The National Apology – one year on

Sometimes you don’t feel so fly being a big, white guy.

The crowd milling about the entrance is a lively mix of ages from fluoro face-painted kids to elders being helped towards the lift to the first floor. But they are not my sort of people.

I was brought up White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. My education reassured me that this was a good thing. But my parents were WASPs too and I was not taken from them and put into care with people who derided my heritage.

I chain my bike to the stairs and follow Lord Mayor Moore into the hall and take one of the few seats left.

Actress Lillian Crombie and Link Up director, Ivan Clarke, are our MCs for the afternoon.

Mr Clark speaks of his own experience, taken, with his brother, from his mother in 1975. So recent. We are not talking about the arcane policies of governments shrouded in the mists of time. Even after Gough these things were happening. Stolen Generations – not just one but many – a recurring curse upon a people dispossessed by bombastic interlopers.

“At some point I have to stop asking, Why me?” Mr Clark muses as he discusses without rancour the casually callous “care” the government provided. Now he can be glad the Government has lifted a “baggage I can’t unload” by saying sorry.

Ms Crombie cuts to the chase – “About bloody time that this happened last year”.

Another speaker is Renee Williamson, the Indigenous Co-Chair of the NSW Reconciliation Council, a spirited young woman happy to welcome this anniversary but now impatient for the rolling back of the Northern Territory Intervention.

As the Juunawi Dance Company closes the program dancing to Nadeena Dixon singing an insistent refrain – “always has and always will be Aboriginal land” – it is clear that last year’s overdue step towards justice is only the first in a long journey.
The Howard Government maintained that people who removed Aboriginal children thought they were doing the right thing and people now should not have to say sorry for what people did in the past. Yeah, and a lot of Nazis thought they were doing the right thing during WWII … It is too easy not to stop the barbecue to consider the centuries of suffering our suburban bliss is built upon. Let’s hope Kevin Rudd’s team is heading us in the right direction.

Recently, Professor Lowitja O’Donoghue and Mr Gregory Phillips have been appointed to establish a Foundation to address trauma and healing in Indigenous communities. Link Up is to gain 11 more caseworkers and five more administrators to facilitate an extra 350 family reunions and 100 “Return to Country” reunions.

As Ms Moore acknowledged: “The Prime Minister made it possible for reconciliation to be more than a word.”

Source: South Sydney Herald March 2009 www.southsydneyherald.com.au