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.

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.