Briefly, the back story goes something like this. In 1995, Australia’s prime minister Paul Keating instituted an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families, a policy that had, semi-surreptitiously, been followed until as recently as 1970. Two years later, the inquiry yielded a report titled Bringing Them Home, packed with harrowing details of children being snatched away from their mothers. or being lured away on false pretences, and thereafter being denied all contact with their families.
The authorities particularly targeted mixed-race children, generally the result of casual sexual contact between European men and Aboriginal women: lighter-skinned children were therefore especially vulnerable to state-sponsored kidnapping. They were parcelled off to orphanages and to church-run institutions, where multifarious forms of maltreatment and abuse were all too common. The profoundly racist motivation behind the practice was to “breed out” their Aboriginality. As appalling as this concept may now seem, the idea of Aborigines eventually ceasing to exist was a part of the Australian mindset at least until the 1950s.
Aborigines had been living on the immense island for tens of thousands of years before the British “discovered” Australia in the late 18th century and, without so much as a by-your-leave, decided to adopt it as a penal colony. Many of the Aboriginal tribes were not altogether averse to sharing the soil, despite their deep cultural and spiritual attachment to the land – of which they considered themselves custodians rather than owners. Yet the process of British settlement was frequently accompanied by massacres. In Van Diemen’s Land, which was subsequently renamed Tasmania, every single Aborigine was eliminated, and hundreds of skulls found their way to mantelpieces in London. And, notwithstanding this savagery on the part on the part of the colonizers, it is the original inhabitants of the land who were denigrated as barbarians and often treated as if they were animals.
The massacres eventually diminished , not least because reports from the antipodes caused a certain amount of consternation in British political circles; but they gave way in the 20th century to genocide by other means, including the arbitrary removal of children. Aborigines were generally coralled on barren tracts – out of sight and out of mind – and were not even considered Australian citizens until a watershed referendum in 1967 empowered the federal government to legislate on their behalf.
In the 40 years since then, their relegation to the margins of society has hardly been reversed. Most of them subsist in dysfunctional communities where the standards of health and education are way below the general Australian standard, reflected in the ghastly statistic that the Aboriginal life span is at least 17 years shorter than the Australian average. Sexual abuse and misadventures involving alcohol are relatively common in these communities, which is not entirely surprising, given the absence of opportunities for intellectual advancement or gainful employment. A phenomenally high proportion of Aborigines tend to be imprisoned, sometimes for minor misdemeanours, and deaths in custody are shockingly frequent.
The use of the word “genocide” in Bringing Them Home raised a few hackles, even though it accurately summed up the intent of the policy in question, but the term “stolen generations” was readily accepted as an apt description of the victims of that policy. The report recommended a formal apology and generous compensation. Unfortunately, by the time the report was tabled in 1997, Keating had been replaced as prime minister by John Howard, whose views on race relations and so many other issues were singularly unenlightened. He refused to accept the recommendations and could not bring himself to say sorry; instead, he made mocking references to the “black armband” view of history, suggesting that it was the patriotic duty of Australians to take pride in their past, in which the few negatives were heavily outweighed by the positives.
His myopic vision, steeped in bigotry, was endorsed by a couple of ideologically motivated historians, but wasn’t completely accepted even by his own Liberal Party, while Australians by the tens of thousands signed Sorry Books and participated in reconciliation marches. Last year, some months before the election that cost him power as well as his own seat, Howard unleashed what was effectively a military intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, with the ostensible aim, inter alia, of reducing abuse of women and children. Unfortunately, this strategy of attacking the symptoms without tackling the causes was supported by the opposition Labor Party.
Since then, Labor has gained a comfortable majority in parliament. And last Wednesday, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd went some way towards allaying concerns that he may be little more than a younger version of Howard when he rose to his feet in the House of Representatives and delivered an eloquent and unequivocal apology to the stolen generations, and to Aborigines in general, for their maltreatment over the decades.
In doing so, he demonstrated the power of words to alter perceptions. It was only a symbolic gesture, but it suddenly felt like a different country – the sort of Australia presaged by Midnight Oil’s mildly rebellious gesture at the Olympics. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the band’s former lead singer is a member of Rudd’s cabinet. Hundreds of Aborigines had gathered outside parliament for the momentous occasion, and many more Australians watched the apology on giant screens across the country. Among black and white alike, there was nary a dry eye to be glimpsed. And when Brendan Nelson, the leader of the opposition expressed some reservations while technically supporting the apology, and strayed off-topic in an effort to appease rednecks in his party and among his constituents, thousands of Australians spontaneously turned their backs on him.
Nelson’s predecessor as Liberal Party leader, John Howard, also did his bit to sour the moment. All living former prime ministers had been invited to watch the parliamentary proceedings. Gough Whitlam (now a wheelchair-bound nonagenarian), Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating all turned up. Howard stayed home. This ungraciousness was, perhaps, just as well: there was no place in parliament that day for the bitter and twisted meanspiritedness he exemplifies.
The apology does not, in itself, spell the end of the Australian version of apartheid. The abolition of Aboriginal disadvantage entails a long journey, and this was only the first step. But it was, at long last, a step in the right direction: a step that takes the nation past a vital psychological barrier. The Rudd government has indicated that it intends to travel far down the road to a demonstrably non-racist Australia. It has thus far exhibited an admirable tendency to keep its promises. Its progress in the months and years will be watched with abiding interest.
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