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Moree is a farming town on the black-soil plains 630km northwest of Sydney with an ugly past and an elegant presence in the weary struggle to reconcile Aboriginal and white Australia.

- Bernard Lagan

In the broiling summer of 1965, Charles Perkins, the first Aboriginal man to graduate from university, who'd also flirted with a professional football career in England, rolled in with other "Freedom Riders" aboard their bus from Sydney. They gathered young boys, shunted to an Aboriginal mission on Moree's outskirts, and took them to a place where they were unwelcome - the town's public swimming baths.

Moree erupted: enraged men punched one Freedom Rider and the activists were covered with eggs, tomatoes and spit. But the mayor backed down and allowed the children to swim; Perkins' Freedom Riders had turned an unwelcome international spotlight on the thendisguised but widespread discrimination against Aboriginals in small-town Australia.