Aboriginal Families: Sincerely sorry!

“Sorry seems to be the hardest word” sang Elton John in one of his early hits. But the new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, found it easy enough. As the first official parliamentary act of his government last week, he apologised to his Aboriginal countrymen in an eloquent and passionate speech. “For the indignity and degradation... inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.” 

Many of Australia’s 500,000 Aborigines live in Fourth World conditions in a First World country. Life expectancy for them is 17 years lower than for the rest of Australia. The statistics for health, housing, literacy, infant mortality and employment are appalling. Last year the Federal Government spent A$3.8 billion on Aboriginal affairs and had precious little to show for it. No big deal. Neither had its predecessors.

Yet the Prime Minister was not apologising for any of this. Nor was he apologising for the theft of land, the murders, the discrimination, the neglect of the past 200-odd years since European settlement. Instead, he was apologising for wrecking Aboriginal families. An estimated 50,000 of their children were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 – the so-called “Stolen Generation”. Rudd called it “one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history”.

A thick 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, brought these stories to the attention of white Australians. As Rudd said, “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.”