When three million or so people sit down tonight to watch the State of Origin, they'll be doing so knowing that as many as half of the players taking part are proud to claim Indigenous or Pacific Islander heritage in their ancestry.

The growing recognition of Indigenous talent alone makes it timely that the series decider coincides with the annual NAIDOC Week celebrations.

But there's an added political element this year, with players on both teams remaining silent during the national anthem - or at least through the line that finds no place for up to 60,000 years of Indigenous presence to declare Australia "young and free".

Speaking before game one, NSW winger Josh Addo-Carr summed up the situation from an Indigenous perspective when he said: "We're Australians too. Why can't we recognise the Indigenous people of Australia? How hard can it be?"

Unfortunately, as generations of Aboriginal Australians have come to know, the answer is "very hard, indeed".

Because while applauding Indigenous sporting prowess is one thing, encouraging - or even allowing - Aboriginal Australians to have a meaningful say in the running of this country has been something entirely else.

It is only this year that in Ken Wyatt, we have a federal Minister for Indigenous Australians who is himself Indigenous. As Mr Wyatt acknowledged in parliament last week, "many of the gaps" between black and white Australia are still to be closed almost 50 years after the Department of Aboriginal Affairs opened in 1972.

The longer the gaps remain, the clearer the need for a new approach.

Australia is not the only country with a troubled past. Many New World nations took their shape after their first peoples were invaded and supplanted by Europeans. But most have since made formal reparations, or recognised the primacy of indigenous cultures through agreements such as New Zealand's 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

Today, a "welcome to country" ceremony is virtually mandatory at any government or corporate gathering. With even the best of intentions, such "honouring" of elders will eventually prove hollow without some formal mechanism to bring the two halves of a split nation together.

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