Imagine if there was a national holiday in which you actually went up to your neighbor, to your co-worker, and apologized for the transgressions of the past. Trust me. Such a national holiday exists. I wouldn’t exactly call it a holiday, it’s not like Christmas or Easter – but it does involve healing and patience and atonement. More like a secular version of Yom Kippur, and it’s a story that needs to be told.
On May 26, 1997, the Australian government received a very special report about one of the most tragic and sinister moments in their history. The “Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families” was a document that depicted something worse than apartheid, worse than racial segregation, worse than the genocides in Rwanda or Somalia – no, it was a period of ethnic cleansing that took place over generations of Australian history, and paints a different picture of Australia – different than sun-kissed beaches and shrimps on the barbie.
Beginning in 1869, and continuing for the next hundred years, the Australian government forcibly removed children from aboriginal families. The children were made wards of the court, and were placed in white families’ foster homes. The boys were often trained as farmhands; the girls became servants. Children were beaten if they were caught speaking or writing in their native Aboriginal language. Their parents were forbidden to contact the children; it wasn’t until the 1990’s, when the Report – also known as “Bringing Them Home” – shocked the country.
One year later, on May 26, 1998, the first “National Sorry Day” was held. Ten years later, Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd spoke in the Australian Parliament, and you can hear his apology on the YouTube clip below.
The Stolen Generation story doesn’t end there. Films like Rabbit-Proof Fence and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia also base their content on the stories of children that were taken away from their Aboriginal families.
There is no way to change the past. What happened was wrong – and this is taking into account the same misguided idiocy that created everything from shantytowns to concentration camps; from internment centers to refugee camps, from slums to squalor.
But in the past few years, the Australian government and the populace have worked toward creating a day when an apology is given – and accepted – for the wrongs of a country’s past.
It’s not a perfect solution. Nothing ever is.
It is, however, a step towards slowly healing the barbaric and cathartic wounds of a nation’s past.
Chuck The Writer 