FEATURE: Australia's apology one year on

One year on from the prime minister's apology to Indigenous Australia and its Stolen Generations, Linda Mottram looks at the state of play in Aboriginal reconciliation.

Linda Mottram

Last Updated: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:09:00 +1100

It was an intensely emotional moment in the life of Australia when, on February 13, 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd rose in the nation's parliament and said sorry to the Stolen Generations.

"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.

"And I offer you this apology without qualification," Mr Rudd said that day at a special meeting of the national parliament in Canberra.

The public galleries were packed with those who had waited decades for the acknowledgement that by force of legislated policies over more than 90 years, Australian governments had compulsorily removed at least 100,000 children from their parents - permanently denying them family, culture and land, and leading to more decades of deep pain in shattered communities.

One woman spoke of 86 years still crying for lost mothers, calling "mummy, mummy".

"I was so moved I was trembling and I was shaking that much. I was crying silently and it just brought back to me what happened to myself and my countrymen," said indigenous activist Lorna Cubillo.

Mr Rudd acknowledged he could do nothing to take away that pain.

"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," Mr Rudd said.

But it was time to "seize the day" he said, as those gathered wept quietly, and comforted each other, hands linked.

Addressing the gross imbalance

For most of the period that indigenous children were removed from families, Australia did not even count them in the national census, though it did count farm animals. Aboriginal people finally won the right to vote in a landmark referendum in 1967.

Then, after various inquiries into aspects of Aboriginal disadvantage and treatment, came the inquiry into the Stolen Generations and its report, published in 1997, entitled "Bringing Them Home".

One of the authors, the former head of Australia's Human Rights Commission, Sir Ronald Wilson, called the removal of children an attempted genocide. The claim was hotly disputed in some conservative circles but the shift in the terms of the debate and the national willingness to acknowledge past wrongs was growing.

When the Labor Party under Kevin Rudd was elected in late 2007, it had pledged to say sorry. And Mr Rudd moved very quickly in 2008 to fulfil the promise. The gesture of healing was all the more urgent because, despite progress in Indigenous affairs over time, the previous conservative government of John Howard had steadfastly refused to offer an apology.

A year on, there are divided views about the apology. Some Indigenous Australians are deeply impatient and are accusing Mr Rudd of a hollow gesture.

"It was good when he did it. It raised the hopes of many Aboriginal people. I saw the tears of their relief and joy on their faces on TV but now it's just words, there's nothing," says Ned Hargraves, a local councillor from the distant township of Yuendumu in Central Australia.

Indigenous state of emergency

Mr Hargraves and many others live under what is called the Northern Territory Intervention - a state of emergency declared by the previous Australian government and maintained by the Rudd government over more than 70 communities in the top end.

The emergency is over the alleged widespread child sexual abuse in those Indigenous communities. It includes the quarantining of welfare payments to ensure money is used to buy food, assumption of control of Indigenous lands by the federal government, and the suspension of laws against racial discrimination which otherwise would have made the intervention illegal.

The intervention is controversial and paradoxically, for some Aboriginal people, one of its better features has been the use of Australian soldiers to roll out key services.

"They feel protection, they feel safe," says Deborah Hocking, chairperson of the Stolen Generations Alliance, and who was taken from her mother at the age of 18 months.

Fred Chaney is a former Aboriginal affairs minister in the Fraser government, was deputy chair of the Native Title Tribunal and is a director at Reconciliation Australia. He agrees with Ms Hocking.

"The army has actually worked very productively with the Aboriginal communities, not as an occupying force but as a civil works program," Mr Chaney told Radio Australia's Connect Asia program.

"I think most of the Aboriginal people I've met are pretty happy to work with the army. In fact, I think they find them rather more practical than many of the public servants they deal with," he said.

But the intervention remains deeply divisive and Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, says the suspension of racial discrimination legislation is a key worry.

"We have to remember that human rights aren't just human rights for Aboriginal and Islander people, they're human rights for all Australians, and what happens in the Northern Territory legislation indicates that the federal government could be argued that they're paying lip service to human rights protection," Mr Calma told Radio Australia.

The Rudd government says it will restore the racial discrimination legislation but not until later this year.

Mr Calma also wants the government to move quickly to show its support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which the previous Australian government voted against. That too is in planning. Work is also being done to form a new Indigenous representative body.

The task ahead

There is also a long list of new commitments from the federal government, along with large private sector initiatives focussing on health, education and employment for Indigenous Australians.

Mr Chaney says he gives the Rudd government "good marks" for the work so far, though with reservations at a very practical level.

"My great current concern would be the actual ability to work with very disadvantaged people in very diverse circumstances in ways that really will change their lives and close the gap," Mr Chaney said, referring to a paucity of training for many government officials despatched to work in these areas.

Another key issue weighing on the minds of many Aboriginal people is the question of compensation, recommended by the inquiry into the Stolen Generations.

"Now that hasn't happened, and that has led to some frustration among the Aboriginal people. On the other hand let me say that for the first time in our history, the government is listening to the Stolen Generations," says Ms Hocking, who has helped to establish a reparation fund in Tasmania.

Fred Chaney says the issue is a very big piece of "unfinished business" for the Stolen Generations.

Even as the Aboriginal flag flew alongside the Australian flag on government buildings to mark the anniversary of the apology, the Australian government was announcing new measures, including a healing centre to address a deeply felt element of Aboriginal response to their devastated communities.

As well as practical measures to close the gap, many Aboriginal people want white Australia to learn to connect and engage with their cultures - as one woman put it, "to sit with me in my backyard".

The Australian prime minister has set a high level of expectation and will be judged on how well he ultimately meets it.