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When sorry is not enough

May 25, 2002 - On the eve of National Sorry Day, Debra Jopson finds Aboriginal leaders reshaping the aims of reconciliation after a decade of disappointment.

Professor Marcia Langton addressing a reconciliation conference, Birmingham, September 1998 (conference organised by ANTaR and 8020 Educating and Working for a Better World). ENIAR representatives were invited guests.

East Timor's independence awoke both joy and longing in Aboriginal thinker Professor Marcia Langton. Joy that after decades of struggle, the East Timorese would take charge of their destiny; longing because Aborigines would never know such freedom.

"Self-determination is possible for them [but] this will never happen for Aboriginal people. Our fate will always be entwined with Australians who are historically and intellectually blind to difference," Langton says ruefully in an Overland magazine article.

These are bitter comments to digest on the eve of tomorrow's National Sorry Day healing ceremonies for the stolen generations. They mark the beginning of more than a week's national reflection on reconciliation and the state of indigenous affairs.

Many of the great spokespeople of the 1990s - such as Lowitja O'Donoghue, Gatjil Djerrkura, Mick and Patrick Dodson and Peter Yu - have retreated from the national limelight, even if they remain deeply involved in smaller arenas. Equally, many supporters in the wider community "the bridge.-walkers", as those in indigenous affairs call them - have shifted their concerns to the asylum seekers.

Now that the reconciliation decade has patently failed to deliver that long-coveted objective of self-determination, thoughtful and committed members of the Aboriginal cause are reshaping their message about what it means.

There is also a fresh and painful frankness about indigenous people's plight, thoughts many were afraid to voice during the years of One Nation's rise for fear of racist backlash.

This honesty was evident when the nation's only indigenous Aboriginal affairs minister, the Northern Territory's John Ah Kit, recently told Parliament it was difficult to find even one functional indigenous community in the territory and declared: "I am trying to do some truth telling."

He said later in Sydney: "Aboriginal organisations must... develop new, innovative strategies to help overcome the cancerous ideology of despair. The other side of the coin is that government - in partnership with Aboriginal people - must allow the development of forms of governance that allow Aboriginal people the power to control their lives and communities."

But Reconciliation Week begins on Monday amid the echoes of the Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner, Dr Bill Jonas, accusing the Federal Government of deliberately seeking to "shut down debate" on reconciliation.

"True and meaningful reconciliation is being prevented as long as the only attempt being made to accommodate indigenous peoples within the fabric of Australian society is on the basis of sameness, without recognition of cultural distinctions," Jonas declares in his Social Justice 2001 report (whose impact the Government sought to minimise by tabling it on Budget day).

Tuesday marks the second anniversary of the great surge of up to 250,000 people walking for reconciliation across Sydney Harbour Bridge, but Jonas's report warns: "There is a danger that the reconciliation walks... will be the high watermark of support for reconciliation, as national attention... slowly dissipates."

Is indigenous affairs at a low point? Jonas says: "I don't see any real progress being made at the moment in the way that you felt progress being made 10 years ago." The money going into Aboriginal affairs was a matter of "just managing the problems" and did not provide holistic, long-term solutions based on human rights.

In a lecture this month, the former royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody, Hal Wootten, Qc, went back to the 1973 words of the former prime minister Gough Whitlam, who had declared: "Our most important objective now is to restore to Aboriginals the power to make their own decisions about their way of life."

Yet, says Wootten: "People in communities tell us they have lost control of their lives" to funding authorities and bureaucratic processes, to those who can capture and manipulate organisations, to "experts, whose claim to expertise is sometimes only the colour of their skin," to alcohol, "to the drunk and violent and loud-mouthed authority" and to "the paralysis that comes when one cannot see a future worth working for".

There has been a collapse in confidence with the shock of realising the current approach to indigenous affairs has not narrowed the disadvantage gap between Aborigines and other Australians, he says.

"It is no longer a question of why Aborigines are shot but why they die early from lifestyle diseases or take their own lives; no longer why Aboriginal children are not allowed into proper schools, but why many children won't go to them, no longer why Aborigines are starving or given inappropriate rations, but why they live on fast foods and soft drinks that shorten their lives; no longer why they don't have houses, but why houses don't last; no longer why they are denied the right to drink, but why so many drink to excess."

But, Wootten says, the Left has clung too ferociously to a rights agenda advocating "constitutional amendments and treaties, which, whatever their future value, are a million miles from daily problems such as sexual abuse and youth suicide". The Right are smirking "I told you so" and saying self-determination causes the problems and that we should have stuck to assimilation. "This approach is arrogant and unworkable because it gives at best only a token recognition to the Aboriginal identity that is so precious and tenacious."

There is a widespread misunderstanding of what self-determination was meant to be. "It is not some state of grace, or political status, that can be conferred on people who are thence forward permitted and qualified to make whatever decisions they please. It is something that takes place whenever a responsible person, family or group make a decision about their own affairs, instead of having it made for them by a superintendent or missionary or anyone else."

In his report, Jonas says that from the Whitlam era on, indigenous policy's focus on "communities" has contributed to poverty and welfare passivity and has contributed to "the assimilation process" by undermining traditional authority structures and kinship responsibilities.

Many such "communities" had been created as colonial institutions such as reserves or missions, as part of "the dispossession and relocation of indigenous populations", he says.

At a Sydney forum last year, the indigenous historian Jackie Huggins complained that Aboriginal organisations find they must work "in white forms" imposed from above, as reflected in their very structures, meeting procedures and voting methods.

'When Aboriginal culture was to be incorporated inside the liberal democratic nation, it was thought of the equivalent to a high culture rather than as part of everyday life," she said.

But Monica Morgan, manager of the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation, told the conference her people had found "the structures themselves don't empower the people". So, they had set up the Yorta Yorta nation, made up of 16 families, each represented by an elder on the registered association governing the "nation". There is also a "circle of youth".

"The prime people to talk for country are the family groups with the elders as our representatives. Nothing but nothing happens without their authority and approval.'

However, Jonas is not hopeful Canberra will lose its distaste for self- determination."Recent years have seen the emphasis of the reconciliation process shift dramatically," he says.

"Currently, it is not about mutual accommodation on the basis of equality - it is about whether one group, indigenous people, are prepared to conform to the rest of society. If not, then the offer is closed."

Clip from: The Sydney Morning Herald

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