and were pretty effective in tracking them down in the bush. Mounted on horseback, and led by white officers, they were lethal.' His discourse is interrupted by our arrival at the station.

The historic old Kuranda train threads though rainforest and skirts steep-sided hills and cliffs. It's a dramatic ride. Deliberately not wearing a timepiece, I guess it must be about an hour before I disembark at Kuranda.

Trevor was right. Unlike Cairns, so many Aboriginal people wander around the sidewalks they easily outnumber the whites. They might seem irrelevant to a white Australian given the dwindling minority of the Aboriginal population, but as a foreigner, sharing sidewalks with Aboriginal people, it's as if at long last I'm in the Australia I had unrealistically imagined, but wanted to see. I wander in and out of the numerous Aboriginal art shops.

Today is Thursday, pay day. Trevor told me if I wanted to get an idea of what it is like here, best place to go is the bar.

The dark bar is full of equally dark Aboriginal men and women. I walk in not at all sure about what I am doing. Apart from the bartenders, I am the only white. Many of the Aboriginals are already drunk. Several play at a pool table. Despite finding myself intimidated, there is a convivial atmosphere. I walk as coolly as I can to the bar counter and stand next to a heavy-set Aboriginal man.

Three thin-lipped unsmiling white female bartenders work efficiently enough, taking money, handing over drinks. The Aboriginal catches their attention and orders a round of beers for the two of us. We clink glasses together; he doesn't take his eyes off me as we drink.

He thumps his mug on the table. "Ralph,'' he says, offering me his hand.

"Andrew.'' We shake hands. His grip is firm.

"Where you from?' he asks, raising his half-emptied glass. His face is partially hidden by a well-worn Aussie hat pressing down a halo of frizzy hair. A thick moustache dripping beer suds reaches down to the bottom of his chin. He tilts his hat back so that he can look me directly in the eye when he speaks.

"Canada,'' I reply to keep things simple although I don't feel Canadian at all and haven't lived there for over a decade. It isn't so simple nowadays to reply honestly and simply to the question, 'Where you from?' You mean, where was I born or where do I live now or where do I consider my home? "I've been to Canada three times,'' Ralph informs me, putting his beer down on the bar and wiping the froth off his moustache. "With the Tjapukai dance group.'' He takes a shine to me, perhaps because I am Canadian. "You know what is strange in Canada?'' I shake my head. "The streets. Even in big cities like Vancouver, the streets are narrower than in Cans.'' He says Cairns, "Cans'', like everyone else in Cairns. If everyone in Sydney can say "Seed-knee' instead of Sydney, there's no reason why people in Cairns can't say "Cans''.

"You know what I find strange here?' I ask.

He shakes his head.

"Your streets. They're so wide.'' He laughs and raises his beer and we clunk glasses again. `Cultural differences,' he says.

"You still work for Tjapukai?'' I ask, pulling a folded brochure of the Aboriginal theme park out of my pocket. My pockets are full of brochures. A whole rainforest must be decimated every day to provide the pulp for all the tourist brochures available.

"I don't dance so much now, I train the others, but that's me on the brochure. I teach tourists how to throw boomerangs, or throw a spear with a woomera.'' "A woomera?'' "Yeah. It's like a rocket launcher. Gives you more power when you throw the spear by giving extra leverage. Aboriginals were pretty smart, eh.'' On a napkin he draws a diagram for me showing how the woomera is held in the same hand with the spear. As the shaft of the spear is thrown, the end, fitted into a notch in the woomera stick, is catapulted with even more power, as the woomera is swung in an arch after the spear.

"My ancestors knew the aerodynamics of a helicopter thousands of years ago.

It's a rotating wing, same principle as the boomerang.'' He points his forefinger into the air and spins it around like a helicopter blade as he makes a whooshing sound. "Know what Aboriginal people call a boomerang that won't fly?'' I shake my head. "A stick.'' He laughs at his own joke although he must repeat it a dozen times a day. "Used to be a stockman. Tough life that, but it taught me a lot. Sorry my kids won't get a chance to work as stockmen and get out into the bush and toughen up a bit.'' Apparently well respected by his peers, Ralph stands at the bar very sure of himself. We alternate buying each other rounds. Several Aboriginal men and women help themselves to a packet of cigarettes in his pocket, as if these are not his so much as a communal resource to which they are entitled. Now that I am in the bar, and after a couple of beers, it doesn't seem nearly as intimidating as it did from the outside. Everyone is friendly. Several times a glass of beer is generously offered with an outstretched hand from someone that I have yet to meet. The hospitality and friendliness is remarkable and I feel ashamed I had considered giving the bar a miss just because it was full of people whose skin colour was darker than mine.

Two tourists look inside the gloomy bar full of Aboriginals and are dissuaded from entering.

Ralph says, "See those two tourists come in and go out again? They have no idea what we are all about. They just see black faces. Even our government officials see us just as black faces. Once we had some Government of Queensland people come up from Brisbane. Big corroboree.'' He puts his mug down again and wipes his moustache with his shirtsleeve.

"Corroboree?'' "Meeting. Wanted to discuss land issues with us. All our top blokes were at the meeting, same as all the Queensland Government people. The Minister talked for two hours. Then he says, "Well, I've been talking for a while; you probably want some time to discuss the issues I've raised.'' We didn't need to do that. We had been discussing the issues as they were brought up. We communicate with our eyes, our faces, small movements of our hands, fingers, and thumbs. We already knew our answers to issues he brought up because we decided each question as he raised them.' He laughs at the memory. "White people think we're telepathic. Maybe we are.'' He shrugs and looks at his watch. '`If I really was telepathic, I'd be rich, but I can never figure out which horse is going to win. Aussies will bet on anything,' Ralph informs me, buying us yet another round. "National pastime is betting, eh. Bet on two flies on the wall to see which one stays there longest.'' White Australians say that the Aboriginals cannot hold their liquor; that they never had alcohol before the white men came, and that they have not had the time for their genes to adapt so their bodies can process alcohol the same way whites can. Alcohol goes straight to their heads and can very quickly destroy them. I have no idea if that is true, but sitting on the other side of me is an empirical case in point. Although probably quite young, she has no front teeth and would be severely buck-toothed if she did, judging from the overbite of protruding pink gums. She has a heavy brow and massive cheekbones, a receding forehead and despite her heavy body, spindly legs. She is also so drunk she is barely able to sit upright. The older Aboriginal man adjacent has to support her although he could very well go down for the count first.

....For every beer I buy Ralph, he insists on buying a round back. I'm feeling the effects of this largesse when I realise it's time to leave if I want to catch the train back to Cairns.

Ralph escorts me outside. He seems genuinely sorry to see me go. "Next time you come back, come over to my place. Got my own house now,'' he says proudly.

He yells after me, as I walk unsteadily down the street. "Look me up next time you're here. My last name is O'Reilly.'' He holds his forearm up to show me the dark colour of his skin and laughs. "Someone must have left us O'Reillys out in the sun too long. Someday we'll go back to Ireland and meet our white family.'' Australia's first inhabitants: Australian Aboriginal people perform during the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.