the apology

We've been trying to instill in Olle the sense that this is a very important day. I know he doesn't comprehend that - but I hope that when he's older, much older, he'll remember and realise why it was so important.

Though maybe it's impossible for someone of his generation to ever understand the near-silence about and invisibility of race and of Aboriginal people when I was a child in urban Australia. Except of course, there wasn't really silence - there were, for example, my (Catholic) farming relatives who argued that "you would never want to live next door to 'them'". As a child of 10, I was shocked that supposedly religious people could have that attitude. Looking back, it seems so obvious that less than a century before, their district had been settled by whites and the Aboriginal people dispossessed - I do think guilt fuelled the type of anger in them that seemed so aimless and apparently unmotivated to me. I was oblivious to the Aboriginal people camped by the river on the outskirts of their country town, though my older brother says he remembers them. I was oblivious to the fact that some of the shearers were Aboriginal, because I thought Aboriginal people had black skin. Oblivious... Looking back, I realise that my best friend's father was Aboriginal, though that was not something that could have been talked about as it would have carried connotations of alcoholism and dirt.

Our own parents were never explicitly racist - my father had spent time in WA and the NT during the war and was very interested in Aboriginal culture and art, before that became popular. But Aboriginals were seen as a distant and largely irrelevant issue (except in 1967 when they of course supported the referendum).

As a young adult, I didn't realise that my Aboriginal friends were Aboriginal. Some of them didn't realise that either. One friend had been adopted - we used to speculate that she had an Italian background, due to her dark curly hair. At work once she was abused as a "coon". But it wasn't until she sought her birth mother when she was 30 that she discovered her mother was Aboriginal. That's now so obvious when I look at her that I find it remarkable that we whites could have been so race-blind at the time. We were brought up not to see. (She attended some adoption conferences and was approached by other Aboriginal people who assumed - correctly - that she was Aboriginal, before she found out she was.) And the fair-skinned women who did know they had Aboriginal relatives largely kept quiet about it, even though the Land Rights movement was in full swing at that time (the mid-70s). On the personal level, there are many dimensions of fear and shame that this culture has only recently begun to address.

I watched Kevin Rudd's speech live online, having passed the big screen and crowds at Martin Place on my way to work (of course it was drizzling, this being Sydney 2008). It was a better, tougher speech than I'd expected. I cried. Then I made myself listen to Brendan Nelson. Some of it was okay, but for crying out loud do we always have to have references to glorious Australian soldiers as the highest touchpoint of 'the nation'? (Yes, apparently we do.) And what were these "good intentions" with which Aboriginal children were removed? Even if not all of the perpetrators were evil villains, they were at the least misguided and complicit in a racist system - surely that has to be faced. (And Rudd did face that.) Nelson went over the top with his prolonged descriptions of recent intra-Aboriginal crime. The detail was out of place on such an occasion and came across as a 'nyah nyah' moment, an attempt to justify the Howard government's policies. I wonder how much of that was Nelson's own words and how much a sop to the right wing of his party.

In my university studies in the past 18 months, there've been quite a few tutorial discussions about the state of Aboriginal Australia (usually without any indigenous people present). Although it's now something that can be discussed (it wasn't mentioned in any of my mid-70s university tutorials), there's still obvious resentment and something verging on fear from most students, plus annoyance that "that old subject" is raised yet again. It's occured to me that many of this new generation (the vast majority of students are first or second generation migrants from Asia, Europe and the middle east) could easily replicate the blindness to indigeneity of my generation of whites.

For today, anyway, I am, if not optimistic that things will change fundamentally under this government, relieved and prepared to be hopeful.

Comments

[Lori]

I missed the speech since it was on so early (7am for us in the west).

All the reports of it have been positive so far...and all the reports of Nelson's speech have been negative. I'll watch it properly later tonight on tv or online.

I think the understanding of my kids here will be much like how I understood the civil rights movement in the US as I grew up. It was before my time...I do understand but I don't think I could ever completely appreciate what it was like since I was born in the era of the civil rights movement and grew up in a culture that was far different).

I enjoyed your post. This is why you should continue to blog. :)

[Mikhela]

In my film class we also had a discussion and the younger students seemed convinced that racism against indigenous people was distant history. Again, no Aboriginal people were present.

[cathy (scrap4u)]

well written.

i too am hopeful that this important speech be the catalyst for real change and progress...