Two years ago I stood with thousands of others on the lawns outside Parliament House in Canberra and watched on a giant screen as inside the building Australia’s new Labor Party prime minister did something his conservative predecessor refused to do: he apologised to Australia’s Aboriginal people.
Around me were many Aboriginals. By the end of Kevin Rudd’s speech, most of them were in tears. Rudd wasn’t apologising for the whole sorry mess of Australian colonialism. His apology was specifically for the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, which was government policy for many years during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Many of those weeping quietly around me had suffered that most primal of dispossessions.
Rudd’s speech ended cautiously: “We take this first step … in laying claim to a future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems…”
Two years later, how does it look?
Rudd was right to be cautious; indigenous people remain hugely disadvantaged. They’re much more likely than non-indigenous Australians to suffer preventable illnesses, die young, be in jail, be illiterate and live in bad conditions. Reform in housing, health and education is moving with glacial slowness.
Public outrage about the “stolen generations” has faded. A backlash, led by revisionist academics, has gained a voice, arguing that no children were forcibly taken and that non-indigenous Australians have nothing to apologise for.
The “intervention” was a radical policy by the previous government in response to reports of high levels of violence in some remote indigenous communities. It was widely perceived as clumsy, insensitive, insulting and often ineffective. To specifically target indigenous communities, the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended. One accusation directed at the Rudd government is that it has continued the intervention. So was the apology just hot air? The Rudd government can’t point to any spectacular policy changes, but there has been some movement.
The Racial Discrimination Act has been reinstated, so that income management of those on welfare no longer applies only to Aboriginals. More than a billion extra dollars has been allocated to indigenous housing. There has been unprecedented consultation with indigenous groups. But when you spend time among indigenous people, especially in remote Australia, you see how snarled the problems are.
Take housing. Some indigenous communities are deeply divided about what should be built, where, and for whom. Aboriginals often want to live in extended families, but there are, traditionally, forbidden relationships. For example, a mother-in-law and a son-in-law can’t share space or make eye contact.
Housing policy also has to accommodate people who wish to live “between places” rather than staying put. The idea of individual ownership isn’t part of traditional culture. Add to all this the fact that many people in remote communities speak little English.
When a culture has been thoroughly disrupted over 200 years, the damage can’t be easily reversed. That culture, and the huntergatherer life, can’t be put back the way it was. But it also can’t be erased: “assimilation” isn’t the way to go. Between these extremes, indigenous communities are trying different ways to accommodate change while retaining tradition.
Something unexpected and positive is happening: Aboriginal voices in mainstream media. Australia’s richest literary prize was recently won by Alexis Wright for a novel — Carpentaria — that fuses indigenous and European storytelling. Samson and Delilah, by indigenous director Warwick Thornton, won eight Australian Film Institute awards and the Camera d’Or prize at Cannes.
That has nothing directly to do with Rudd’s statement in parliament: symbolic acts don’t change anything, and they’re never enough. But this one was an overdue and necessary first step. —