Build trust and move ahead

• Only 44% of the overall population believe that Indigenous people are open to sharing their culture with other Australians.
• But 89% of Indigenous people say they are open to sharing their culture.

Reconciliation has a long way to go. The goodwill is there – but there's still an important problem. There's still too much misunderstanding and distrust between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

• Only about 1 in 10 people feel there is a high level of trust in the relationship, with Indigenous people feeling this way about other Australians and other Australians about Indigenous people.
  

However, a survey released today shows many Australians would like more contact with Indigenous people. While just over half (58%) of Australians currently report contact with Indigenous people, more than three quarters (76%) say they would like contact in the future.

There is also a level of interest in helping disadvantaged Indigenous people, with more than a third of people (37%) expressing a wish to do so.

A critical finding is that only 20% of Australians say they know what they can do to help disadvantaged Indigenous people.

Overall, however, those of us who seek greater progress in reconcilation will be encouraged by the initial Australian Reconciliation Barometer, released today in time for Friday's first anniversary of the national apology to the stolen generations. Reconciliation Australia plans to repeat the survey every two years to measure progress.

Despite the misunderstandings and distrust indicated by the excerpts above (taken from the survey's Executive Summary), Indigenous and other Australians have much in common when they see themselves as family oriented, proud, good at sport, easy going, friendly, good humoured and welcoming.

Attitudes to one another differ more on values like co-operative, disciplined, hard working and respectful.

The Sydney Morning Herald's report this morning can be found here. As well as the executive summary, other sections of the Barometer report can be accessed through the Reconciliation Australia link above.

Of interest: The Australian's media section today says the National Indigenous Television Network has commissioned well-known human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC to run a new Hypothetical show. Closing the Gap. His panel will include Tony Abbott, Germaine Greer, Marcia Langton and "indigenous rapper Wire M.C." (perhaps one of you young fellas could tell me who he or she is).

It should be a lively show, to be broadcast on NITV this Friday, Feb 13 (anniversary of the Apology, remember!), at 8pm AESDT. as well as on some subscription and specialist channels. This report on the NITV website calls its broadcast an "exclusive premiere", so we city types without pay TV may get to see it later.

Australians begin to understand

A symbolic gesture perhaps, but when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said sorry it did begin a healing process. And the first sign of that healing is a sharp rise in the number of Australians who now believe the apology was the right thing to do.

As reported in an earlier post, a Galaxy poll commissioned by the online activist group GetUp! just a fortnight before the apology showed that only 55 per cent of Australians supported an apology.

Only days after its delivery, another Galaxy poll showed the percentage of Australians approving had jumped to 68 per cent. What a great result!

Later, The Australian's Newspoll (the one which showed a leap in the public's rating of Kevin Rudd as preferred prime minister, along with Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson's slump) agreed with the second Galaxy figure.

The rise in public support for the apology may have come partly from a "getting on the bandwagon" effect.

But most of all, I believe, it came from the opportunity all Australians had to listen to the stories of ordinary Aboriginal people.

As they moved through the crowds in Canberra's parliamentary precinct, television and newspaper crews invited many people to tell their stories. Most of those who agreed were emotional -- some were in tears -- but they told their stories without rancour. Some of those stories were heart-breaking. Only a Quadrant "intellectual" would remain unmoved.

It was a time of true reconciliation. Not between politicians and Aboriginal leaders, self-appointed or otherwise, but between ordinary decent Australians. The only reconciliation that counts.

However, the fight has yet to be won. Two big battles remain. First, should our nation pay compensation, and if so, how should it be done?

Despite their growing support for the apology, a majority of Australians do not support automatic compensation for the stolen generations. Too vigorous a campaign for compensation (or reparation, to use the Bringing Them Home report's word) may set back the broad reconciliation movement.

From the anti-apology side, we're hearing a lot of claptrap about compensation -- including Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle's ridiculous claim (examined a little further down in this blog) that the Trevorrow case in South Australia had set a compensation figure of $500,000 for every member of the Stolen Generations.

Many on the Aboriginal side also claim that the apology, the acknowledgement of the wrongs of the past, has created a right to compensation. And that's firing up redneck Australians who foresee Aboriginals rushing at a bucket of money (as if a whitefella wouldn't do that).

But I am convinced -- and I could quote The Australian's legal affairs editor, Chris Merritt, in support -- that our nation's apology did not open any further legal rights to compensation.

Nearly all Stolen Generations removals were carried out by State governments under State laws. There appears to be a general move among those governments to set up funds to pay compensation to Aboriginal people who can show they were harmed by the separation from their families and by their subsequent treatment in institutions or foster homes.

At the Federal government level, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised a big increase in spending to close the disgraceful gap between white and Aboriginal Australians in health, education and mortality.

Perhaps this is the most worthwhile compensation our nation could pay, healing the damage of not just the Stolen Generations removals but also of several hundred years of colonial and national policies.

Of course, compensation may be seen as a moral rather than a legal issue. But that could become a minefield, too.

After all, the Opposition's shadow minister for indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, wrote that we should not say sorry because it would lead to claims for compensation. I find it hard to believe the Mad Monk's words could represent Catholic moral teaching, but he did, after all, spend some time in a seminary.

However, the mixture of State-based compensation funds and Federal "closing the gap" spending should meet both legal and reasonable moral standards.

The other big battle to win is establishing the truth of our past, and how our nation-building often excluded and damaged the original Australians.

Other nations which have undergone a reconciliation process have also seen the need to marry an acknowledgement of truth to the healing process -- such as in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation inquiries. I'll come back to this idea, but first I need to take a walk in the garden.

There! Was it so hard to say sorry?

It all went so well. A moving speech by new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The Apology. Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson's endorsement, marred somewhat by an ill-timed attempt to mix in another side of the story. The acceptance by Aboriginal leaders.

But most moving were the responses of the Aboriginal people who crowded Canberra's parliamentary precinct, or who gathered in front of big screens around the nation. Some wept, some hugged, some seemed to have trouble accepting that our nation had finally said sorry.

The media did a splendid job. So many people were allowed to tell, in their own words, of the pain they had suffered with the separation from their mothers and their wider families, it must have helped white Australia understand a little better.

We need that better understanding. Just a week before the Apology, the left-leaning online activist group GetUp! reported the results of a Galaxy poll it had commissioned.

Only 55 per cent of Australians supported the Apology. Some 36 per cent did not. In Western Australia, and presumably in the north of Queensland, the numbers were the other way round.

We can sneer about rednecks. We can jeer at the "group-think" of the Quadrant mob, as I often do. We can talk about the Deep West, or the Deep North of Queensland.

We can march down streets, waving identically printed placards and chanting "Wadda we want?" till the cows come home, but we won't lift that figure much above 55 per cent unless we engage in rational, polite conversation with the people who hold other opinions.

We're unlikely to gain much ground with the 36 per cent who opposed an apology, but thoughtful discussion with the the 9 per cent in the middle, the people who hadn't made up their minds, should be fruitful.

To that end, GetUp! has launched one of its campaigns. Called Mythbusters, it provides a fact sheet to counter the major arguments against saying "sorry", in the hope that members will use them when they write to newspapers or call talkback radio (good luck with Alan Jones!).

GetUp! offers the factsheet on this web page, which also gives links to the full Bringing Them Home report about the Stolen Generations, and also to the Galaxy poll and to Reconciliation Australia factsheets.

Facts can be in short supply, or badly misused, in debate about the Stolen Generations. Some of the nastiest examples of this came last weekend when the Weekend Australian ran this feature by Keith Windschuttle, the new editor of Quadrant. So here's my own abbreviated factsheet.

"If the Rudd Government apologises to the Stolen Generations," Windschuttle began, "it should not stop at mere words. It should pay a substantial sum in compensation. This was the central recommendation of the Human Rights Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1997."

Fact: The Rudd Government is not blindly implementing the recommendations of the inquiry, although it would have given weight to its findings. It has ruled out paying across-the-board compensation, and will instead spend the money on a focused program to close the appalling gap between the health, education and mortality rates of white and Aboriginal Australians.

"The charge that justified this, the report said, was genocide."

Fact: The report did say the policies amounted to genocide, but Windschuttle must know that one of the report's authors, Sir Ronald Wilson, recanted and regretted the use of the term. It was in all the papers after the Bulletin splashed it on its cover. [Since this original post, I've revisited the Bringing Them Home report about the issue of compensation, and have added further comment in a footnote below. -- Ian Skinner]

"The Bruce Trevorrow case in South Australia provided a benchmark for what that sum [to be paid to "virtually every person in Australia who claimed to be an Aborigine"] should be, a minimum of $500,000."

Fact: Trevorrow won this case under existing law because he convinced the court his removal was illegal, and that he'd suffered a lifetime of mental problems and alcoholism because of it. Few of those removed from their families could satisfy both criteria. Most removals took place under lawful authority. Even if the Rudd government changes its mind and sets up a compensation scheme, it would not be at this scale.

"Those who are serious about an apology should back it with a lump sum payment of $500,000 to each [Aboriginal] family, a total of $50 billion."

Fact: See above.

It's a pity Windschuttle wrote such tripe. Some of the other points he made, evidence he quoted, deserve to be put into the debate. In the past, he has played a valuable, if unwelcome, role in exposing the sloppiness of some historians on the other side of the culture wars. Forcing them to re-check their sources and revise their stories was no bad thing.

Windschuttle will publish the second volume of his Fabrication of Aboriginal History some time this year, and it's sure to damage some other historians' accounts. He'll find some major errors, and probably many you'd call nit-picking.

You and I, people of commonsense, may ask whether exposing these errors justifies a claim that all such accounts are false.

The Quadrant mob will have no such quibbles. I expect Miranda Devine to take no more than a fortnight to pronounce again that Windschuttle had refuted the "black armband" view of our history (as she did with volume one, in a Sydney Morning Herald comment on December 12, 2002). Dear old Frank Devine probably will hail Vol 2 with even more unseemly haste.

Footnote added February 17: A rereading of Chapter 13 of Bringing Them Home makes it clear the Human Rights Commission made out its case for reparation [its word] on wider grounds than its genocide claim.

These grounds, separately analysed for Australia's colonial era and for more recent times, broadly cover failures to meet proper legal standards in parliamentary acts authorising the removals, failure to provide for judicial review of removals, the states' failures in duty of care when they became the children's guardians, and breaches of international human rights in both racial discrimination terms and in what many Australians were to see as a rather too technical definition of genocide.

The following link will take you to Chapter 13 of the report.
http://www.humanrights.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/report/ch13_part4.html

On the eve of the Apology

A few years ago, after a ceremony which first saw the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags fly alongside our other flags outside the Gosford City Council building, I joined the group of Aboriginal and white people and listened to stories of the Stolen Generations.

One told of her mother's life, scrubbing floors in the convent school in a big town in the west of NSW to pay for her children's education. As a girl, the speaker had wondered at the lack of a wider family, and after some determined inquiries discovered her mum had been removed from the Taree region on the mid-north coast

One man introduced himself as coming from Bree [Brewarrina, in the northwest of NSW], then broke down, sobbing. Others rushed to comfort him.

Me? I'm standing behind the speakers, praying those cameras from NBN3 are pointed elsewhere as I touch a handkerchief to my eyes.

Damn, I thought. Now I'll never make Quadrant editor. I seem to recall that when the Quadrant board ousted Robert Manne as editor because of his sympathy to Aboriginal people, incoming editor Paddy McGuinness promised there would be no more mawkish sentimentality.

But I'm a journalist, and I've got a responsibility to check these stories before I recount them. Could I be witnessing some form of mass hysteria?

After all, it doesn't take much thought to recall other ideas in which many Australians suspended their normal commonsense. The notion, now seen to be laughable, that Joh was a decent man who'd make a fine prime minister. The belief that anyone who'd used a typewriter had been crippled for life. That aeroplanes would fall from the sky as computer clocks failed to recognise the new century. That share prices would rise for ever, without pause.

So I did check what I could, and I believe the stories were true. With the woman who discovered her extended family around Taree, I was able to offer extra information about some of her relatives from John Ramsland's history of Aboriginal-European relationships in the Manning Valley, Custodians of the Soil (published by the Greater Taree City Council, 2001).

Yet there are problems in assessing the nature and the impact of the policy of removing light-coloured children from Aboriginal mothers. I can turn to oral histories in where Aboriginals agree they were removed from dreadful situations. I hesitate to do so because it sets off that chorus from over Quadrant way: "Saved generations . . . saved generations . . ."

Should we also distinquish between those children snatched from the arms of their mothers and those whose mothers handed them over believing it would give them a better future. Did white Australia betray the trust of mothers who handed over their children?

Why did governments remove the light-skinned children? Was it to remove them from squalid living conditions -- in which case, why not do something about the appalling shanties in which the dark children remained? Or was it to reclaim them as white people, and breed out their aboriginality?

Here's another reason, related by Ted Fields: "Many white men had children with Aboriginal women and some of these children were taken from their Aboriginal mothers and placed into white institutions from 1883 until 1969. Sometimes the fathers did not want the children close to their homes . . . "

George Fernando remembers his mother saying that sometimes the respectable white men didn't want little black children saying, "There is my daddy", when their white wives returned to the farm.

These stories are taken from oral histories recorded by Cilka Zagar, a long-term teacher at St Joseph's in Walgett, and published in Goodbye Riverbank (Magabala Books, 2000). In the same book, Lucy Murphy says: "White people have always been nice to me and I am grateful to them for saving my life."

How good, or how bad, were institutions like Cootamundra Girls Home or Kinchela Boys Home at Kempsey? Most former residents have bad memories, but Ms Murphy said she found a protective and nurturing environment.

As with so many issues on which Australians disagree, the truth is somewhere in the middle. However, my reading, my discussions with Aboriginal people and what I believe to be my understanding of the history of European-Aboriginal relationships convince me our nation owes a heartfelt apology to Aboriginal people.

I'd like the apology to cover all the damage inflicted on Aboriginal people (while acknowledging that often, but not always, this damage was done without evil or genocidal intent), but if it's to be just for the Stolen Generations, it will still be worthwhile.

We should learn the text of the apology after 5pm today (Tuesday, February 12) and it's to be delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson tomorrow.

This may be a good place to pause. I had planned to offer thoughts on a scornful, and to my mind cheap and nasty, article in the Weekend Australian by the new Quadrant editor, Keith Windschuttle. I probably will soon, but I'd like to check some information first. Please come back.

Why not use John Howard's sincere and moving apology?

A fortnight to go, and we will hear that long awaited sorry. Kevin Rudd has promised his new national government will deliver its apology to Australia's Aboriginal people on February 13.

It will be an emotional time. I expect to see some of my fellow Australians weeping, Aboriginals who experienced or know of the years of dispossession, family separations and social exclusion. And more than a few whitefellas, too. Even your grumpy old blogger will have a box of tissues nearby, just in case.

The Federal Government is still negotiating with Aboriginal leaders on the phrasing of the apology.

However, I'd like to suggest we use the text of an apology given by John Howard on July 3, 2000. (There's a bit of trick here, but if you don't know of it I'll explain later.)

Good evening. My name is John Howard and I'm speaking to you from Sydney, Australia, host city of the year 2000 Olympic Games.

At this important time, and in an atmosphere of international goodwill and national pride, we here in Australia – all of us – would like to make a statement before all nations. Australia, like many countries in the new world, is intensely proud of what it has achieved in the past 200 years.

We are a vibrant and resourceful people. We share a freedom born in the abundance of nature, the richness of the earth, the bounty of the sea. We are the world's biggest island. We have the world's longest coastline. We have more animal species than any other country. Two thirds of the world's birds are native to Australia. We are one of the few countries on earth with our own sky. We are a fabric woven of many colours and it is this that gives us our strength.

However, these achievements have come at great cost. We have been here for 200 years but before that, there was a people living here. For 40,000 years they lived in a perfect balance with the land.

There were many Aboriginal nations, just as there were many Indian nations in North America and across Canada, as there were many Maori tribes in New Zealand and Incan and Mayan peoples in South America.

These indigenous Australians lived in areas as different from one another as Scotland is from Ethiopia. They lived in an area the size of Western Europe. They did not even have a common language. Yet they had their own laws, their own beliefs, their own ways of understanding.

We destroyed this world.

We often did not mean to do it. Our forebears, fighting to establish themselves in what they saw as a harsh environment, were creating a national economy. But the Aboriginal world was decimated. A pattern of disease and dispossession was established. Alcohol was introduced. Social and racial differences were allowed to become fault-lines. Aboriginal families were broken up.

Sadly, Aboriginal health and education are responsibilities we have still yet to address successfully.

I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand, that it is with this sorrow, that we as a nation will grow and seek a better, a fairer and a wiser future. Thank you.

John Howard, July 3, 2000

To my mind, the apology, delivered by a John Howard seen indistinctly but heard clearly across the nation on ABC television, says all the right things, and could provide the basis of our nation's apology.

The John Howard who delivered the apology was not, of course, the Prime Minister we have recently voted out, but the Australian actor hired to appear on the ABC's satirical and somewhat manic series The Games.

In this episode, the Olympic Games organisers are frantic – visiting dignitaries will strip the games from Australia unless they hear that apology. So they call in the actor to pretend to be the Prime Minister, stand him in shadows, and have him read the words above.

The ABC noted: Any other John Howard who wishes to make this announcement should apply for copyright permission here, which will be granted immediately.

Most sorry resolutions passed by our state parliaments about a decade ago were apologies for the Stolen Generation, and it seems this will be focus of the Rudd government's apology on behalf of the nation.

I believe our nation should express sorrow for the wider suffering experienced by Aboriginal people since Europeans arrived on their lands, including the removal of children from their families. We need not assume the policies of our governments and the actions of some of our white settlers had evil or genocidal intent – although, at times, that may have been true – but we should acknowlege that often they were disastrous, and for that we should be sorry.

Nobody else seems to have noted it, but there's a remarkable resonance between the apology above and words written by historian Geoffrey Blainey quarter of a century ago.

In many ways the European history of this land has been a remarkable achievement. Today this land feeds fifty times as many Australians as it fed in Aboriginal times. We clothe hundreds of millions of people, across the seas; we supply minerals to hundreds of millions of people; and we feed millions in other lands.

But this great European achievement has been accompanied by failures. And the greatest of all the failures is the dispossession of the people who once roamed these lands.

As a nation we have to redeem that failure. We have to remind ourselves that we were not the only pioneers. We have to give back to Aboriginals the hope and the sense of security they have lost.

Blainey goes on to express reservations about land rights, but says:

Aboriginal land rights is not a gateway to paradise. But I can't help thinking that if this land is to be one land, and we are all to be one people, then we have no alternative but to give Aboriginals a
reasonable share of that land which was once their own.

The historian wrote these words in the opening chapter of The Blainey View, which accompanied the ABC television series of that name in 1982.

* I'm a member of the Central Coast Reconciliation Group. My views might not be shared by all members of the group, and I appreciate their tolerance and understanding if at times we differ.