“There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future. Our nation, Australia, has reached such a time. That is why the parliament is today here assembled: to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and, in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, 13 February 2008.
This is a diary about the stories that form a country. About the actions, decisions, events and ramifications that crystallise the collective consciousness of a nation. It’s a story about confronting an attempted cultural genocide. It’s a story about grief, healing, and finally, hope. It’s a long story in itself, but I hope you’ll come with me, because I watched history being made yesterday, and it was an incredible privilege that I want to tell and share. I’ve included music to help you on the journey.
In my country exists the oldest extant, continuous human culture on this earth. It’s an impossibly rich, diverse culture that defies the ability of many in the West to grasp, because the things it values, and it’s means of expression are fundamentally different from those of white culture. It frequently does not use words, and is rarely linear; and perhaps most importantly, it’s foundation is a profound, continuous connection to country – the land, the sea, the rivers, the sky – that stretches back well over 40,000 years. Forty. Thousand. Years.
But one thing our cultures have in common, that all humans have in common, is that we tell stories.
It was utterly appropriate, the most right thing to do in every sense then, that what I believe to be the greatest speech made in Australia’s history was given largely as a narrative:
Some have asked, `Why apologise?’ Let me begin to answer by telling the parliament just a little of one person’s story–an elegant, eloquent and wonderful woman in her 80s, full of life, full of funny stories, despite what has happened in her life’s journey, a woman who has travelled a long way to be with us today, a member of the stolen generation who shared some of her story with me when I called around to see her just a few days ago. Nanna Nungala Fejo, as she prefers to be called, was born in the late 1920s. She remembers her earliest childhood days living with her family and her community in a bush camp just outside Tennant Creek. She remembers the love and the warmth and the kinship of those days long ago, including traditional dancing around the camp fire at night. She loved the dancing. She remembers once getting into strife when, as a four-year-old girl, she insisted on dancing with the male tribal elders rather than just sitting and watching the men, as the girls were supposed to do.
But then, sometime around 1932, when she was about four, she remembers the coming of the welfare men. Her family had feared that day and had dug holes in the creek bank where the children could run and hide. What they had not expected was that the white welfare men did not come alone. They brought a truck, two white men and an Aboriginal stockman on horseback cracking his stockwhip. The kids were found; they ran for their mothers, screaming, but they could not get away. They were herded and piled onto the back of the truck. Tears flowing, her mum tried clinging to the sides of the truck as her children were taken away to the Bungalow in Alice, all in the name of protection…
A few years later, government policy changed. Now the children would be handed over to the missions to be cared for by the churches. But which church would care for them? The kids were simply told to line up in three lines. Nanna Fejo and her sister stood in the middle line, her older brother and cousin on her left. Those on the left were told that they had become Catholics, those in the middle Methodists and those on the right Church of England. That is how the complex questions of post-reformation theology were resolved in the Australian outback in the 1930s. It was as crude as that. She and her sister were sent to a Methodist mission on Goulburn Island and then Croker Island. Her Catholic brother was sent to work at a cattle station and her cousin to a Catholic mission.
Nanna Fejo’s family had been broken up for a second time. She stayed at the mission until after the war, when she was allowed to leave for a prearranged job as a domestic in Darwin. She was 16. Nanna Fejo never saw her mum again. After she left the mission, her brother let her know that her mum had died years before, a broken woman fretting for the children that had literally been ripped away from her.
I asked Nanna Fejo what she would have me say today about her story. She thought for a few moments then said that what I should say today was that all mothers are important. And she added: `Families–keeping them together is very important. It’s a good thing that you are surrounded by love and that love is passed down the generations. That’s what gives you happiness.’ As I left, later on, Nanna Fejo took one of my staff aside, wanting to make sure that I was not too hard on the Aboriginal stockman who had hunted those kids down all those years ago. The stockman had found her again decades later, this time himself to say, `Sorry.’ And remarkably, extraordinarily, she had forgiven him.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, 13 February 2008.
This is a good time I think to explain to those new to the topic, what this is all about, and why it’s so significant.
I think many Americans are aware that Australia is a country steeped in racism. The British that colonised Australia found the existing Aboriginal cultures so utterly alien that the failure to relate formed a chasm of un-empathy that the white culture that rapidly dispossessed the continent’s first peoples has failed to cross, well pretty much ever, together. The dispossession, the massacres, the spreading of disease, the first genocides – these are the sins of British Empire, part of a long list that stain it’s history. One day, perhaps, it will apologise and make reparations.
But in 1901 Australia became a federated, independent nation. The policies, legislation and practices of the government and its people are our sins alone. Aboriginal people had no legal status, no basic human rights of any weight in this `new’ nation – like livestock, the Australian Government and its member colony states appointed “Native Protectors” to oversee the `welfare’ of the Aborigines, and to deal with “The Aboriginal problem”.
What this amounted to was government policies that for 7 decades from 1910 through even to the early 1970s, Aboriginal people were further dispossessed of their land; driven from their country, fragmented, forced into missions, used as unpaid labour on cattle and sheep stations, turned out when it was decided they must be paid; abused, summarily shot, starved, denied use of their own languages. And on the pretext of `rescuing’ the many part-white children that resulted from the common practice of raping Aboriginal women or taking and keeping them as domestics and sex slaves on the side, so that the good `white’ part of them could be `saved’, we took their children away.
Nanna Fejo’s is just one story. There are thousands, tens of thousands of them: stories of forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their mums and dads over the better part of a century. Some of these stories are graphically told in Bringing them home, the report commissioned in 1995 by Prime Minister Keating and received in 1997 by Prime Minister Howard. There is something terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity…..
These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out for an apology… But should there still be doubts as to why we must now act, let the parliament reflect for a moment on the following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers; that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families; that this was the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state as reflected in the explicit powers given to them under statute; that this policy was taken to such extremes by some in administrative authority that the forced extractions of children of so-called `mixed lineage’ were seen as part of a broader policy of dealing with `the problem of the Aboriginal population’.
One of the most notorious examples of this approach was from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives, who stated:
Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated.
The problem of our half-castes, to quote the protector–
will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white…
The Western Australian Protector of Natives expressed not dissimilar views, expounding them at length in Canberra in 1937 at the first national conference on Indigenous affairs that brought together the Commonwealth and state protectors of natives. These are uncomfortable things to be brought out into the light. They are not pleasant. They are profoundly disturbing. But we must acknowledge these facts if we are to deal once and for all with the argument that the policy of generic forced separation was somehow well motivated, justified by its historical context and, as a result, unworthy of any apology today.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, 13 February 2008.
You can listen here to a man called John, taken as an infant from his mother, who as an adult finally found her. He talks of how after 24 phone calls he finally had her on the line, and said to her “I think I’m your son that was taken”. She dropped the phone, and when she picked it up the first thing she said was – “do you know I’m black?”.
Do you know I’m black?
That question has wrenched at me since I heard them earlier this week. They sum up in 5 terrible words all the harm done by the cultural genocide perpetuated through the policies and actions that created the Stolen Generations. The loss of culture. The loss of family. The loss of love and connection and a sense of belonging. The profound self-loathing forced upon a group of human beings for no other reason than their colour. The fear of that mother, before she could even begin to feel anything about her son finding her, that she had to know whether he was going to reject her because of who she was. That she expected him to if he hadn’t known.
“…all mothers are important…..Families–keeping them together is very important. It’s a good thing that you are surrounded by love and that love is passed down the generations. That’s what gives you happiness.“
…Nanna Fejo, member of the Stolen Generation
Legendary Aboriginal Australian artist, Archie Roach:
The Bringing them Home report – the “Report to the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Children from their Families” (1997) documents in detail the scope and magnitude, the scale of the impact, and calls it what it was in all but name – a cultural genocide, a deliberate attempt to eradicate Aboriginal culture, and by extension, its people.
This Inquiry and report was commissioned by the Keating Labor government in 1995, and received by the new Howard conservative government in 1997. I can’t say it better than the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said it yesterday, to sum up Howard’s reaction on behalf of the conservatives:
Instead, from the nation’s parliament there has been a stony, stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade; a view that somehow we, the parliament, should suspend our most basic instincts of what is right and what is wrong; a view that, instead, we should look for any pretext to push this great wrong to one side, to leave it languishing with the historians, the academics and the cultural warriors, as if the stolen generations are little more than an interesting sociological phenomenon. But the stolen generations are not intellectual curiosities. They are human beings, human beings who have been damaged deeply by the decisions of parliaments and governments. But, as of today, the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end.
The nation is demanding of its political leadership to take us forward. Decency, human decency, universal human decency, demands that the nation now step forward to right an historical wrong.
….Then we come to the argument of intergenerational responsibility, also used by some to argue against giving an apology today. But let us remember the fact that the forced removal of Aboriginal children was happening as late as the early 1970s. The 1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity. There are still serving members of this parliament who were first elected to this place in the early 1970s. It is well within the adult memory span of many of us. The uncomfortable truth for us all is that the parliaments of the nation, individually and collectively, enacted statutes and delegated authority under those statutes that made the forced removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.
Former Prime Minister John Howard was born in 1939; and first elected to parliament in 1974
There is a further reason for an apology as well: it is that reconciliation is in fact an expression of a core value of our nation–and that value is a fair go for all. There is a deep and abiding belief in the Australian community that, for the stolen generations, there was no fair go at all. There is a pretty basic Aussie belief that says that it is time to put right this most outrageous of wrongs. It is for these reasons, quite apart from concerns of fundamental human decency, that the governments and parliaments of this nation must make this apology–because, put simply, the laws that our parliaments enacted made the stolen generations possible.
We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves. As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well. Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history. In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul. This is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth–facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it.
Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people. It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.
The last 11 years of hearltess, selfish, bigoted contempt and denial, have compounded and intensified the pain crafted out of 7 decades of appalling policy. I say compounded because not only has the nation been kept on hold, in that time, many members of the Stolen Generations and family members affected by it, have died. John Howard’s actions denied them justice, denied them truth and reconciliation in perpetuity. I find it hard to think of a more callous, cruel act. Fittingly, tellingly, John Howard was the only living Prime Minister not present yesterday in the parliament to hear the apology.
To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments. In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation–from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.
I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.
Thank you, Kevin Rudd, from the bottom of my white Australian heart for restoring compassion, humanity and basic decency to the leadership and core values of this, my beloved country. Thank you for speaking for me.
So where to from here? The apology Kevin Rudd made was magnificent. Humble and direct, eschewing soaring rhetoric for unaffected and thrice-powerful substance, its very telling as a story reaching across the cultural divide; Rudd has laid a foundation for the rebirth of Australia as a nation, beyond most of our small, carefully hidden and wildly hopeful dreams.
Well what Rudd said next is what will redefine his Prime Ministership and my country for the future, if only we can pull it off.
Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot. For us, symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong. It is not sentiment that makes history; it is our actions that make history. Today’s apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs. It is also aimed at building a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians–a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt. Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians… But the core of this partnership for the future is to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians on life expectancy, educational achievement and employment opportunities….
The truth is: a business as usual approach towards Indigenous Australians is not working. Most old approaches are not working. We need a new beginning–a new beginning which contains real measures of policy success or policy failure; a new beginning, a new partnership, on closing the gap with sufficient flexibility not to insist on a one-size-fits-all approach for each of the hundreds of remote and regional Indigenous communities across the country but instead allowing flexible, tailored, local approaches to achieve commonly-agreed national objectives that lie at the core of our proposed new partnership; a new beginning that draws intelligently on the experiences of new policy settings across the nation. However, unless we as a parliament set a destination for the nation, we have no clear point to guide our policy, our programs or our purpose; we have no centralised organising principle.
If you an Aboriginal Australian, you will die on average 17 years earlier than your white counterparts. If you are an Aboriginal child today, you are four more times likely to die before you turn five compared to your little white brothers and sisters. If you live in a remote community in particular, you may well grow up permanently deaf from permanent chronic ear infections resulting from a lack of health care and from living with over 20 people in houses meant for 4 or 5. If you make it further your educational opportunities will be limited, crammed as you will be into overflowing classrooms in under-equipped schools, and your nutrition may well be appalling because again of a lack of services.
You may well develop an early addiction to alcohol, glue sniffing or marijuana. You are far more likely to be sexually or physically abused. And you may well be surrounded by the inescapable, incredibly damaging evidence of your culture unravelling before your eyes through decades of oppression, disadvantage and neglect. Of course the last eleven years under Howard have not helped at all, with their focus on denying land rights claims, forcing assimilation, cutting services in particular indigenous-developed programs, and gutting the support for Aboriginal arts.
Rudd further addressed these fundamental issues thus:
Let us resolve today to begin with the little children–a fitting place to start on this day of apology for the stolen generations. Let us resolve over the next five years to have every Indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled in and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy programs. Let us resolve to build new educational opportunities for these little ones, year by year, step by step, following the completion of their crucial preschool year. Let us resolve to use this systematic approach to build future educational opportunities for Indigenous children to provide proper primary and preventive health care for the same children, to begin the task of rolling back the obscenity that we find today in infant mortality rates in remote Indigenous communities–up to four times higher than in other communities.
None of this will be easy. Most of it will be hard–very hard. But none of it is impossible, and all of it is achievable with clear goals, clear thinking, and by placing an absolute premium on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership on closing the gap. The mood of the nation is for reconciliation now, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The mood of the nation on Indigenous policy and politics is now very simple. The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate this one core area of national responsibility to a rare position beyond the partisan divide. Surely this is the unfulfilled spirit of the 1967 referendum. Surely, at least from this day forward, we should give it a go.
Let me take this one step further and take what some may see as a piece of political posturing and make a practical proposal to the opposition on this day, the first full sitting day of the new parliament. I said before the election that the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of Indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences are too great to allow it all to become a political football, as it has been so often in the past. I therefore propose a joint policy commission, to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate to develop and implement–to begin with–an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years. It will be consistent with the government’s policy framework, a new partnership for closing the gap.
Now, if you know anything about the treatment of Aboriginal Australians and their struggles, you will know that recognition of prior sovereignty, self-determination, and land rights are the issues at the heart of the situation. While the health, housing, educational and unemployment crises within the Aboriginal community are real, pressingly urgent and must be addressed immediately in the short term; long term justice and prosperity for Australia’s Aboriginal people will only come from this bedrock. So it was with utter surprise and joy I listened to Rudd say the following words:
If this commission operates well, I then propose that it work on the further task of constitutional recognition of the first Australians, consistent with the longstanding platform commitments of my party and the pre-election position of the opposition. This would probably be desirable in any event because, unless such a proposition were absolutely bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum
There can be no treaty between Aboriginal and white Australia until the prior sovereignty of the first Australians is recognised in our constitution, and the terrible lie of terra nullius is forever bound in its grave.
Yothu Yindi:
So let us seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection. Let us take it with both hands and allow this day, this day of national reconciliation, to become one of those rare moments in which we might just be able to transform the way in which the nation thinks about itself, whereby the injustice administered to the stolen generations in the name of these, our parliaments, causes all of us to reappraise, at the deepest level of our beliefs, the real possibility of reconciliation writ large: reconciliation across all Indigenous Australia; reconciliation across the entire history of the often bloody encounter between those who emerged from the Dreamtime a thousand generations ago and those who, like me, came across the seas only yesterday; reconciliation which opens up whole new possibilities for the future.
It is for the nation to bring the first two centuries of our settled history to a close, as we begin a new chapter. We embrace with pride, admiration and awe these great and ancient cultures we are truly blessed to have among us–cultures that provide a unique, uninterrupted human thread linking our Australian continent to the most ancient prehistory of our planet. Growing from this new respect, we see our Indigenous brothers and sisters with fresh eyes, with new eyes, and we have our minds wide open as to how we might tackle, together, the great practical challenges that Indigenous Australia faces in the future.
Let us turn this page together: Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, government and opposition, Commonwealth and state, and write this new chapter in our nation’s story together. First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who first took the oath of allegiance just a few weeks ago. Let’s grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for this great land: Australia.
Standing outside the national or various state parliaments watching the live broadcast, huddled around tvs at home, watching with our children at school, pausing at work to take note – the nation stood and cried, and applauded, and felt a great weight begin to lift. And we turned our backs (literally, on their speeches) on those who still did not have the maturity, the empathy, the grace, the morality, or the ability to let go of their wilful ignorance to grasp this simple fact –
““we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well.”.
And we did not let them spoil the solemnity and the joy of being present as history was made.
I’ll leave you with Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody, one white and one black Australian and both two of our finest documenters of our nation’s story. Here they sing about another great moment in Australian history,along with great young Australian artists John Butler of the John Butler Trio, and Missy Higgins. The song is about the first recognition of Aboriginal land rights – by a Labor PM of course – a fitting narrative, and an apt title:
From little things, big things grow:
