National Sorry Day and Reconciliation Week
It was 1987 and the lesson was Year 9 Australian History. I was a student at a large, well-known catholic school in Launceston and we were doing, what we usually did in History, reading from a textbook.
We were learning about Indigenous Australians, and I was struck by this line in the textbook (it is a paraphrase, I don’t have that textbook anymore):
“Truganini was the last Tasmanian Aboriginal and with her Aboriginals died out in Tasmania in 1876”.
I was confused; this didn’t seem right. The mother of my best friend was married to a man from a local Aboriginal family. I knew him and had stayed in the family home for sleepovers. It just didn’t make sense! However, the culture of that history classroom did not involve critical thinking or asking questions and so I stayed silent and quickly moved to the next teenage drama.
Fast forward to my honour’s year at the University of Tasmania where I had the privilege of working with a small group of talented, intelligent students as we grappled with big ideas, explored postmodern literature and wrote our theses.
It was here that I was transported back to that Year 9 classroom as we debated Australian history and its representation through literature. In that year my thinking about history transformed: I began to see it as a collection of stories that varied depending on the perspective of the person writing the story.
Historians are not free of bias and through the telling of the story that sits behind an historical event, they choose whose perspectives and experiences to include or omit. The historian writing my Year 9 textbook omitted the story of the “Black Wars” in Tasmania; the role George Augustus Robinson played in moving Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples to Flinders Island; and the generations of Aboriginal families who survived massacres, the introduction of disease, and their ancestor’s displacement.
Fast forward again to 1998, and my first year of teaching and the release of the Bringing them Home Report. As I listened to Pat Dobson speak last Tuesday on National Sorry Day, I was in 1998 again and remembering how the release of that report marked a seismic shift in Australia. Politicians wept as they read stories of the Stolen Generation and schools leant into telling these stories as part of our national healing. There was a sense of collective empathy and a willingness to honour the diversity of perspectives that comprise Australian history.
What emerged from this commitment to national storytelling, was National Sorry Day. National Sorry Day can make some feel uncomfortable. Some worry that it requires us to feel ashamed of our nation and our past. However, back in 1996 the Governor General Sir William Dean had this to say at the inaugural Lingiari Lecture:
“True reconciliation… is not achievable in the absence of an acknowledgement 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 or acknowledge guilt. It is simply to assert our identity as a nation and the basic fact 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 the government.”
Every country has a part of its history that is shameful. Healing is about acknowledging what makes us uncomfortable, leaning into it and listening to the stories of those who are most impacted. This week I heard a beautiful story about two brothers, separated as part of the Stolen Generation, who were reunited late in life. Their goal now is to enjoy each other’s company and to tell their stories to all those who will listen. As one elderly man said on the same interview, “I don’t know what they experienced or what it felt like, but I can listen to their stories”.
Listening to understand - not to fix the pain, or to rush through the telling or insert our own narrative - but just to listen deeply is a gift we can give to indigenous Australians, past, present and emerging.
This is what National Sorry Day is about - pausing and taking the time to remember and to listen. Remembering is not about making someone feel ashamed or guilty, but it is about acknowledging that some government legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was harmful to indigenous Australians. We can do this and still feel proud to be Australian. The two can co-exist and their co-existence makes us a stronger nation.
As Carmel Bird wrote in 1998 in The Stolen Generation: Their Stories:
“The Indigenous people of Tasmania had not, after all, disappeared. The indigenous people of Australia and the islands of the Torres Strait will never disappear. They belong here, they have an indisputable right to be here in the full dignity of their humanity, and to contribute in confidence and joy to the future of this country. Listen to their voices”. (1998, 15)