Australia’s ‘National Sorry Day’
It’s always risky for nations to apologize, but Kevin Rudd’s act of contrition for Australia was based in Christian conviction.
On May 26, while Americans were barbecuing hot dogs and collectively grumbling over their beers and Cokes about the outrageous price of gasoline, Australians, fourteen hours ahead of America’s East Coast, were reflecting on their tenth annual commemoration of National Sorry Day.
To most Americans, that phrase might sound like a cynical skit from TV’s Saturday Night Live. But for Australians it is deadly serious. For ten years Australians have been annually reflecting upon the suffering that the country’s white settlers imposed on the indigenous Australians, also called Aborigines.
There are about 460,000 Aborigines in a total population of 21 million, about two percent of the population. That number is barely the same as the number in Australia at the time of the first English settlements in 1788, which means that, allowing for projections of natural growth, over two centuries thousands—and perhaps hundreds of thousands—were decimated at the hands of the white man and the white man’s disease, smallpox.
The murder and mistreatment of indigenous Australians at the beginning of Australia’s history was one thing. Americans might feel a twinge of guilt over the thought that some of their own ancestors were behaving towards Native Americans in the same way at the same time. But the origins of National Sorry Day came out of a much more recent historical wrong against the Aborigines. Even as late as the 1970s a government-approved program in different parts of Australia was forcibly removing Aborigine children from their parents and placing them in foster families and orphanages. The explicit purpose was to assimilate them so completely in the white community that, after a few generations, they ceased to be Aborigines. Those who suffered this humiliating family disruption were called the Stolen Generation. It was one year after the official approval of a government report on the Stolen Generation, Bringing them Home, that the first National Sorry Day began.
What made 2008’s National Sorry Day especially poignant for many indigenous Australians—many prefer this term to “Aborigines,” which carries a lot of freight—was an extraordinary speech to the Australian parliament made by the country’s new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, last February 28. For the first time ever, Australia’s head of government issued an unqualified, and deeply moving, statement of apology to the indigenous Australians, specifically for the offense of the policies that led to the Stolen Generation. “I move,” Rudd said, using the language of parliamentary bills, “that today we honor the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.”
Rudd went on, “Let the Parliament reflect for a moment on the following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30 percent of Indigenous children [some 50,000] were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers.” He then provided anecdotes of the suffering of individual Aborigine families caught up in the Stolen Generation policy. He told of children being literally dragged away from their mothers or of being winkled out from holes in the ground where they were hiding. Then he made a remarkable public act of contrition. “To the Stolen Generations,” he stated, “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. And I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering we, the Parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted.”
As thousands of Aborigines listened to the speech outside the Parliament in Canberra, many of them wept. In schools throughout the country classes were modified to listen to the speech and then discuss it. In the apology speech, Rudd proposed a “war cabinet,” consisting of him and the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, to coordinate government policies to repair the damage done to Australia’s indigenous people during the Stolen Generation years.
Rudd’s eloquent apology was not only deeply moving, it was also a historical first for an Anglo-Saxon country. Though the Germans have performed many acts of public contrition for the holocaust against Europe’s Jews, and in 2005 Tomiichi Murayama, then Japan’s prime minister, issued a formal apology to the nations that Japan invaded and occupied during World War II, the apology record of other governments is mixed. One strongly expressed argument against an apology by the U.S. government for its past mistreatment of Native Americans and African-Americans is that it would unleash an uncontainable avalanche of compensation claims.
In Australia, there was and is a risk that Rudd’s apology could likewise open the dam to a financial firestorm. There have certainly been mutterings in the Aboriginal community about a need for compensation. One reason the former Liberal Party government (which is actually politically conservative) refused to offer a generalized apology earlier, despite the issuance of the Stolen Generation report during its term of office, was the fear of financial claims. Another was the view that the current generation of Australians was not responsible for offenses committed by its predecessors. After Kevin Rudd’s speech of apology in parliament in February 2008, the Liberal Party opposition leader Brendan Nelson offered a much more qualified apology and several of his fellow-party MPs boycotted the session. Many of the listening Aborigines turned their backs to this speech.
Rudd’s act of deep conviction last February is certainly related to his strong Christian faith. Though not at all a “Christian conservative” in the American sense of the term, Rudd is a committed Christian believer. He traces his political roots back to an early stalwart of Britain’s Labour Party, the Christian socialist Keir Hardie, who was raised as an atheist and converted to Christianity.
There are always risks when nations apologize. The Germans did indeed pay billions to the state of Israel and to individual Jews as part of their act of contrition. But can anyone now say that the German apology was the wrong thing to do? Germany was morally ennobled by its forthright acceptance of wrongdoing during World War II. Australia will be similarly ennobled by Kevin Rudd’s act of political courage and by Australians’ collective willingness to share in the contrition. Oh, and you don’t have to be politically conservative to be a Christian.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, Society, Fri 30 May 2008
