Australia’s top leaders officially said “sorry” today to the “stolen generation” and their families. All over the continent Indigenous people and the non-Indigenous gathered in crowds to listen, applaud, and shed tears of both happiness and sorrow.
For outsiders living here, it was like being present for a family event almost too personal for the eyes and ears of guests. One felt honoured to be able to listen and watch.
Kevin Rudd, elected Prime Minister in part because he promised to say the word his campaign opponent, John Howard, refused to say, “sorry,” spoke solemnly and without great flourish, but his message was powerful.
It is time, he said, to “deal with this unfinished business of the nation,” to “remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and in the true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land Australia.”
He said: People of European descent took Aboriginal and Torres Strait children forcibly from their parents and put them into institutions or foster homes and they did so for much of a century, finally ending the practice only in the 1970s. (Yes, the nineteen seventies.)
He said: Laws passed by previous Parliaments permitted this to happen and we, the Parliament of today, must say we are sorry. The resolution he offered used that word three times.
With 100 invited Indigenous leaders present and all major Australian television stations covering the event live, legislators present stood to be counted in favor. It was an emotional moment, even for me and Kristi, observing from our living room.
Thousands were just outside Parliament’s Great Hall in Canberra watching large television screens, as were others all over the nation. There were gatherings outdoors in Melbourne’s Federation Square, Sydney’s Martin Place, in an area called “the foreshore” in Perth, at a government building in Hobart, in Adelaide, and in places we’ve never seen, including Alice Springs, Broome, Redfern, and Cherbourg.
People cried and cheered and every commentator I heard declared this to be a defining moment in Australian history. Not mentioned in Rudd’s speech and left to be decided is the question of whether a compensation fund will be established to give financial help to those still living who were, legally at the time, abducted as children.
Rudd, leader of the Labor Party, proposed bi-partisan action to improve the lives of today’s Indigenous children and invited the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, Brendan Nelson, to co-chair a task force to move forward on the issue of housing for Aboriginals.
I thought I heard in Nelson’s formal response most of the arguments that Howard used, and some Liberals still use, to avoid saying “sorry.” They are: We (the current generation) didn’t do it so we shouldn’t apologize. Our ancestors were good people who built this nation and had good intentions. And, even today, Aboriginal culture is inferior to our own.
But Nelson agreed to co-chair the initiative, he did use the word “sorry” in his own speech, and he and Rudd, together, walked around the chamber to greet selected Indigenous leaders.
Over and over, Aboriginals, when asked by television and radio reporters to say why “sorry” was such an important word for them to hear, spoke of what children learn when there has been a fight and one has injured another. In a family, they said, first we say “sorry.” Then healing can begin.
Kevin Rudd helped Australia take a giant step today toward feeling like a family. He moved many thousands of hearts toward reconciliation and hope. It is, as he said, only a first step.
But it was a joy to watch, to hear, and to feel.
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