[ExI] "an aboriginal human from 70,000 B.C."

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:55 PM 3/22/2008 -0700,  Lee wrote:

> >> What can the government do except forcibly integrate the
> >> families into separate cities as far as apart as possible?
> >> It should have been done a long time ago.

[Damien:]
> > <incredulous outburst in response deleted>

[Lee:]
>[...] I did *not* say that the solution I suggest would be nice or good.
>In my earlier post where I mentioned the same thing, I thought I
>had made it clear that I didn't like this one bit, but that all the
>alternatives looked worse.

The point is that this is *exactly* the appalling 
"solution" that helped destroy Aboriginal 
Australia, already reeling from the theft of land and livelihood.

Here is the recent important and moving speech on 
the topic by newly-elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd:


"There comes a time in the history of nations 
when their peoples must become fully reconciled 
to their past if they are to go forward with 
confidence to embrace their future. Our nation, 
Australia, has reached such a time. That is why 
the parliament is today here assembled: to deal 
with this unfinished business of the nation, to 
remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and, 
in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new 
chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.

Last year I made a commitment to the Australian 
people that if we formed the next government of 
the Commonwealth we would in parliament say sorry 
to the stolen generations. Today I honour that 
commitment. I said we would do so early in the 
life of the new parliament. Again, today I honour 
that commitment by doing so at the commencement 
of this the 42nd parliament of the Commonwealth. 
Because the time has come, well and truly come, 
for all peoples of our great country, for all 
citizens of our great Commonwealth, for all 
Australians--those who are Indigenous and those 
who are not--to come together to reconcile and 
together build a new future for our nation.

Some have asked, ‘Why apologise?’ Let me begin to 
answer by telling the parliament just a little of 
one person’s story­an elegant, eloquent and 
wonderful woman in her 80s, full of life, full of 
funny stories, despite what has happened in her 
life’s journey, a woman who has travelled a long 
way to be with us today, a member of the stolen 
generation who shared some of her story with me 
when I called around to see her just a few days 
ago. Nanna Nungala Fejo, as she prefers to be 
called, was born in the late 1920s. She remembers 
her earliest childhood days living with her 
family and her community in a bush camp just 
outside Tennant Creek. She remembers the love and 
the warmth and the kinship of those days long 
ago, including traditional dancing around the 
camp fire at night. She loved the dancing. She 
remembers once getting into strife when, as a 
four-year-old girl, she insisted on dancing with 
the male tribal elders rather than just sitting 
and watching the men, as the girls were supposed to do.

But then, sometime around 1932, when she was 
about four, she remembers the coming of the 
welfare men. Her family had feared that day and 
had dug holes in the creek bank where the 
children could run and hide. What they had not 
expected was that the white welfare men did not 
come alone. They brought a truck, two white men 
and an Aboriginal stockman on horseback cracking 
his stockwhip. The kids were found; they ran for 
their mothers, screaming, but they could not get 
away. They were herded and piled onto the back of 
the truck. Tears flowing, her mum tried clinging 
to the sides of the truck as her children were 
taken away to the Bungalow in Alice, all in the name of protection...

A few years later, government policy changed. Now 
the children would be handed over to the missions 
to be cared for by the churches. But which church 
would care for them? The kids were simply told to 
line up in three lines. Nanna Fejo and her sister 
stood in the middle line, her older brother and 
cousin on her left. Those on the left were told 
that they had become Catholics, those in the 
middle Methodists and those on the right Church 
of England. That is how the complex questions of 
post-reformation theology were resolved in the 
Australian outback in the 1930s. It was as crude 
as that. She and her sister were sent to a 
Methodist mission on Goulburn Island and then 
Croker Island. Her Catholic brother was sent to 
work at a cattle station and her cousin to a Catholic mission.

Nanna Fejo’s family had been broken up for a 
second time. She stayed at the mission until 
after the war, when she was allowed to leave for 
a prearranged job as a domestic in Darwin. She 
was 16. Nanna Fejo never saw her mum again. After 
she left the mission, her brother let her know 
that her mum had died years before, a broken 
woman fretting for the children that had literally been ripped away from her.

I asked Nanna Fejo what she would have me say 
today about her story. She thought for a few 
moments. then said that what I should say today 
was that all mothers are important. And she 
added: ‘Families--keeping them together is very 
important. It’s a good thing that you are 
surrounded by love and that love is passed down 
the generations. That’s what gives you 
happiness.’ As I left, later on, Nanna Fejo took 
one of my staff aside, wanting to make sure that 
I was not too hard on the Aboriginal stockman who 
had hunted those kids down all those years ago. 
The stockman had found her again decades later, 
this time himself to say, ‘Sorry.’ And 
remarkably, extraordinarily, she had forgiven him.

Nanna Fejo’s is just one story. There are 
thousands, tens of thousands of them: stories of 
forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait 
Islander children from their mums and dads over 
the better part of a century. Some of these 
stories are graphically told in Bringing them 
home, the report commissioned in 1995 by Prime 
Minister Keating and received in 1997 by Prime 
Minister Howard. There is something terribly 
primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain 
is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, 
the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer 
brutality of the act of physically separating a 
mother from her children is a deep assault on our 
senses and on our most elemental humanity.

These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out 
for an apology. Instead, from the nation’s 
parliament there has been a stony, stubborn and 
deafening silence for more than a decade; a view 
that somehow we, the parliament, should suspend 
our most basic instincts of what is right and 
what is wrong; a view that, instead, we should 
look for any pretext to push this great wrong to 
one side, to leave it languishing with the 
historians, the academics and the cultural 
warriors, as if the stolen generations are little 
more than an interesting sociological phenomenon. 
But the stolen generations are not intellectual 
curiosities. They are human beings, human beings 
who have been damaged deeply by the decisions of 
parliaments and governments. But, as of today, 
the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end.

The nation is demanding of its political 
leadership to take us forward. Decency, human 
decency, universal human decency, demands that 
the nation now step forward to right an 
historical wrong. That is what we are doing in 
this place today. But should there still be 
doubts as to why we must now act, let the 
parliament reflect for a moment on the following 
facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 
and 30 per cent of Indigenous children were 
forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers; 
that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were 
forcibly taken from their families; that this was 
the product of the deliberate, calculated 
policies of the state as reflected in the 
explicit powers given to them under statute; that 
this policy was taken to such extremes by some in 
administrative authority that the forced 
extractions of children of so-called ‘mixed 
lineage’ were seen as part of a broader policy of 
dealing with ‘the problem of the Aboriginal population’.

One of the most notorious examples of this 
approach was from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives, who stated:

Generally by the fifth and invariably by the 
sixth generation, all native characteristics of 
the Australian aborigine are eradicated.

The problem of our half-castes, to quote the protector­

will quickly be eliminated by the complete 
disappearance of the black race, and the swift 
submergence of their progeny in the white...

The Western Australian Protector of Natives 
expressed not dissimilar views, expounding them 
at length in Canberra in 1937 at the first 
national conference on Indigenous affairs that 
brought together the Commonwealth and state 
protectors of natives. These are uncomfortable 
things to be brought out into the light. They are 
not pleasant. They are profoundly disturbing. But 
we must acknowledge these facts if we are to deal 
once and for all with the argument that the 
policy of generic forced separation was somehow 
well motivated, justified by its historical 
context and, as a result, unworthy of any apology today.

Then we come to the argument of intergenerational 
responsibility, also used by some to argue 
against giving an apology today. But let us 
remember the fact that the forced removal of 
Aboriginal children was happening as late as the 
early 1970s. The 1970s is not exactly a point in 
remote antiquity. There are still serving members 
of this parliament who were first elected to this 
place in the early 1970s. It is well within the 
adult memory span of many of us. The 
uncomfortable truth for us all is that the 
parliaments of the nation, individually and 
collectively, enacted statutes and delegated 
authority under those statutes that made the 
forced removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.

There is a further reason for an apology as well: 
it is that reconciliation is in fact an 
expression of a core value of our nation--and 
that value is a fair go for all. There is a deep 
and abiding belief in the Australian community 
that, for the stolen generations, there was no 
fair go at all. There is a pretty basic Aussie 
belief that says that it is time to put right 
this most outrageous of wrongs. It is for these 
reasons, quite apart from concerns of fundamental 
human decency, that the governments and 
parliaments of this nation must make this 
apology--because, put simply, the laws that our 
parliaments enacted made the stolen generations possible.

We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately 
responsible, not those who gave effect to our 
laws. And the problem lay with the laws 
themselves. As has been said of settler societies 
elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings 
from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the 
bearer of their burdens as well. Therefore, for 
our nation, the course of action is clear: that 
is, to deal now with what has become one of the 
darkest chapters in Australia’s history. In doing 
so, we are doing more than contending with the 
facts, the evidence and the often rancorous 
public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling 
with our own soul. This is not, as some would 
argue, a black-armband view of history; it is 
just the truth: the cold, confronting, 
uncomfortable truth--facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it.

Until we fully confront that truth, there will 
always be a shadow hanging over us and our future 
as a fully united and fully reconciled people. It 
is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the 
injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. 
It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: 
as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On 
behalf of the government of Australia, I am 
sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, 
I am sorry. I offer you this apology without 
qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the 
pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have 
caused you by the laws that previous parliaments 
have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the 
degradation and the humiliation these laws 
embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, 
the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the 
families and the communities whose lives were 
ripped apart by the actions of successive 
governments under successive parliaments. In 
making this apology, I would also like to speak 
personally to the members of the stolen 
generations and their families: to those here 
today, so many of you; to those listening across 
the nation--from Yuendumu, in the central west of 
the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North 
Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf 
of the government and the parliament, there is 
nothing I can say today that can take away the 
pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words 
I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone 
are not that powerful; grief is a very personal 
thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians 
listening today who may not fully understand why 
what we are doing is so important to imagine for 
a moment that this had happened to you. I say to 
honourable members here present: imagine if this 
had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. 
Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. My 
proposal is this: if the apology we extend today 
is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in 
which it is offered, we can today resolve 
together that there be a new beginning for 
Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that 
I believe the nation is now calling us.

Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a 
very practical lot. For us, symbolism is 
important but, unless the great symbolism of 
reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater 
substance, it is little more than a clanging 
gong. It is not sentiment that makes history; it 
is our actions that make history. Today’s 
apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting 
past wrongs. It is also aimed at building a 
bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous 
Australians--a bridge based on a real respect 
rather than a thinly veiled contempt. Our 
challenge for the future is to cross that bridge 
and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership 
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous 
Australians--to embrace, as part of that 
partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical 
services to help the stolen generations to trace 
their families if at all possible and to provide 
dignity to their lives. But the core of this 
partnership for the future is to close the gap 
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians 
on life expectancy, educational achievement and 
employment opportunities. This new partnership on 
closing the gap will set concrete targets for the 
future: within a decade to halve the widening gap 
in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and 
opportunities for Indigenous Australians, within 
a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant 
mortality rates between Indigenous and 
non-Indigenous children and, within a generation, 
to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap 
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in overall life expectancy.

The truth is: a business as usual approach 
towards Indigenous Australians is not working. 
Most old approaches are not working. We need a 
new beginning--a new beginning which contains 
real measures of policy success or policy 
failure; a new beginning, a new partnership, on 
closing the gap with sufficient flexibility not 
to insist on a one-size-fits-all approach for 
each of the hundreds of remote and regional 
Indigenous communities across the country but 
instead allowing flexible, tailored, local 
approaches to achieve commonly-agreed national 
objectives that lie at the core of our proposed 
new partnership; a new beginning that draws 
intelligently on the experiences of new policy 
settings across the nation. However, unless we as 
a parliament set a destination for the nation, we 
have no clear point to guide our policy, our 
programs or our purpose; we have no centralised organising principle.

Let us resolve today to begin with the little 
children--a fitting place to start on this day of 
apology for the stolen generations. Let us 
resolve over the next five years to have every 
Indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal 
community enrolled in and attending a proper 
early childhood education centre or opportunity 
and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy 
programs. Let us resolve to build new educational 
opportunities for these little ones, year by 
year, step by step, following the completion of 
their crucial preschool year. Let us resolve to 
use this systematic approach to build future 
educational opportunities for Indigenous children 
to provide proper primary and preventive health 
care for the same children, to begin the task of 
rolling back the obscenity that we find today in 
infant mortality rates in remote Indigenous 
communities--up to four times higher than in other communities.

None of this will be easy. Most of it will be 
hard--very hard. But none of it is impossible, 
and all of it is achievable with clear goals, 
clear thinking, and by placing an absolute 
premium on respect, cooperation and mutual 
responsibility as the guiding principles of this 
new partnership on closing the gap. The mood of 
the nation is for reconciliation now, between 
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The 
mood of the nation on Indigenous policy and 
politics is now very simple. The nation is 
calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond 
our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and 
our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate 
this one core area of national responsibility to 
a rare position beyond the partisan divide. 
Surely this is the unfulfilled spirit of the 1967 
referendum. Surely, at least from this day forward, we should give it a go.

Let me take this one step further and take what 
some may see as a piece of political posturing 
and make a practical proposal to the opposition 
on this day, the first full sitting day of the 
new parliament. I said before the election that 
the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts 
of Indigenous policy, because the challenges are 
too great and the consequences are too great to 
allow it all to become a political football, as 
it has been so often in the past. I therefore 
propose a joint policy commission, to be led by 
the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a 
mandate to develop and implement--to begin 
with--an effective housing strategy for remote 
communities over the next five years. It will be 
consistent with the government’s policy 
framework, a new partnership for closing the gap. 
If this commission operates well, I then propose 
that it work on the further task of 
constitutional recognition of the first 
Australians, consistent with the longstanding 
platform commitments of my party and the 
pre-election position of the opposition. This 
would probably be desirable in any event because, 
unless such a proposition were absolutely 
bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum. As I 
have said before, the time has come for new 
approaches to enduring problems. Working 
constructively together on such defined projects 
would, I believe, meet with the support of the 
nation. It is time for fresh ideas to fashion the nation’s future.

Mr Speaker, today the parliament has come 
together to right a great wrong. We have come 
together to deal with the past so that we might 
fully embrace the future. We have had sufficient 
audacity of faith to advance a pathway to that 
future, with arms extended rather than with fists 
still clenched. So let us seize the day. Let it 
not become a moment of mere sentimental 
reflection. Let us take it with both hands and 
allow this day, this day of national 
reconciliation, to become one of those rare 
moments in which we might just be able to 
transform the way in which the nation thinks 
about itself, whereby the injustice administered 
to the stolen generations in the name of these, 
our parliaments, causes all of us to reappraise, 
at the deepest level of our beliefs, the real 
possibility of reconciliation writ large: 
reconciliation across all Indigenous Australia; 
reconciliation across the entire history of the 
often bloody encounter between those who emerged 
from the Dreamtime a thousand generations ago and 
those who, like me, came across the seas only 
yesterday; reconciliation which opens up whole 
new possibilities for the future.

It is for the nation to bring the first two 
centuries of our settled history to a close, as 
we begin a new chapter. We embrace with pride, 
admiration and awe these great and ancient 
cultures we are truly blessed to have among 
us--cultures that provide a unique, uninterrupted 
human thread linking our Australian continent to 
the most ancient prehistory of our planet. 
Growing from this new respect, we see our 
Indigenous brothers and sisters with fresh eyes, 
with new eyes, and we have our minds wide open as 
to how we might tackle, together, the great 
practical challenges that Indigenous Australia faces in the future.

Let us turn this page together: Indigenous and 
non-Indigenous Australians, government and 
opposition, Commonwealth and state, and write 
this new chapter in our nation’s story together. 
First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who 
first took the oath of allegiance just a few 
weeks ago. Let’s grasp this opportunity to craft 
a new future for this great land: Australia.