Some reconciliation, indeed
Feb 12th, 2008 by Rebecca
At 9am tomorrow, Kevin Rudd will stand in parliament and deliver a formal apology to the Stolen Generations. White liberals all over the country will, I’m sure, celebrate and feel proud that “reconciliation” has finally happened. Board rooms and offices will watch the event on their big screen televisions. But, while this is a notable step forward, forgive me for thinking it a mite hypocritical for the government to be “apologising” when there are still soldiers on the ground in Wadeye and Papunya as part of the racist “intervention” in Aboriginal communities that this government supported less than six months ago - and on much the same claimed “save the children” basis as the policies behind the original Stolen Generations.
It is a step forward that the federal government has actually decided to acknowledge and formally apologise for the Stolen Generations, albeit decades too late. Yet there is no compensation to those who suffered and their descendants. No acknowledgment that former leaders that are lauded as national heroes in school curricula all over the country were responsible for this attempt at genocide. There is not the slightest attempt at addressing the damage done over successive generations. There are words. Significant words, but words nonetheless.
Call me cynical, but when this same government, in opposition less than six months ago, staunchly supported the racist “intervention” in Aboriginal communities the Northern Territory - involving sending in the army, bans on items available everywhere else in the country and compulsory health checks on Aboriginal children to “check for sexual abuse” - now claims to be genuinely apologetic for the Stolen Generations, I really don’t buy it. That the “intervention” used much the same justification as the Stolen Generations - that of saving Aboriginal children from their “unfit” parents - makes that especially bitterly ironic. If we’re talking about real reconciliation, how about apologising for the genocide of the entire Aboriginal population of Tasmania? Settler death squads? Smallpox? Hell, how about stopping stalling on paying the Stolen Wages? These things, it seems, would be much rather forgotten. There’s an apology for past wrongs with an intent to fix them, or there’s a few politically convenient words that allow us white folks to alleviate white guilt. Forgive me if I think this looks rather like the latter.
I’d love to see a federal government actually take responsibility for the wrongs of the past - actually compensating those who suffered and their descendants for their suffering, providing real assistance in dealing with the rather vast consequences of attempting to wipe out an entire fucking race, and encouraging a more accurate rendition of our history. We might then be able to talk about reconciliation. It certainly won’t be this government, though, and all this white liberal talk of reconciliation is way, way too soon.
I didn’t go watch it, on the big screen with the rest of my department… Instead I sat here and did a Workplace Equity Course.
The Northern Territory intervention makes me sick. They are repeating the exact same mistakes!
Rudd spoke rather well actually (they showed it before the presentation I was making to the university’s Senior Residents as part of their training), making clear that mere words weren’t going to cut it, and promising major new commitments on indigenous education (he basically promised to rebuild the entire school system covering remote communities over the next decade or so) and indigenous housing in the territory.
However, perhaps y’know it might have been better to pull the soldiers out of indigenous communities *before* attempting to distance oneself from past abuses…
Re: diseases - because of European diseases, as in the Americas death rates of 90+% were going to occur following *any* contact between the hemispheres - and there was no way Australia would stay isolated.
That’s a crock. We deliberately used disease for the purposes of killing the indigenous population. Smallpox wasn’t all that big in the Sydney community of the time.
This is the sort of thing that makes me very cynical about nigh on all attempts by white Australia to “reconcile” in the light of past abuses: when it comes down to it, white people would far more often make excuses than rewrite their own history books.