Historicity
This morning, Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, addressed parliament and the country with an apology to the Stolen Generations, a group of Aboriginal people who were forcibly removed from their families up to the 1970's.
It's a historic day.
I first encountered the idea of an apology to the Stolen Generations with Sorry Day in 1998. I balked. A friend was handing around a Sorry Book, and I distinctly remember the juggling of words, the struggle to express sympathy without using the word sorry. It's true that I was born after the policy and practices of forced removal were abandoned, but my callow 18-year-old self couldn't see how any of this connected to me, or how the word "sorry" could be applied by me to things that happened before I was born.
A few things have happened to me in the years since then, which have changed my perspective a bit. One thing has been studying child development and related theories (attachment theory, self psychology). Realising just how central our upbringing is to our adult adjustment and our sense of Self, I can more readily appreciate just what was lost by people raised in orphanages and institutions, without a loving parent to cradle their development or even pass on life skills. Working with people who were abused or neglected as children, and seeing the profound brokenness in their lives, gives me no room to doubt that harm was done where children were removed from loving homes and left vulnerable and alone in institutions.
With all its faults and failings, my own family is a haven for me, a place where I am accepted and loved without question. I can't imagine how different my life would be without the continued relationship with my Mum and my sisters especially. On her deathbed, my grandmother whispered to me "Family is everything." My Dad, especially, is interested in history, and has discovered a lot about where our forebears came from, and how we ended up here. Glimpses from the past illuminate aspects of our shared personalities - a note from a ship's log quotes a forebear, a paying passenger who refused to be pressed into service at the direction of the captain - words like "I will help any man who asks it, but I will not be compelled". We discover also that our surname means "outsider" in a certain dialect. Moreover, I am always amazed and gratified to see the echoes of resemblance in different family members - the similar barrel-chested solidness in an uncle here, a cousin there; the same shade of eyes, the similar nose, the defined shape of hands. In years gone by, people who did not know I had sisters would meet my youngest sister (Abby) and conclude we were related. I look at a photo of myself and see my grandmother, and others point out my uncle's jaw, my aunt's hair. All this gives me a sense of belonging, a sense of who I am which began long before I was born. What a loss, then, to grow up thinking yourself an orphan, or worse, to know of family still living who could not be found.
The picture that emerges from family history is a mixed one. I am amazed to read about their struggle against adversity, the differentness of times past from all that is familiar to me. There is a strange sense of pride in being descended from people of such toughness. At the same time, though, I wonder what they were really like - while the family I know of were largely selectors rather than squatters, and came to Australia far too late to be involved in anything like the Myall Creek massacre, I have no reason to think that their attitudes were any less barbarous (to my 2008 sensibilities) than many of the views expressed at the time. How can I disentangle a sense of pride at their achievements from a sense of shame at what else they might have done? To do so would be disingenuous on my part. While the wrongs of the 19th century don't specifically relate to the Stolen Generations, members of my family would have memories of the time when forcible removal of children official policy. I can't say anything about whether they agreed with these policies, whether they even knew about them at the time, but if I am of my family, then I have to accept my history is also entwined with the ugly parts of the history of our country.
Whether or not the removal of children from their families was a deliberate attempt to destroy the Aboriginal races (and there's some evidence that it was - Kevin Rudd read out some of it in his speech this morning), the scale of the suffering is hard to accept. And so of course it's easy to want to justify that, as many have done by saying that the people who enacted this policy thought they were doing the right thing (they probably did), that many of the people who took in Aboriginal kids did so out of love and did not mistreat them (undoubtedly true), and that many of the kids who were removed were living "in squalor", in other words neglected (this is probably true, but it's a chicken-and-egg situation - parents who have been raised in institutions, whether they were further abused or not, probably are lacking in parenting skills, and may well be too preoccupied with the aftereffects of their own trauma to raise children without help. It is probably fair to say that there was little support for struggling Aboriginal families to keep their children.) But to give voice to these contextual factors as though they explain away forcible removal is to ignore the effect of these policies, which was devestating, and the effects continue today, long after the policies and practices of forcible removal have gone.
And so then, for what it's worth at this late stage, here is my apology:
People of the Stolen Generations, I am sorry. I am grieved for all that you have lost in being separated from your families and stripped of your identity. I am sorry for my ignorance and my willingness to downplay this tragedy for my own comfort. I am sorry that the country I am part of, that I am proud of, has treated you so badly, has caused such lasting and irreparable harm. I am sorry that governments of our country (I'm not taking the blame for John Howard; I didn't vote for him) have treated your suffering like a political football, and further trampled on your grief, in their unwillingness to lose face and risk the possibility of compensation. I hope that today's national apology is a turning point towards a better future.
By-the-by, I have given up "recreational internet" for Lent. This means no Facebook, no YouTube, no eBay, and up to recently, no Livejournal. I've been reading my flist on the train via my PDA, but not spending ages trawling through communities etc. My intent in giving up a lot of my internet was to decrease the time-suckage, to leave more time for introspection, but I think LJ may well be useful for that. In any case, it seemed pointless to post that I was going away for a bit, since my last post was months ago anyway. Perhaps Lent and less time suckage means I should post more? We'll see. In any case, I'll still get comment notifications and emails directed to
It's a historic day.
I first encountered the idea of an apology to the Stolen Generations with Sorry Day in 1998. I balked. A friend was handing around a Sorry Book, and I distinctly remember the juggling of words, the struggle to express sympathy without using the word sorry. It's true that I was born after the policy and practices of forced removal were abandoned, but my callow 18-year-old self couldn't see how any of this connected to me, or how the word "sorry" could be applied by me to things that happened before I was born.
A few things have happened to me in the years since then, which have changed my perspective a bit. One thing has been studying child development and related theories (attachment theory, self psychology). Realising just how central our upbringing is to our adult adjustment and our sense of Self, I can more readily appreciate just what was lost by people raised in orphanages and institutions, without a loving parent to cradle their development or even pass on life skills. Working with people who were abused or neglected as children, and seeing the profound brokenness in their lives, gives me no room to doubt that harm was done where children were removed from loving homes and left vulnerable and alone in institutions.
With all its faults and failings, my own family is a haven for me, a place where I am accepted and loved without question. I can't imagine how different my life would be without the continued relationship with my Mum and my sisters especially. On her deathbed, my grandmother whispered to me "Family is everything." My Dad, especially, is interested in history, and has discovered a lot about where our forebears came from, and how we ended up here. Glimpses from the past illuminate aspects of our shared personalities - a note from a ship's log quotes a forebear, a paying passenger who refused to be pressed into service at the direction of the captain - words like "I will help any man who asks it, but I will not be compelled". We discover also that our surname means "outsider" in a certain dialect. Moreover, I am always amazed and gratified to see the echoes of resemblance in different family members - the similar barrel-chested solidness in an uncle here, a cousin there; the same shade of eyes, the similar nose, the defined shape of hands. In years gone by, people who did not know I had sisters would meet my youngest sister (Abby) and conclude we were related. I look at a photo of myself and see my grandmother, and others point out my uncle's jaw, my aunt's hair. All this gives me a sense of belonging, a sense of who I am which began long before I was born. What a loss, then, to grow up thinking yourself an orphan, or worse, to know of family still living who could not be found.
The picture that emerges from family history is a mixed one. I am amazed to read about their struggle against adversity, the differentness of times past from all that is familiar to me. There is a strange sense of pride in being descended from people of such toughness. At the same time, though, I wonder what they were really like - while the family I know of were largely selectors rather than squatters, and came to Australia far too late to be involved in anything like the Myall Creek massacre, I have no reason to think that their attitudes were any less barbarous (to my 2008 sensibilities) than many of the views expressed at the time. How can I disentangle a sense of pride at their achievements from a sense of shame at what else they might have done? To do so would be disingenuous on my part. While the wrongs of the 19th century don't specifically relate to the Stolen Generations, members of my family would have memories of the time when forcible removal of children official policy. I can't say anything about whether they agreed with these policies, whether they even knew about them at the time, but if I am of my family, then I have to accept my history is also entwined with the ugly parts of the history of our country.
Whether or not the removal of children from their families was a deliberate attempt to destroy the Aboriginal races (and there's some evidence that it was - Kevin Rudd read out some of it in his speech this morning), the scale of the suffering is hard to accept. And so of course it's easy to want to justify that, as many have done by saying that the people who enacted this policy thought they were doing the right thing (they probably did), that many of the people who took in Aboriginal kids did so out of love and did not mistreat them (undoubtedly true), and that many of the kids who were removed were living "in squalor", in other words neglected (this is probably true, but it's a chicken-and-egg situation - parents who have been raised in institutions, whether they were further abused or not, probably are lacking in parenting skills, and may well be too preoccupied with the aftereffects of their own trauma to raise children without help. It is probably fair to say that there was little support for struggling Aboriginal families to keep their children.) But to give voice to these contextual factors as though they explain away forcible removal is to ignore the effect of these policies, which was devestating, and the effects continue today, long after the policies and practices of forcible removal have gone.
And so then, for what it's worth at this late stage, here is my apology:
People of the Stolen Generations, I am sorry. I am grieved for all that you have lost in being separated from your families and stripped of your identity. I am sorry for my ignorance and my willingness to downplay this tragedy for my own comfort. I am sorry that the country I am part of, that I am proud of, has treated you so badly, has caused such lasting and irreparable harm. I am sorry that governments of our country (I'm not taking the blame for John Howard; I didn't vote for him) have treated your suffering like a political football, and further trampled on your grief, in their unwillingness to lose face and risk the possibility of compensation. I hope that today's national apology is a turning point towards a better future.
By-the-by, I have given up "recreational internet" for Lent. This means no Facebook, no YouTube, no eBay, and up to recently, no Livejournal. I've been reading my flist on the train via my PDA, but not spending ages trawling through communities etc. My intent in giving up a lot of my internet was to decrease the time-suckage, to leave more time for introspection, but I think LJ may well be useful for that. In any case, it seemed pointless to post that I was going away for a bit, since my last post was months ago anyway. Perhaps Lent and less time suckage means I should post more? We'll see. In any case, I'll still get comment notifications and emails directed to