Heavily reliant on archival documents and interpretations from historians and indigenous community leaders, the seven episodes track the time period from white settlement, beginning in 1788, all the way to 1993, when the High Court overturned the notion of terra nullius that the land belonged to no one at the time of the British arrival.

Perkins says harnessing the power of television ''the most powerful medium of our time'' to tell the indigenous story will ideally progress understanding within mainstream Australian society of what occurred when the oldest living culture was overrun by the world's greatest empire.

This greater understanding of a shared history, she hopes, will contribute to a sense of unity. ''Indigenous people are seen as this other small group that no one really knows much about and are not really Australian. Somehow, I think it's really strange. The first Australians aren't really seen as Australians, they're seen as these Aborigines who were different or something.'' Perkins believes that much of our history has told of white progress in taming a savage land.

As author Bruce Pascoe says in episode one: ''This was the longest surviving civilisation on Earth. If you can't learn something from a civilisation that successful you are defying your own intelligence.''

Perkins has chosen to effect change by channelling her activism into the production of groundbreaking works for the screen because: ''I'm quite a coward, I just stick to the film and television industries, that's enough for me to do.''

She began her career at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs in 1988 and has gone on to produce and direct documentary series and work as an executive producer at SBS and ABC TV. She has also directed the dramatic features Radiance and One Night the Moon, which have screened at film festivals worldwide, including London, Toronto and Sundance, and won her five Australian Film Institute awards.

This latest work is her magnum opus, the project of a lifetime. However, Perkins, in Broome carrying out pre-production on the feature film Bran Nue Dae, knows her contribution to the indigenous cause is a hard one to quantify. ''It's not an easy thing to measure, the effect of film and television on audiences. You can't say, 'Oh yes, well, we established three health services and we cured this much trachoma and we fixed this many houses up'. It's a bit intangible so sometimes you feel as though you're kidding yourself but then I remember seeing films and it widening my understanding.''

Series producer Darren Dale is putting the final touches on an episode of First Australians in the lead-up to the series premiere and he tells The Canberra Times it's taking his mind off the weight of expectation.

''It's good to have that as a distraction otherwise with all this media and all these articles saying it's the most important, it's the biggest, it's sort of like I'm shrinking and recoiling back into my chair with nerves,'' Dale, 34, says.

The hype has raised the stakes, he believes, and while the film-maker hopes the seven episodes will redefine history, he is realistic about the risk of fall-out from dissenting voices. ''It'll be interesting to see the level of debate and how comfortable we are as Australians with looking at this history.''

Dale, co-owner with Perkins of Blackfella Films, says this interpretation of the collision of two cultures long ago could attract controversy because history can never be definitive; it does, after all, change with time and the teller. ''I'm interested and I'm intrigued to see what unfolds and I guess that will be one of the measures of its success.''

The history is certainly unsettling, with accounts of war, the abduction of charismatic Aborigine Bennelong to serve as Governor Arthur Phillip's translator, and a small pox epidemic that wipes out most of the population indigenous to the Sydney area and that is only episode one. The stories to be shown over the next six weeks tell of genocide in Tasmania, the forced removal of babies, the attempt to breed the Aborigines out of existence, and massacres.

''Because some of them are so tragic and so painful I think there is an assumption that people need to feel guilty to engage with the history.''

As historian James Boyce says in episode two: ''I believe that what happened was slaughter ... British settlers were in a very good position to kill large groups of Aborigines where they contained infants and where they contained old people and where they contained whole communities . These people couldn't fight a guerilla war and they were pursued relentlessly. There was no dignity of war about this. This was horror unleashed.''

But Dale insists care has been taken to present a balanced view of the happenings of the past. ''It's so easy just to make a simple 'black people were good and white people were bad', that's a really reductive way of looking at the history so I think through the complexity comes understanding. We've trawled through the records and we've trawled through the books and we've tried to bring some of that complexity to the screen and not make it just a simple goodies and baddies story.''

And so names like Bennelong, Jandamarra, Truganini, Eddie Koiko Mabo and more may join a lexicon shared by all Australians, not only the first ones.

''The history really is ours to all share in. In the tales of treachery and loss and tragedy and also of great friendship and love, that is our cultural inheritance as Australians.''

For Perkins, First Australians is a long way from her early Canberra years but in many ways she's still the same auxiliary activist, supporting indigenous leaders in taking centre stage.

''People probably won't remember this but when Parliament House was first built there was a sort of vigil up on the site by local indigenous people, Ngunnawal people, about that site. Because, as I remember it, it was a long time ago and I was just a young girl, I think it was a women's site and they were trying to negotiate to have it moved. But it went ahead in the end. But I remember going up there and taking big pots of stew and stuff for them because they were all camped out in the middle of winter, up on the top of the mountain.''

With this television series, indigenous people, those who came before Perkins, are once again being supported to share their experiences.

And in many ways she can give credit to her dad the first indigenous Australian to graduate from university and the first Aborigine to become a permanent head of a federal government department for teaching her to believe in the possibility for creating change.

''He was a really inspirational figure. I think the thing about him is that he almost died of a kidney failure when he was quite young and he appreciated his life. He thought, 'God I've got this life that is so precious and I'm going to do whatever I can in the life that I've got'. And I think he imbued that to us to make the most of your life and use it and live it. I suppose that's what we're doing,'' Perkins says. ''If you're going to do something give it everything. It's sort of hard to describe but they said use every opportunity to do something for your people, that sounds like a cliche but that's true. First Australians is certainly that.''

First Australians, Tuesdays and Sundays, 8.30pm, SBS.