How clearly this had arisen, so it would think, from the remarkably rich and colorful and varied civilisations and cultures which had grown and developed here in such robust harmony with nature over several millennia before the arrival of the dark white tribes from across a watery vastness of the Blue Planet.

It would find, as have my wife, Joosik, and I on our current ramblings, that just about everything here - mountains, roads, highways, rivers, plants, lakes and cities - is named after the "tribes" and leaders of these remarkable Indians; Nations such as the Sioux, Blackfoot, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Lakota; leaders such as Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sacajawea, Little Raven, Chief Joseph, Ninastoka and Sitting Bull - many of whom are celebrated in great art works.

As with Trump in such circumstances, the shallowness of the visitor's perceptions would not be as important back home as the entertainment value of its messaging.

During my three years in Washington DC, I was reminded every time I looked out of my office window in the embassy of the fate of the American Indians.

There in the middle of Scott Circle sat, atop his boldly rearing charger, a bronze statue of Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the first officer to achieve this exalted rank since George Washington.

Good old Winfield, thus so heroically memorialised for achievements such as his successful command of the 7000 troops used in 1838 to remove, in a merciless death march from their cherished homeland of antiquity in Tennessee to far away Oklahoma, the pitiful remnants of the once-proud Cherokee Nation.

In my planet "EarlyWhiteChildhood" days, these Indians were universally depicted as wild heathen savages who, at Queanbeyan's Saturday movie matinees - the fount of all information that mattered - were deservedly put to the sword by the righteous white god-fearing frontier settlers - aided by the blazing sixguns of Tom Mix, Gene Autrey and John Wayne.

Truth and Light was what we were told it was and what we neither thought nor dared to question.

In my early teens, some Truth and Light began to flicker on.

Such as when we visited, in the mid 1950s, a war mate of my father's at Warren, a small town in sheep-rich mid-western NSW. Ray was then the one-man, end-of-the-railway line station master.

On Saturday afternoon, we went down to the town oval to watch the local rugby team take on nearby Nyngan. Already a few years keenly into my own school rugby in Canberra, I was mightily struck by the dominant skill and courage of the Aboriginal players on both sides. (Down our way, Aborigines were rarely seen and hardly mentioned.) How they were cheered on and congratulated after the game by all the locals!

Next morning, Sunday, after obligatory church with Ray and family and, as it seemed, most of the town's god-fearing folk, we, along with what seemed like half the town, went for a swim in the local pool. Odd, I thought, no Aborigines?

Come to think of it, I hadn't noticed any at church either. Why?

I ventured to ask some of the locals. Clumsy and racist was the uniformly and apologetically segregationist response. I didn't know much, but I knew this was ugly and it got me thinking.

My working life took me and Joosik on a long journey - a journey of over 40 years, 25 of which were lived in nine other countries; a journey through which we learned a great deal about people, truth and justice. And, in the process, about not only the intransigence, but in so many ways the growth, of inequality, dispossession, fear, and injustice.

Which were, precisely, the shamefully long hidden truths about America's Indians and Australia's Aborigines - those whose peoples and ancient cultures were destroyed beyond recovery and mostly beyond the care or the interest of their destroyers, however many generations on.

Sadly, they are not alone. Consider, for example, the suffering of the Rwandans, the Zimbabweans, the Bosnians, the Syrians, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Kurds and the Armenians, the Chileans, the Libyans, the Rohingya, and so on. Not to mention the Jews, the Muslims and people "of colour" or non-Christian religions in most white Christian-dominated countries - the countries that have, at least until now, been in control of the so-called "world order".

Howard Debenham is a former career diplomat and author of 'Waiting 'Round The Bend - A life in Australia's Foreign Service' who now lives in Batemans Bay.