THERE are moments in a nation's history when the clocks stop. Today in Canberra such a moment will occur. The past, present and future will bind together around one small five-letter word. That word is sorry. The time has come to say it.
There are also moments in a nation's history when pride and dignity rise to the surface of the national character. Today in Canberra such a moment will occur. The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will rise to speak to the new Parliament, to the visitors' gallery, to the people gathered outside Parliament House, to the spectators expected in city squares to watch proceedings, to schoolchildren and, most importantly, to indigenous communities throughout the land.
In that moment, the Prime Minister of Australia will offer an apology to the stolen generations of indigenous Australia. It will be an offering not of personal penitence, but of regret and sorrow on behalf of this country's actions towards indigenous Australians. It will be the cracking open of a hard seal of denial that has hidden the kernel of a distressing episode that endured in this country for decades.
Last night Mr Rudd released the text of his statement. It reads in part: "To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking-up of families and communities, we say sorry."
Mr Rudd will be speaking to the living, but his audience will also feel the presence of those who could not be there. At their backs, beside them, at their feet, holding their hands, within the hearts of those able to listen are the ghosts of lives thwarted. Indigenous Australians have lived with the memory of this theft from their families for too long. A stolen child scours the life of the parent and the child. The mourning of that loss was not heard, shamefully, by white Australia for far too long.
Today a bridge will be opened over this yawning chasm in the relationship between white and indigenous Australia.
One word, of course, cannot reconcile a family's devastation, let alone that of generations'. Critics of an apology argue that, in essence, the past was another country. They did things differently there and therefore we do not have a duty to say sorry, nor do we owe them anything. It is a puerile objection. It belittles dignity and honour to even raise it. As the Bringing Them Home report stated a decade ago: "The truth is that the past is very much with us today in the continuing devastation of the lives of indigenous Australians."
It was the 1997 report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families that spurred the question of an apology to the stolen generations. Commissioned by the then attorney-general Michael Lavarch in August 1995, the inquiry was conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. One of its main aims was to trace "past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence".
It found overwhelmingly among those affected two traumatic emotions: "grief and loss". It also discovered among this debris "tenacity and survival" in the face of this human harvesting. It is to the survivors that Mr Rudd will speak; it is towards the memory of the victims that his words will fall.
That it has taken a decade to reach this moment is a stain on this nation. In 1995, the New Zealand Government apologised to a Maori tribe for stealing 500,000 hectares of land 130 years earlier. The apology, enshrined in law, had the imprimatur of the Queen. In 1998, the Canadian Government, acting on a 1996 report, apologised to its indigenous population for its past actions that eroded "the political, economic and social systems of Aboriginal people and nations". The hour has now arrived on these shores.
TODAY will mark a step in Australia's evolving maturity. Nationhood is more than trial under fire. Courage forged in wars against foreign foes plays a part in how a country sees itself, but it is also the courage to act while under fire from within that forges character.
Saying sorry has been hostage to cheap political point scoring, and to a federal government (elected one year before the Bringing Them Home report was published) driven by one man's blind ideology, assisted by his loyal followers.
From little things big things grow, and as potent a symbol as the apology is, it must be followed up with concrete and determined action. Mr Rudd has pledged to close the gap between the life spans of indigenous and white Australians, which at present stands at 17 years. If Australia is to hold its head high then it must be committed to ridding indigenous Australia of the Third World conditions that blight its present and darken its future.
Reconciliation and healing are not abstract terms. They live within people, and thus within a nation. A hard truth, however, is this: Mr Rudd's words will not return a single child. Tomorrow the sun will rise, the Earth will spin around the sun, the stars will hold their place in the sky. But to indigenous Australia the axis of their world will have changed because something will have been returned to them. That something is respect; and with that must come hope that what they have seen, white Australia now sees too. And white Australia says sorry also, for all these wasted years of looking the other way.
