Whatever you think of the question of the Voice it was fascinating to hear Noel Pearson, that most formidable and perhaps most difficult indigenous leader, deliver his Boyer Lecture the other night. And what was remarkable about it was not that Pearson supported the Voice but the way in which he emphasised the greatness of the gift of the common law which white settlement brought to this land and the way what was perceived as invasion was at the same time something which betokened the creation of one of the world’s great liberal democracies. The balance and breadth of mind with which the man from Cape York who was once touted – very speculatively – as a potential indigenous prime minister articulated what oft was thought had something breathtaking about it and only someone with Pearson’s credentials (his truculence as well as his range of mind) could get away with it. It was also cheering to hear him quote Robert Hughes who once described himself as belonging in the ranks of the neolithic conservatives: not Thatcherite, not Hobbesian but with a sense of the inestimable value of the best of the past. Hughes put the convicts on the map of the imagination in a way no one had before. Pearson’s unitary vision and his willingness to connect the different parts of a tortured jigsaw puzzle are deeply sane even though they fall on the ear at the same time as ghastly reports of domestic and sexual violence as well as stupefying police insensitivity.

It’s fascinating to see that the Melbourne Theatre Company is mounting a new play about one of the greatest indigenous sportsmasters. Andrea James has written and is directing Sunshine Super Girl about the great tennis player Evonne Goologong (Cawley), the most famous Aboriginal woman to put her mark on the national consciousness before Cathy Freeman. In a world that is obsessed by diversity in a way that can seem ungainly and self-defeating when it doesn’t work this sounds at the very least like a distinctly bright idea. At our best and brightest (and despite the horrors that go wrong on both sides) Australians take a massive pride in their great Aboriginal athletes.

And this now applies to the actors we’ve become familiar with. In The Stranger a creepy but distinctive and impressive film about a child molester with Sean Harris as the perpetrator and Joel Edgerton as an undercover cop there’s a cameo with Jade Alberts as a uniformed police woman, very urgent and intelligent, and it took a minute to realise that she had been the female lead in the second series of Mystery Road and had played Aaron Pedersen’s comrade-in-arms and fellow Aboriginal detective and it’s a complicating paradox that we don’t automatically perceive contemporary indigenous actors like Alberts or Tasma Walton (the estranged wife of the Pedersen character) as black until the context makes this clear.

But in a world of other wonders and far greater ones it’s fascinating to see that the new Prime Minister of Britain Rishi Sunak – a relief whatever you make of him in a Liz Truss world – took his prime ministerial oath as a Hindu on the Bhagavad Gita. T.S. Eliot, that nothing if not conservative Christian who said he would have embraced the Roman variety of the Catholicism he adhered to if he had stayed in America, said the Bhagavad Gita was with Dante the greatest of all religious poems. All that talk of battles which are taking place in the theatre of the soul as Krishna admonishes Arjuna. It was Robert Oppenheimer, the developer of the atomic bomb, who could read the great Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit as easily as he could read Proust in French who invited Eliot to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton when he was Einstein’s successor there and it was to the Bhagavad Gita that Oppenheimer turned when he looked at the horror nuclear physics had unleashed upon the world. ‘I am become Shiva,’ he said, ‘the destroyer of worlds.’

Kamila Shamsie who hails from Karachi and has spent more than her fair share of time living in London’s St. John’s Wood and poring over cricket scores is one of those subcontinental wizards who makes any self-respecting Anglo-Celt feel like a lower form of life. Nothing is better at making you feel like an idiot than to find yourself, for all your literary critical training, quite some distance into Kamila Shamsie’s masterpiece Home Fire before you realise you’re in the presence of a dazzlingly confronting re-enactment of the Antigone myth and the story of the dead boy, the inflamed girl, who would reverence him and the – God have mercy on us – Muslim Home Secretary fell on me with the kind of power those Athenians must have felt in the flawless acoustic of Sophocles’ amphitheatre as they experienced that most bewildering and dialectically driven of Hegelian tragedies.

Kamila was a wonderful person to judge a lustrously remunerative literary prize with some years ago in Perth, the city of gold and iron ore. The prize encompassed more than Australia and although we succeeded in not giving it to Murakami we did end up with that youngster David Malouf as the winner. I remember only continents of food and oceans of liquor and watching In Bruges that marvellous Martin McDonagh film, in the hotel room. All of this enlivened by the wit and charm of Kamila. She’s back in Australia again to coincide with the publication of her new book Best of Friends at the State Library of New South Wales on 8 November and the Melbourne Wheeler Centre on 9 November.

Anyone in Adelaide who wants to see the premiere of Martin McDonagh’s new film The Banshees of Inisherin should rush to see it on 12 November. It’s a masterpiece.

The British film festival has also been showing vintage James Bond films from the glamour-drenched vantage point of the big screen. If Sir Andrew Davis conducting his own big orchestra Goossens-influenced version of Messiah in Melbourne on 10 and 11 December is one version of the glory of the culture that hit these shores in violation of primal inhabitation James Bond is the other, absolute yarn-spinning trash masterdom.

It’s interesting that with James Bond – like Sherlock Holmes before him – we don’t bother with fidelity. Just take a dazzling leading man and toss him in the company of a girl with a name like Billabong Bonks and you’re home and hosed.