“Stolen Generation kids ‘used for tests’ “

There was an article about Stolen Generations on the Sydney Morning Herald the other day. According to the article Stolen Generation Kids ‘Used for Tests’ (SMH, 15 April 2005), the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee’s inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008 was told that some Aboriginal children removed from their families and placed into institutions were used to test medical treatments. Below is from the article:

On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance said the public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children.

And efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered, she said.

“These are the things that have not been spoken about,” Ms Mills told the inquiry.

“As well as being taken away, they were used … there are a lot of things that Australia does not know about.”

Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin.

She said he told her that children were used as “guinea pigs” for leprosy treatments.

“He said it made our people very, very ill … the treatment almost killed them,” she said.

“It was a common experience and a common practice …

“People are very inhibited to speak about their experience and it is not a nice subject … I don’t want them to be shamed.”

Senator Brown said it was important to get to the bottom of the claims, which he called “very, very serious”.

“It may be right, it may not,” he said.

“It needs investigation. If within the indigenous community there is a feeling that children may have been experimented upon for a treatment for leprosy or anything else, the air needs to be cleared.”

Ms Mills said information to do with the testing would be in health department archives and she called on the government to assist “opening Pandora’s box”.

She also said it was important to work with indigenous groups to ascertain who is eligible for compensation.

“It has to happen … but there’s this reluctance to do it,” she said.

“We don’t have the necessary information … it’s probably tucked away in some archive but we don’t have the resources to research, we don’t have the people who are qualified.”

Senator Brown said there was a national responsibility to help Aboriginal people to get to all the records, including those being held by church institutions.

“This is about their identity, this about their sense of being, their history,” he said.

The compensation bill aims to pay money to victims of the stolen generations, including living descendants, out of a Stolen Generations Fund.

Ex gratia payments would be set at $20,000 as a common experience payment with an additional $3,000 for each year of institutionalisation.

Rodney Dillon, from the National Sorry Day Committee, said that while the government debated action more Aboriginal elders entitled to some form of compensation were dying.

“We are going to lose a lot of people between now and the next time this bill is put on the table,” he said.

“Although it does not have all the things in it we would like, I think we should push ahead.”

Zita Wallace, chairperson of the Stolen Generations Alliance, said it was time to act “with urgency”.

“Because I know we are dying and all of us elders from the first generation we will be all gone … maybe the government would wish that would happen, then they would not have to pay compensation.”

Ted Strehlow, a controversial anthropologist

     According to the Koori Mail (12 March 2008, p-46), “the story of South Australian anthropologist Ted Strehlow and his controversial relationship with the Aranda people of Central Australia is being immortalised in opera”; and the opera project is in process. I did some research on this controversial anthropologist on the internet since there is not much information about him in the Koori Mail article; and I came across a very detailed article about him by John Morton( on www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1060.html). According to this article:  

Theodore George Henry Strehlow was born in 1908 at Nthariye (or Hermannsburg), west of Alice Springs, the traditional homelands of Western Aranda (Arrernte) people. His father was Reverend Carl Strehlow, the head of the Finke River Mission started by German Lutherans in 1877. Ted’s father died when he was fourteen years old, and he left the mission with his mother to live in Adelaide. After completing his education, he came back to Alice Springs as an anthropologist.

Ted Strehlow grew up among the Aboriginal people and learnt Western Aranda as a first language. When he returned to Alice Springs, he began his career as a linguist and ethnographer of Aboriginal culture. As John Morton points out, “ Between 1932 and 1978 (the year of his death) Strehlow collected and produced an impressive collection of artefacts and records, most of which relate to the cultures of Aranda people” and “he published widely, translated Christian texts into Aranda for the Lutheran Church and was regularly involved in ‘native affairs’.”

When he returned to Alice Springs in 1932, Strehlow met an old man called Micky Dowdow, (also called Akwerre or ‘Gura’=’Bandicoot’ by his totemic affiliation)  a goat shepherd who was the traditional owner of sites in north of Alice Springs in Northern Aranda country. Gura told Strehlow that “he was the last of the great ceremonial chiefs of the gura bandicoot centre known as Ilbalintja,” and that he wanted Strehlow “to accompany him there to inspect the sacred-secret site which had been placed under his undisputed control by his long-dead forefathers and tribal elders.” And Gura told that “ all the old men of his tribe had held a conference that morning, and had come to the decision that, unless someone they could trust assumed responsibility for the preservation of the sacred secrets, they would all die with the old men.” Gura and other old men thought that their sons and grandsons were not responsible enough and could not be trusted with the secrets, the  tjurungas and other objects. Since Strehlow showed a genuine interest in their culture, they wanted him to “accept responsibility for all their sacred things”. As John Morton points out : 

Strehlow always maintained that he was invited to amass his collection as a kind of sacred trust and many Aboriginal elders came to believe that Strehlow’s ethnographic endeavour was the best way to preserve their knowledge for posterity in the face of the invasive threats of Euro-Australia. While Strehlow had certain misgivings about this trust, he took it on with ardent enthusiasm.

Collecting, preserving, understanding and disseminating central Australian culture became the hub of his life. Yet his story unfolded in uneven ways. While Strehlow’s relationship with Aboriginal people began smoothly enough, and progressed quickly and dramatically, it ended steeped in controversy. After his initial encounter with Micky Dowdow, Strehlow, aided by his Western Arrernte assistant Tom Ljonga, went on to travel through Northern, Upper Southern and Eastern Arrernte country in the 1930s, witnessing and recording some 166 ceremonial acts.

 There was a lull in his ethnographic work after 1935, when Strehlow turned his attention to other matters, but the work resumed in 1948. Between 1950 and 1964 Strehlow witnessed most of the other ceremonial acts that can be found in his records, so that his major ethnographic efforts could be said to have finished by the time he finally published his magnum opus – Songs of Central Australia – in 1971.

Advances in technology and transport helped him to complete his work more extensively and thoroughly after 1950, but there were also significant social changes going on in Australia at that time. Indeed, the 1960s were a true turning point in Strehlow’s life, just as they were in the lives of many Aboriginal people.

     By 1971, many of the senior old men who trusted him with their secret-sacred business were dead, and there was a new generation of Aboriginal people who wanted to take over the secret-sacred ceremonius and objects. Strehlow did not trust them. He became very possesive of the secret-sacred business and said that he had been given “a mandate to preserve the Law, and it had been bolstered by testimony from elders that the system of authority and transfer of rights in secret-sacred business was breaking down: the old men said that the young men could no longer be trusted with atywerrenge(men’s sacred-secret objects).” And he said that “In accordance with the Aranda rules of tjurunga inheritance, these traditions would be regarded as becoming my personal property after the deaths of their original owners.” And Strehlow published photographs of and his knowledge of secret-sacred ceremonies, and object in his books after the death of the old men. When he sold  the ceremonial photographs to the German magazine Stern in the final year of his life this created a big controversy in the final year of his life between him and the Aranda people who “were outraged at what they understood to be insulting and unethical use of their secret-sacred business.”         

     He did not want to leave his collection of the Aranda  secret ceremonies and objects to a public institution and established an organisation called the Strehlow Research Foundation which opened in Adelaide on 3 October 1978; and “Strehlow died just a few hours beforehand, his last words reputed to have been Arrernte, as he attempted to explain Aboriginal culture to visiting dignitaries who had arrived prior to the opening.”  His wife has been the head of the foundation since his dead. Although now most of the collection is back in central Australia, and open to the Aboriginal people, the controversy still continues.

You can read the whole story about Ted Strehlow by Dr John Morton on  http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1060.html 

PS- the Koori Mail is Australia’s national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Newspaper. It is 100 percent Aboriginal owned and controlled. www.koorimail.com

Aboriginal Bark Paintings At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Some bark paintings by indigenous artists have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) since 14 February 2008, and the exhibition will be on until 3 August 2008. The exhibition is called ‘They are Meditating:Bark Paintings From the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection’.Below is more information about the exhibition from MCA website (http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=10&content_id=3600):

 Since the 1950s the practice of bark painting has responded to new contexts and has become increasingly pertinent to the outside world.

During this period, the generation of painters most commonly known and admired – some of whom are still working today – began their careers. This exhibition explores the richness of these early bark paintings alongside more recent practices by subsequent generations of artists from those communities.

In June 1993 Arnott’s Biscuits Limited donated a rare and significant collection of bark paintings to the Museum of Contemporary Art. The collection comprises 271 barks dating from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, by artists from Australia’s north.

The exhibition includes works by Mawalan, Malangi, Nabarrayal, Djawa, Nanyin and Jimmy Ngamjmira, as well as 41 works by Yirawala (c1897–1976).
Also there is another exhibition of bark paintings called ‘Footprints in the Mythic Landscape: A Bark Painting Story’ at Macleay Museum of Sydney University between 9 March and December 2008.

Zorba the Greek Yolngu Style

Here is the youtube video of remote Elcho Island’s Aboriginal Chooky Dancers; in the video they are performing Zorba the Greek, of course Yolngu style. I think this is an interesting example of cultural hybrid. I’m sure you will love this video!

Zorba the Greek Yolngu Style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-MucVWo-Pw 

And this is the original Greek version of ‘Zorba the Greek’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THfOfnrB9HI&feature=related

‘In Living Memory’

There is an exhibition called ‘In Living Memory’ at Sydney Records Gallery; an exhibition of surviving photographs of Aboriginal people from the records of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board from 1919 to 1966. Here’s the link and info about this exhibition:

www.records.nsw.gov.au/archives/whats_on_at_the_state_records_gallery_8327.asp

EXTENDED until 31 January 2009

State Records Gallery
Sydney Records Centre
2 Globe Street (off George Street)

The RocksFREE ENTRY
9am — 5pm, Mon — Fri
10 am — 4pm, Sat
Closed public holidays

Paul Keating on reconciliation, 1992

Thanks to Philippa Barr, a former student at Macquarie, who just sent me this speech by Paul Keating from 1992. It’s a very interesting read in the light of Kevin Rudd’s recent sorry speech. I imagine this speech could be taken in a number of ways. One way would be to see the level of continuity between the sentiments expressed by Keating and Rudd, and to be made aware of just how much of a divergence from this vision the Howard years (1996-2007) were. Another way to regard it would be to note that fine sentiment expressed by politicians, even when talking about the need for practical action, does not necessarily change anything ‘on the ground’.

A small disclaimer here. I haven’t checked that this is indeed the complete and original text of the speech. There were a number of typos in the text I received, which suggests that it wasn’t cut and pasted from somewhere official. I also can’t link to an original source, as I don’t have the original. I think it’s alright to post like this in a blog (others may disagree — if so, please let me know), but I wouldn’t be using the text below as a reference without doing some independent checking up first.

Subject: Paul Keating’s speech at Redfern Park in 1992

We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn’t Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn’t it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.

And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.

It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?

As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year. The Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with devastating clarity that the past lives on in inequality, racism and injustice in the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with guilt. Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive emotion.

I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.

All of us.

Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done - the practical things.

There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. The council’s mission is to forge a new partnership built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia’s indigenous people. In the abstract those terms are meaningles. We have to give meaning to ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ - and, as I have said several times this year, we will only give them meaning when we commit ourselves to achieving concrete results.

If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in another. And another. If we raise the standard of health by 20 per cent one year, it will be raised more the next. if we open one door others will follow.

When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, more happiness - we will know we are going to win. We need these practical building blocks of change.

The Mabo judgement should be seen as one of these. By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice. It will be much easier to work from that basis than has ever been the case in the past.

For this reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of hysteria and hostility of the past few months. Mabo is an historic decision - we can make it an historic turning point, the basis of a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians.

There is everything to gain.

Even the unhappy past speaks for this. Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contributions. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia. They are there in the ways. In sport ot an extraordinary degree. In literature and art and music.

In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity. They are there in the Australian legend. We should never forget - they helped build this nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership.

As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 years - and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.

Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.

Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.

It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice.

I say that for two reasons: I say it because I believe that the great things about Australian social democracy reflect a fundamental belief in justice. And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our capacity over the years to go on extending the realism of participating, opportunity and care.

Just as Australian living in the relatively narrow and insular Australia of the 1960s imagined a culturally diverse, worldly and open Australia, and in a generation turned the idea into reality, so we can turn the goals of reconciliation into reality.

There are very good signs that the process has begun. The creation of the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself. The establishment of the ATSIC - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission - is also evidence. The Council is the product of imagination and goodwill. ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and self-management. The vision has already become the reality of almost 800 elected Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners determining priorities and developing their own programs.

All over Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are taking charge of their own lives. And assistance with the problems which chronically beset them is at last being made available in ways developed by the communities themselves. If these things offer hope, so does the fact that this generation of Australians is better informed about Aboriginal culture and achievement, and about the injustice that has been done, than any generation before.

We are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. We are beginning to learn what the indigenous people have known for many thousands of years - how to live with our physical environment.

Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their epic story.

I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous Australians and how much we have lost by living so apart.

I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the Aboriginal view.

It can’t be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now a marvellous reality and a great reason for hope.

There is one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through 50 000 years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of dispossession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation.

We cannot imagine that.

We cannot imagine that we will fail.

And with the spirit that is here today i am confident that we won’t.

I am confident that we will succeed in this decade.

Thank you.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said ‘Sorry’ this morning

Here is the link to hear Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology:

www.smh.com.au/multimedia/2008/national/australia-says-sorry/main.html

Compensation is essential!

Professor Peter Read, a historian at Sydney University, coined the phrase ‘The Stolen Generations’ in 1981 in a pamphlet of that name; he was co-founder of ‘Stolen Generations Link Up’ and he is today the public officer of that organisation. In an opinion piece published in The Age newspaper on 9 February 2008, he says that compensation is essential:

A wonderful start, but compensation?

CONGRATULATIONS, Prime Minister, on planning your apology to the removed children and their families. You may not realise how incredibly important it will be for the stolen generations to hear the words: “We thought it was right for the country, now we realise it was wrong, and we are sorry for the hurt we caused you, your extended family, and to Aboriginal society.”

I know you’re surrounded on all sides by advisers, but let me put in two-bob’s worth from someone who has been closely involved in the story for more than 25 years.

Note, please, the plural. There are seven or eight generations stolen, beginning with Governor Macquarie enticing a dozen children into his Aboriginal school at Parramatta.

Were the removal policies really all that ill-intentioned? After decades of research there isn’t doubt any more about the purpose of the state and federal policies. Let’s face it, Prime Minister, the policies were quite malevolent. They were designed to put an end to Aboriginality in southern Australia forever. We can be confident of that malevolence because the early 20th century policymakers didn’t bother to mince their words. Here’s a NSW official in 1909: “The only solution of this great problem (is) the removal of children and their complete isolation from the influence of the camps. In the course of the next few years there will be no need for the camps and stations; the old people will have passed away, and their progeny will be absorbed in the industrial classes of the country.”

Yes, I know that your speechwriters are saying: “But there were children who had to be removed.” Sure there were — but these kids should have been allowed to be raised by their own race and within their own cultures. They were almost never allowed to. And yes, of course there were deeply caring white adopting parents who created an enduring bond of love with their children. But that’s not the point. Almost none of those children should have been removed in the first place.

Don’t let anyone talk you down about numbers, making out that a removal rate of one in three is a wild exaggeration. For the decades of the 1920s and the 1950s especially, there is no exaggeration. I see no reason to reduce my original calculation of about 50,000 Aboriginal children removed in all the states and territories since settlement. It’s hard today to grasp how relentless some of those “welfare” officers could be in the pursuit even of one particular family and, equally, how many children bypassed the government net and were simply handed over by churches or hospitals or managers of holiday camps. These were children who left in good faith and never came home.

I’m sure you don’t need prompting from me to avoid the “genocide” distraction. I don’t use the term either. First, it’s too divisive. Second, the children were being deprived of their identity, not their lives. Third, the policies were directed at part-Aboriginality, the mixed-descent children who supposedly, in the late 19th century, threatened anarchy and uprisings around the half-formed bush towns. Even in the north, it was almost always the so-called “half-caste” children who were taken.

If you want to use a term, try “ethnocide”.

But no compensation? Mr Prime Minister, come on! It seems like the Labor Party simply doesn’t get it either. I’ve known many hundreds of stolen generation adults and worked with quite a few, and there is not one who does not deserve a monetary apology as well as one in words. So much abuse, so much pain, so much torment, death for some, misery for almost everyone. And it was all so unnecessary. It didn’t have to happen. Don’t listen just to me, it’s there in thousands of hours of recorded testimonies. No, it won’t be easy to sort out who is more deserving. But that’s what a tribunal could do, work out the guidelines in advance, and respect them.

I’m glad you are heeding the argument of the migrants who say: “Why are you apologising on my behalf? I hadn’t even arrived in the country when all this was happening.” It’s best to say sorry not for what “we” have done, but for what the Australian government has done. Many Australians of every variety will be satisfied.

Everything’s OK now from Wednesday? Not without compensation, no. And even if you paid compensation, your government would have done something for only one part of the long-suffering Aboriginal people. To the terrible threesome — stolen children, frontier killings and land theft — sooner or later our nation is going to have to confront the fourth, the enormity of the managed reserve system that degraded and abused and humiliated Aboriginal people for 90 years after 1870.

Don’t worry about that on Wednesday, though, you’ll have my best wishes. I’ll be there in the crowd cheering you on. It will be one of the biggest events in my life.

www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2008/02/08/1202234161498.html

Marcia Langton on the Apology

I remember Marcia Langton coming in and doing guest lectures in my undergraduate units on Aboriginal Australia. I don’t actually recall much of what she said, but I remember her presence, her engagement with issues that weren’t merely academic for her. I also remember that she didn’t mince her words and her investment in what she was talking about, as an indigenous scholar, made me confront my own position and investment in this subject — my whiteness, relative privilege, and merely ‘academic’ interest.

I don’t always agree with what Langton writes, but I consider the following article she has just written on the issue of the forthcoming apology to be a beautiful and evocative case for the far-reaching importance of this most symbolic of gestures.

Even the hard men know, it must be said

Marcia Langton
February 9, 2008

There are people who hate without knowing why they hate. Then there are people such as the former chief ministers of the Northern Territory, Ian Tuxworth and Shane Stone - both of whom have contributed more than their fair share of race hate to the community. The man who signed so many of the orders to remove children, the late Harry Giese, walked the streets of Darwin and attended official functions while they held the post of chief minister. I once stared at Giese from across a room wondering how he could have been so cruel and why he was a kind of demi-god to the Country Liberal Party hard men.

I am astonished to find myself saying this about Tuxworth and Stone: they both have thought deeply about their Aboriginal friends and finally, free of the shackles of electoral politics, recanted their petty hatred. They have expressed as genuine an understanding as I can imagine of the damage done to Aboriginal people by the policies of child removal.

In 1992, Paul Keating, in his Redfern speech, asked Australians to try to imagine the Aboriginal view. He said the test of Australia’s nationhood would be whether we have “managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous people of Australia”.

Most Australians recognise these lines from that speech: “We took the children from their mothers … It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?”

There is a possibility that there can be healing when the hard men such as Tuxworth and Stone are able to answer these fundamental questions and to tell the truth. There is no shame in telling the truth, and the complaint that those not responsible should not be made to feel guilty is an absurd response to the acknowledgement of events that occurred historically and within our own lifetimes.

I did not believe that it was possible that the truth could be so powerful until I read their words in black and white; the momentous importance of the apology finally hit me and my cynicism evaporated as I was forced to think of my friends who have suffered so much and who want to hear an acknowledgement of events that were incomprehensible to them until someone found the words to describe the collective actions, the historical meaning and the philosophical arguments about those events.

What should be said? So much, but there is one word that is so important. I telephoned one of my dear friends who was removed from her Aboriginal mother into a life of abuse and suffering. She has raised two sons, both now adults, and still finds it impossible to explain her pain to them or why it happened. We spoke and cried and talked about where we would be next Wednesday. In Cairns, she said, a venue has been organised for people to bring their family photographs and flowers and to be together to listen to the apology. I told her that at my university, Trinity College has organised a service.

Then, I realised: there will be people around Australia gathering to listen to the apology; it will be very hard to listen without crying, without thinking about our friends and all of those souls who have left the world without an apology. To do justice to the historical facts and speak above the din of the spiteful people who want to cause more suffering to Aboriginal people, this is what I expect from the Prime Minister and the Parliament next Wednesday. Is it so hard to understand how much an apology means to the thousands of Aboriginal people who were removed from their families? What it would mean for me as an Aboriginal person who has consoled and encouraged friends is simply this: I want to be in a relationship with them without the heartbreaking pain of the past 10 years, knowing that there has been a just acknowledgement of the crimes against them.

If I were to find just a few words, then I think something like the following, at the very minimum, must be said:

There are no words that could heal the wounds of those people who were taken from their families by the Commonwealth and other Australian governments with no reason other than to deny them their Aboriginal legacy and hence the future of Aboriginal society. But those people who lived through such crimes against humanity demand an apology. They are right to demand an apology, because there can be no justification for those heinous policies. And so it is incumbent on the Commonwealth to apologise; to say, as the Prime Minister of Australia, on behalf of all Australians: I am sorry. I am sorry that you have suffered. I am sorry that your families have suffered. I am sorry because your suffering has diminished us as citizens of a nation that claims to be a Commonwealth, a government for the well being of all.Those who have departed this life in the several generations affected by these policies are remembered, and as Prime Minister of Australia, on behalf of Australians, say: I offer this apology to their descendants: I am sorry for what happened to your ancestors and that such a terrible burden has befallen you; the denial of your family and cultural legacy is a terrible loss.

The nation would be healed if we could consign this history to our past by admitting that it was wrong to take children from their families in order to prevent Aboriginal ways of life and traditions from continuing. I ask that all Australians understand this part of our history and recognise that such terrible wrongs must never be repeated.

Marcia Langton is Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Read the original article here.

What does ‘Sorry’ mean?

Below is an interview with Helen Moran, Co-Chair of National Sorry Day Inc conducted by GetUp( ‘an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group’) on 4 February 2008  about the parliament’s upcoming apology to the Stolen Generations. It is about the meaning of ‘sorry’ for the members of stolen generations, and also it might be a response to Jovan’s question ‘is financial compensation a necessary, or even desirable, part of an apology?’:

GetUp: Why is the apology so important?

Helen: It is an opportunity to acknowledge, recognise and take responsibility for the effects and consequences of what happened - an apology is an absolute necessity. Significantly it provides comfort and healing to the Stolen Generations as individuals themselves.

What does the apology mean to you personally Helen?

Well, I think the enormity of the situation we’re now in struck me yesterday as I was quietly driving back from the south coast. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of appreciation of what Kevin Rudd is going to do and what that will mean to myself, my family and other Stolen Generations’ survivors. It will allow the way forward on a journey toward healing, not only for Indigenous Australians but also for the broader community.

What do you have to say to people who oppose the apology or say that it is meaningless?

When people are aware and the right knowledge is made available to them they will have a more informed understanding. It is also essential that people understand the spill-over into the broader community – that includes not only indigenous but non-indigenous families who were also affected. I would like to reach out to people, ask them to look at this from their heart and soul and to draw on their humanity, to put themselves in the position of the Stolen Generations. Understanding the reality of the emotional, psychological and physical effects on real people is crucial, these issues are trans-generational. We are dealing with the consequences today.

What can Getup! members do?

To help themselves and others to understand the debate is crucial. The word ‘sorry’ has been misused and misrepresented so much by the past government over the last 10 years that its meaning has become confused. Nowhere in the recommendations of the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report does it say for any individuals to take responsibility or say sorry. The apology is about enabling a process of healing and reconciliation. The Stolen Generations and the nation as a whole need the apology to be linked to acknowledgement, prevention, rehabilitation, reconstitution and also compensation. This goes way beyond monetary compensation, for example the return of identity, land and essential human rights. Personally I’ve been fighting a non-responsive Government on the issue for the last 10 years – I’ve been in fight mode – I don’t need to fight anymore or come from a negative space. To create a partnership of support and success is what I want and to assist the government in fulfilling its promise to a comprehensive response to the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report. I see the apology as the first step towards that.We don’t need to be on the other side of the fence to the Government anymore. We can work with them by giving them the opportunity to work with us.

 www.getup.org.au/blogs/view.php?id=759&dc=259,91816