home | news l

Papal email reignites 'sorry' debate

By Patrick Barkham in Sydney

26 November 2001 - The Pope's apology to Australia's Aboriginal population has put pressure on the prime minister to follow suit.

Australia's "sorry" debate was reignited last week when the Pope emailed an apology to the country's indigenous population for the "shameful injustices" committed by the Catholic church in the past.

The Pope's document in particular singled out the "stolen generation" for an apology, saying sorry for the Catholic church's role in the forcible removal of thousands of Aboriginal children from their parents by white welfare authorities from the late 19th century to the early 1970s.

"The synod fathers apologised unreservedly for the part played in these [shameful injustices] by members of the church, especially where children were forcibly separated from their families," the Pope said in the special synod's Oceania report. The papal apology is the latest of many official apologies to Australia's 400,000 indigenous people. It comes a month after the Northern Territory government became the final state and territory administration to apologise for its treatment of its indigenous population in the past. Australian bishops also said sorry three years ago.

The new leader of the opposition, Simon Crean, also took the opportunity last week to confirm that the Australian Labour party would immediately apologise to Aboriginal Australians if they were elected. It leaves John Howard's government as virtually the only public body not to offer some kind of apology for the history of white settlement since 1788, during which Aborigines have lost most of their land, much of their culture, and some of their children.

Aborigines and church leaders last week renewed calls for a formal apology from the prime minister. "I think it's a matter of national shame that the government hasn't responded in the way in which most of the rest of the nation has," Bishop Pat Power told ABC radio. But the latest pressure is certain not to sway Mr Howard, who has ignored calls for an apology in the past.

The vitality of the movement calling for a formal reconciliation between white and black Australia has ebbed away since May 2000, when 250,000 people strode across Sydney harbour bridge as a sky-writing plane wrote "sorry" in the sky.

The government has stuck to its emphasis on "practical reconciliation", a mantra that questions the value of a symbolic "sorry" (which could have a real cost if it was the legal trigger for mass compensation claims against the government) and gives priority to helping welfare-dependent Aborigines enter the real economy. John Howard's refusal to apologise has received support from unlikely quarters.

Noel Pearson, an influential Aboriginal leader and lawyer from Cape York, the northern tip of Australia, said last month that he would reject any statement of regret issued by the federal government. He said the "sorry" campaign only hid the liberal elite's lack of solutions to the desolate cycle of poverty, addiction, violence and ill-health in many indigenous communities.

For Pearson, this has been exacerbated by welfare programmes created since 1967, when Aborigines were belatedly granted the same rights as all other Australian citizens. "The combination of passive welfare dependence and the grog and drug epidemic will, if not checked, cause the final breakdown of our traditional social relationships and values," he warned, arguing that welfare dependency and addiction could only be halted by community-based programmes instilling self-reliance, alongside zero-tolerance anti-alcohol policies.

But many Aborigines and activists insist that a formal government apology remains an important first step to help remove guilt from the debate and foster a better understanding of the history shared by indigenous Australians and settlers. Australia is the only sizeable former British colony in which the colonial authorities failed to negotiate and sign a treaty with the indigenous population.

ATSIC and others see an apology as a precursor to a formal treaty between black and white Australia. "We are here on false pretences because we have no agreement with indigenous people," says Phil Glendenning, director of the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education. "We stand on stolen ground. We took the land, we took language, we took heritage, we took spirituality, and we began to take children." "John Howard refers to people like me as advocating a blank armband view of history. I would say there is a white blindfold view of history in Australia that is not prepared to come to terms with our past."

"There's a fundamental unease at the heart of Australia because we haven't come to terms with ourselves and our identity."

Source: The Times

Further information: stolen generations issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page