Chapter three of Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate
“True reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indigenous people is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgment by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, oppression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. That is not to say that individual Australians who had no part in what was done in the past should feel personal guilt. It is simply to assert that national shame, as well as national pride, can and should exist in relation to past acts and omissions, at least when done or made in the name of the community or with the authority of government. Where there is no room for national pride or national shame about the past, there can be no national soul.”
— Sir William Deane, Governor-General of Australia
In many countries, European colonization has brought about the devastation of indigenous culture, particularly where the colonizers became the majority population. Now these countries are struggling to overcome a culture of despair among their indigenous people, often expressed in appalling rates of ill health and addiction. Australians are confronting this issue vigorously.
Britain’s colonization of Australia began in 1788, and the story of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples for the next 150 years was one of dispossession, disease and massacre, to the point where it was widely assumed that they would die out. But the number of people of mixed Aboriginal and white race grew steadily; and since they were almost always born of white fathers and Aboriginal mothers, most of them grew up in Aboriginal communities.
This alarmed the white authorities, who looked on Aboriginal culture as worthless. In their view, if they denied these children all access to Aboriginal culture, Australia would soon become a wholly Western country. So, from the late 1800s, in many parts of Australia the authorities adopted a practice of removing the children from their Aboriginal parents and placing them with white foster parents or in white institutions.
The practice of child removal went on into the 1970s. Most white Australians who knew of it thought that it was justified by the wretched living conditions of many Aboriginals, and they accepted the argument that the children could thereby receive the benefits of Western society. Little attention, however, was given to improving Aboriginal living standards.
In 1995 “Fiona,” an Aboriginal woman, described her experiences in words which could be repeated thousands of times across the country:
In 1936 it was. I would have been five. We went visiting Ernabella the day the police came. We had been playing all together, just a happy community and the air was filled with screams because the police came and mothers tried to hide their children and blacken their children’s faces and tried to hide them in caves. We three, Essie, Brenda and me together with our three cousins, the six of us were put on my old truck and taken to Oodnadatta which was hundreds of miles away and then we got there in the darkness. My mother had to come with us. She had already lost her eldest daughter down to the Children’s Hospital because she had polio, and now there was the prospect of losing her three other children, all the children she had. I remember that she came in the truck with us curled up in the fetal position. Who can understand that, the trauma of knowing that you’re going to lose all your children? We talk about it from the point of view of our trauma but our mother, to understand what she went through, I don’t think anyone can really understand that. We went to the United Aborigines Mission in Oodnadatta. We got there in the dark and then we didn’t see our mother again. She just kind of disappeared into the darkness.
These are the words Fiona gave in evidence before an Australian Royal Commission, describing her abduction from her mother. She was not to see her again until 1968: “When I finally met my mother through an interpreter she said that she had heard about the other children, but because my name had been changed she’d never heard about me.”
Some white Australians have worked courageously to overcome the attitudes that allowed such cruelty to happen. One was a member of Parliament, Kim Beazley, whose son is the leader of the Labor Party in the Australian Parliament. He decided to make the needs of the Aboriginal people a priority of his parliamentary career. He realized that if Aboriginals did not own land — and they owned none in the three million square miles of Australia — they would always negotiate from a position of weakness. So he persuaded his party to adopt a policy of Aboriginal land rights. He traveled 21,000 miles around the country interviewing hundreds of Aborigines. He was struck by their grace toward a majority people at whose hands they had endured persecution.
Beazley began a variety of initiatives to treat Aborigines with a dignity befitting their position as the first Australians. When he became minister for education, one of his first acts was to arrange for Aboriginal children to be taught in their own languages in primary school. “To deny a people an education in their own language is to treat them as a conquered people,” he said. Schools ceased to be alien places for Aboriginal people. With his colleagues, he also set in motion initiatives that led to Aborigines’ owning an area of land larger than Great Britain.
International figures also focused on the needs of Aboriginal Australians. When Pope John Paul II visited Australia in 1986, he said, “Christian people of good will are saddened to realize — many of them only recently — for how long a time Aboriginal people were transported from their homelands into small areas or reserves where families were broken up, tribes split apart, children orphaned and people forced to live like exiles in a foreign country.”
Such voices encouraged the Australian authorities to look more searchingly at Aboriginal problems. In the late 1980s the Labor Government initiated a royal commission to discover why so many Aboriginal people took their own lives in prison. The commission report made various recommendations, but said that the underlying need was to improve relations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals by a definite process of encouraging understanding.
The government took up this recommendation by forming the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. This council was chaired by a powerful Aboriginal spokesman, Patrick Dodson; the deputy chair was Ian Viner, a former minister in a Conservative government. Under their leadership, programs were arranged around the country where police, public servants, and many others could meet the Aboriginal people of their area in forums which encouraged creative discussion.
Ian Spicer, who as chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry was asked to serve on the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, believes that, despite conflicts, there has been significant progress: “For the first time in our history, every person is forced to face their attitude to Aboriginal Australia. No one can avoid the issues.” The problems could not be fixed by money alone. Content and understanding had to be provided. Spicer had found that out through sitting down and talking with Aboriginal people. “It gives a great depth to being a citizen of Australia,” he says, “that we have in this country an incredible culture which places such importance on the balance between what the land can provide and what individuals can demand from it. It injects into our Anglo-Saxon culture the importance of viewing the whole of life, not just the economic side of it.”
An indication of the growing readiness of some Australians — including some government officials — to admit how cruelly the Aboriginal people had been treated is seen in a 1993 speech by Prime Minister Paul Keating. He told Aboriginals in Sydney:
It is we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and prejudice. With some noble exceptions we failed to make the most basic human response and enter in their hearts and minds. We failed to ask: “How would I feel if this were done to me?” We failed to see what we were doing degraded all of us.
In 1992 the Australian High Court made a momentous decision recognizing traditional indigenous land title in common law. This overthrew the 200-year-old constitutional myth that Australia was an empty land when the whites arrived.
Progress was being made toward creating attitudes of respect between the races. But one issue kept raising its head — the continuing effect of the policies of removing Aboriginal children from their parents. A book by an Aboriginal, Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared, published in 1977, brought this issue to the attention of the Australian public in a way that forced people to reevaluate the widely held view that the children were taken out of wretched conditions for their own good. She describes her own abduction in graphic terms:
As we hung onto our mother she said fiercely, “They are my children and they are not going away with you.” The policeman, who no doubt was doing his duty, patted his handcuffs, which were in a leather case on his belt and which May and I thought was a revolver. “Mrs. Clements,” he said, “I’ll have to use this if you do not let us take these children now.”
Thinking the policeman would shoot mother, because she was trying to stop him, we screamed, “We’ll go with him, mum, we’ll go.” I cannot forget any detail of that moment, it stands out as though it were yesterday. I cannot ever see kittens taken from their mother cat without remembering that scene. It is just on sixty years ago.
But Margaret Tucker’s book is also written with a remarkable generosity of spirit. She says:
Color is not the issue, the answer is there for all to see: not who is right but what is right. I make many mistakes and don’t always have the courage to right those mistakes, but as long as I live, I pray with God’s help, I can fight that old snake of hate and bitterness, when he rears his head. Hate does more harm to the hater than to the hated because it makes you ineffective in dealing with the cause of hatred. Hatred can be cured, I know, because it has happened to me.
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody investigated ninety-nine deaths and was startled to discover that forty-three of those people had been separated from their families as children. It became clear that this needed proper investigation. The government set up a “National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,” to be conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. To take charge of the inquiry, the government chose a former high court judge, Sir Ronald Wilson, a West Australian who flew Spitfires during World War II and then pursued a legal career with distinction. Asssisting him was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Mick Dodson.
The commission of inquiry visited every state and territory capital and most regions of Australia. It took evidence in public and private sittings from indigenous people, government and church representatives, former mission staff, foster and adoptive parents, doctors and health professionals, academics, police, and others. A total of 777 people and organizations provided evidence or submissions; 535 were indigenous people, most of whom had been abducted as children.
Sir Ronald says: This inquiry was like no other I have undertaken. Others were intellectual exercises, a matter of collating information and making recommendations. But for these people to reveal what had happened to them took immense courage and every emotional stimulus they could muster. They weren’t speaking with their mind; they were speaking from the heart. And my heart had to open if I was to understand it.
At each session, the tape would be turned on and we would wait. I would look into the face of the person who was to speak to us. I would see the muscles straining to hold back the tears. But tears would stream down, still no words being spoken. And then hesitantly, words would come. We sat there as long as it took. We heard the story, told with the person’s whole being, reliving experiences which had been buried deep, sometimes for decades. They weren’t speaking with their minds, they were speaking with their hearts. And my heart had to open if I was to understand them.
I began to realise that the children had been removed because the Aboriginal race was seen as an embarrassment to white Australia. The aim was to strip the children of their Aboriginality, and accustom them to live in a white Australia. The tragedy was compounded when the children, as they grew up, encountered the racism which shaped the policy, and found themselves rejected by the very society for which they were being prepared.
Sir Ronald had been moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Western Australia at the time his church ran Sister Kate’s Home, where “stolen children” grew up. “I was proud of the home, with its system of cottage families. Imagine my pain when I discovered, during this Inquiry, that children were sexually abused in those cottages.”
The 680-page report was finished in April 1997 and was titled Bringing Them Home. It contained fifty-four recommendations that ranged over compensation and apologies, education, standards for indigenous children in state care, the juvenile justice system, counseling services and research. It called for a national apology.
By now, however, a new government had come to power, and their view was that Aboriginal people had been given too much, and the time had come to “swing the pendulum back.” They found the report a major embarrassment and tried to bury it.
But national attitudes were changing. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation by now had been at work for six years. Thanks to its encouragement, hundreds of study circles had been established, bringing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people together all over the country. In May 1997 it held a major convention in Melbourne. It was attended by 1,800 people and had been preceded by 100 regional meetings involving 12,000 people around Australia. At this convention, Sir Ronald presented Bringing Them Home to the nation.
The report shook the conscience of Australia. It sold far more than any comparable report, and a shortened version was also prepared; the two together sold more than 70,000 copies. According to Alan Thornhill, the Associated Press correspondent in Canberra, it was the biggest news story of the year. Australians had believed that Aborigines had been taken out of wretched conditions to be offered the benefits of white society — and, indeed, some had been cared for well and altruistically. But the report revealed that many were not: there had been widespread abuse. It also concluded that the policy was not just wrong but was “genocidal” in that its aim was the disappearance of Aborigines as a distinct group. This conclusion was angrily scorned by some. However, Robert Manne, editor of the journal Quadrant, wrote in February 1998: “Even if the charge of genocide remains contentious between people of good will, as I suspect it might, that does nothing to change the fact that the policy of child removal constitutes one of the most shameful, if not the most shameful episode in twentieth-century Australian history.”
After some months, the government announced that it would make available $63 million over four years for counseling and family reunion services.
However, it ignored the proposal for a national apology, arguing that it could not be held responsible for the actions of its predecessors. It ignored, too, the concept of a national Sorry Day — a formal and public acknowledgment of past wrong.
On their own initiative, many community groups, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, came together and launched a plan to hold a Sorry Day on 26 May 1998, exactly a year after the report had been laid before Parliament. In an article in the Canberra Times (April 7, 1998), John Bond, a member of the National Sorry Day Committee, wrote:
It took us over 20 years to honor our Vietnam veterans because we were ashamed of what we, as a country, had pushed them into. It is taking us longer to honor the stolen generations, because we are even more ashamed. But on Sorry Day we will celebrate them, for there is much to celebrate. Their struggle to overcome their tragic experience has given many of them qualities of resilience, humor, compassion. They are a source of strength for our country.
The idea spread rapidly, with strong backing from churches and from education authorities who produced study material. One community group had already launched “Sorry Books” in which people could express in their own words their sorrow for the forced removal policies. Eventually more than 1,200 such books were distributed, in which nearly a million people wrote personal messages.
A look through these books conveys a sense of a grieving nation reaching out to its Aboriginal people. Young and old, people of all backgrounds, often taking great effort to write neatly and legibly, express sentiments like “This day means, hopefully, a new start and new hopes for the future.” “I don’t feel guilt but I certainly feel some shame and sorrow for the hurt.” “For the terrible grief of a people, and for the cause of that grief, I am sorry.” “I offer my deepest apology for all the years of injustice suffered by your people. Sorry is not enough but this day is appropriate.”
Occasionally there crept in a message from someone who resented the whole idea of apology. There were also some digs at the prime minister: “I’m not taking responsibility but I’m definitely saying I’m sorry it happened. John Howard and his government should do at least as much.”
One message, illustrated with a flower, was simply signed “From a mother in Canberra.” It read, “I am sorry for your pain, and hope the messages this book contains help to heal and bring a better understanding to all Australians of the special culture and heritage native Australians can share. May the gesture found in these pages help to overcome despair and restore hope and love.”
On National Sorry Day, the books were handed to elders of the “stolen generations” in hundreds of ceremonies in cities, towns and rural centers. Thousands of churches and schools observed the day. In Perth, West Australia, in the Anglican cathedral, leaders of all the churches read out their denominations’ apologies for the “removals.” Patrick Dodson, former chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, told the crowded congregation, “Take confidence, because in the hearts of many young Australians there is a desire to go into the next century with the banner of reconciliation fully unfurled. I can survive without your apology but the integrity of the nation cannot survive without it.”
In Adelaide, South Australia, a national monument to the stolen generations was unveiled. The granite carving portrays an empty coolamon, or cradle, with water, representing tears, washing down over the faces of Aborigines who had been taken away from their parents. It is inscribed with words from Fiona’s testimony: “And every morning as the sun came up the whole family would wail. They did that for 32 years until they saw me again. Who can imagine what a mother went through? But you have to learn to forgive.”
In Melbourne, Victoria, the lord mayor handed the keys of the city to representatives of the stolen generations, and the city churches rang their bells. 2,000 people attended an ecumenical service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. A meeting in the Town Hall was chaired by Dimity Fifer, a member of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. She said, “Reconciliation is at times a difficult process, much like the building of any relationship. It is built on listening and it is about hanging in there when we hear things we may find difficult. Listening takes courage and energy and we are rewarded as a nation and as individuals when we make this commitment.”
In Sydney, New South Wales, thousands rallied at the Opera House. On a national radio program marking the event, one of the speakers was Avis Gale, who had been taken away from her mother when she was one week old. She accepted the apologies but said that she in turn had some apologizing to do. She was learning to love her enemies. Avis explained that when she and others were invited to receive the apology of the Synod of the Uniting Church in South Australia, “it freaked me out.” At the age of eight, in rebellion against the institution in which she had been placed, she threw every Bible she could find onto a bonfire. For this she was told she would go to Hell and, to make the point, the letter H was branded on her leg. The church’s apology for its part in the removal policies moved her deeply. She realized that she also had apologies to make. In fact, she agonized over a list of twenty people or so whom she hated most, gradually scrubbing each one off her list with a stubby pencil as she “gave them away.” She emerged from victimhood when she realized that there might be some she had hurt who would need to forgive her. “One day they will have to meet their Maker,” she said, “but so will I.”
State legislatures passed resolutions. The Australian Senate marked the day with a minute’s silence, as did every prison in Queensland. Newspapers made it the main subject of their opinion columns and it dominated the radio waves. Special music was composed. Around the country could be heard the haunting refrain of Aborigine singer Archie Roach’s song “Took the Children Away.”
Lois “Lowitja” O’Donoghue, the first and only Aboriginal to address the United Nations General Assembly, said the day was “a milestone on the road to reconciliation.” She is a descendant of the original keepers of Uluru (known in English as Ayers Rock), whose ancestry goes back more than 60,000 years, but she spent the first half of her life as a non-citizen. At the age of two she was taken from her family and, like Avis, did not meet her mother for thirty years. In response to one apology, she said, “We forgive you for the part you played in the removal of children from our mothers, families, culture, our land and our language. But never ask us to forget the pain and anguish we have endured over years.”
Four months after the National Sorry Day, the largest dinner party ever to be held in the Great Hall of Parliament House drew 700 public servants, dignitaries, diplomats, politicians, business people, family and friends to “express togetherness.” Along with the Aboriginal people, there were representatives of many of the ethnic immigrant peoples of Australia. Australian Immigration and Multi-cultural Affairs Minister Phillip Ruddock called the evening “a turning point in our commitment to cultural diversity.”
The chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Evelyn Scott, said, “Many Australians, in particular indigenous and Asian Australians, feel the core values of our society are being threatened by ignorance and bigotry, and by people who use us as scapegoats for their own failings. I am so heartened by your attendance here tonight. I am an absolute believer that reconciliation must be a people’s movement — and you are living proof of my belief.”
On the first anniversary of the Sorry Day, the National Sorry Day Committee invited the whole Australian community to participate in a “Journey of Healing,” under the patronage of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Lowitja O’Donoghue. It was launched at Uluru, the monolithic rock at the heart of the Australian continent. Reporting on the event, the Sydney Morning Herald headlined its story, “Radiating from the Rock, new ritual of hope.”
Fraser, who was prime minister from 1975 to 1983, wrote in an article in The Age (April 7, 1999), headlined “Why we must say sorry”:
Facing the truth about our own past, when it is contrary to that which we have been taught for generations, is difficult. Unless non-Aboriginal Australians are prepared to look at the past honestly there will be no real reconciliation with Aborigines. True reconciliation does not only involve material things — it also involves matters of the spirit. This is where the question of an apology for past wrongs is relevant. An apology does not say “I am guilty.” It is a recognition that our society perpetuated a wrong and that we are sorry it happened. It is perhaps the most important thing we can do which is within our power, to address matters of the spirit. An apology is not even a commentary on the morality or ethics of the people involved in policies at the time. An apology is a criticism of the act much more than a criticism of the people who lived in a different time with different ideas. An apology says that, by today’s standards, these things should never have happened.
Gatjil Djerrkura, who heads one of Australia’s main Aboriginal organisations, says of the Journey of Healing, “It could inspire a rolling action of initiatives all over the country bringing communities together and encouraging a societal transformation at grassroots level.” The Journey emphasizes three aspects: recognition of the injustices of the past, not as a matter of personal guilt, but as a matter of healing wounds by embracing, rather than shunning, Australian history; commitment to deal with the consequences of forced removals — broken families, lost identity, shattered physical and mental health, loss of language, culture and connection to traditional land, and loss of parenting skills; and unity, through listening to each other, both to see the racism, prejudice and hurts which keep us apart and to benefit from everyone’s wisdom on how to meet the needs of the whole community.
“Last year the Australian community took the first step by saying ‘Sorry’. The next step is to overcome the continuing consequences of the wrong,” wrote Bond in Australian Medicine, urging doctors to bring their skills to the healing process and encourage community initiatives which can help restore health.
The Journey of Healing is being led by members of the stolen generations who have themselves suffered and are taking the initiative to heal the wounds remaining among people of all races. One of these is Fiona, whose story began this chapter. She says, “The suffering we have endured has made us a strong people, a courageous people, a people of compassion who understand the suffering of others. Don’t let bitterness, hate or anger take root in our hearts. Only as we choose to forgive can we be truly healed.”
Another woman giving leadership is Audrey Kinnear, a policy advisor on indigenous health to the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission in Canberra. In 1998, presenting a copy of the report Bringing Them Home to the Caux conference center in Switzerland, she said, “The report is about pain, people, cultural survival, the capacity to say sorry and the capacity to forgive.” She had been separated from her family at the age of four and raised in a mission. She was twenty-eight when she met her mother again. For years she didn’t know where she belonged, sometimes wishing she were a full-blood Aboriginal, sometimes wishing she were white, because these two were accepted:
But we were half-caste — outcaste in white Australia — we didn’t belong anywhere. I know some people have a problem with the words “stolen generation” but it is very appropriate because of what has been stolen from us — our families, our language, our community, our culture, our identity and our sense of belonging. These things can never be made up. But my Aboriginal family helped me to heal. They accepted and understood. National Sorry Day was the final thing in my healing, because it gave recognition to pain. It had other Australians saying “I’m sorry” and it gave us permission to cry and grieve together. Since then I’ve suddenly become aware that our people aren’t victims any more.
On May 26, 1999, the Journey was launched all over the country. In Canberra, a thousand people crowded the Great Hall of Parliament and finished the meeting by singing together the theme song of the Journey, written by two Aboriginal people, Johnny Huckle and Helen Moran:
Come join the journey, Journey of Healing
Let the spirit guide us, hand in hand
Let’s walk together into the future
The time has come to make a stand.
Let’s heal our hearts, let’s heal our pain,
And bring the stolen children home again
For our native children to trust again
We must take this journey together as friends.
Australia faces difficult issues, as it grapples with a fair distribution of land between its Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal inhabitants. In many countries, these issues have provoked bitter conflict. The Journey of Healing gives hope that Australians will move beyond the conflict and develop creative solutions that might be of use elsewhere.
On May 28, 2000, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation invited support for reconciliation through a walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was speculation in the preceding days as to how many people would come, but the final number of 250,000 exceeded all predictions. Other cities and towns immediately arranged their own bridge walks. In Melbourne 300,000 took part. In all, nearly a million people walked for reconciliation.
Later that year the Olympic Games were held in Sydney. The crowning moment of the opening ceremony was the lighting of the flame by Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman. When she ran in the final of the women’s 400 meters, the entire nation stopped. When she won the gold, Australians rejoiced. At the closing ceremony, one of Australia’s best-known bands, Midnight Oil, took the stage wearing outfits that proclaimed ‘Sorry.’ They were joined by an Aboriginal band, Yothu Yindi, to the cheers of the 90,000-strong crowd. At last, many felt Australians were beginning to take pride in their Aboriginal heritage.
Ordinary Australians have realized that they don’t have to wait for government action; everyone can help to overcome the continuing consequences of the forced removal policies. This attitudinal shift may be the key to healing the wounds of the past.