Events | 2010.02.22
A true apology to Aboriginal people means action as well | Kate Grenville
Australia\'s prime minister was right to say sorry, but two years on little has changed for the better in indigenous communities
Two years ago I stood with thousands of others on the lawns outside Parliament House in Canberra and watched on a giant screen as, inside the building, our new Labor party prime minister did something his conservative predecessor had refused to do: he apologised to the Aboriginal people of Australia .
Around me in the crowd were many Aboriginal people. By the end of Kevin Rudd\'s speech most of them were in tears. Rudd wasn\'t apologising for the whole sorry mess that is the history of colonialism in Australia. His apology was specifically for the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, government policy for many years during the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of those people weeping quietly around me had suffered that most primal of dispossessions.
Rudd\'s speech ended on a cautious note: "We take this first step … in laying claim to a future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems …" Two years later, how does it look? Any new solutions to those old problems?
Rudd was right to be cautious; indigenous people are still hugely disadvantaged. They are much more likely than non-indigenous Australians to suffer preventable illnesses, die young, be in jail, be illiterate and live in unacceptable conditions. Promised reform in housing, health and education is moving with glacial slowness. Government support is often inadequate, and lacking in understanding and willingness to listen.
Public outrage about the "stolen generations" has faded. A backlash, led by revisionist academics, has gained a public voice, arguing that no children were forcibly taken and more generally that non-indigenous Australians have nothing to apologise for. The issue of compensation is still contentious.
The mosr recent " intervention " was a radical policy by the previous government as a response to reports of high levels of violence on some remote indigenous communities. It was widely perceived as clumsy, insensitive, insulting to functional communities and in many ways ineffective. In order to specifically target indigenous communities, it suspended the Racial Discrimination Act.
One of the accusations directed at the Rudd government is that, in spite of grand words about the "healing of the nation", it has continued the intervention. So was the apology just hot air, a cynical exercise in spin?
The Rudd government can\'t point to any spectacular policy changes or huge improvement in outcomes. But there has been some movement. The Racial Discrimination Act has been reinstated, so that income management of those on welfare no longer applies only to indigenous recipients. Over a billion extra dollars has been allocated to indigenous housing. There\'s been an unprecedented amount of consultation with indigenous groups, and a recognition that a "one size fits all" approach doesn\'t work.
When you spend even a short time among indigenous people, especially in remote Australia, you start to see just how tangled the problems are.
Take housing. Some indigenous communities are deeply divided about what should be built, where and for whom. Threading a way through local politics is fraught with problems. As well, indigenous people often wish to live in extended families, but there are, traditionally, forbidden relationships. For example, a mother–in-law and a son-in-law can\'t share a space or even make eye contact. That makes housing not a simple matter.
When a person dies in a house, continuing to live there can be an issue – traditionally the people would move away. Housing policy has to accommodate people who wish to live "between places" rather than staying put. The idea of individual ownership – of a house or land – isn\'t part of traditional culture and is a goal many indigenous people have no interest in. Add to all this the fact that many people in remote communities speak little English, and you end up with a situation where the provision of desperately needed housing isn\'t as simple as it might first appear.
When a culture has been as thoroughly disrupted as indigenous culture has been by European colonisation over the last 200 years, the damage can\'t be easily reversed. That culture, and the hunter-gatherer life it sprang from, can\'t be put back the way it was. At the same time, it can\'t be erased: "assimilation" isn\'t the way to go. Between these extremes, indigenous communities are trying different ways to accommodate change as well as retain tradition.
Something unexpected and positive is happening: Aboriginal voices in mainstream media. Our richest literary prize was recently won by Alexis Wright, an indigenous woman, for a novel – Carpentaria – that fuses indigenous and European storytelling ways. Samson and Delilah, by indigenous director Warwick Thornton, a film about young love in a troubled outback community, won eight Australian Film Institute awards and the Camera d\'Or prize at Cannes and has reached big mainstream audiences.
All that has nothing directly to do with what Rudd said in parliament two years ago. Nothing his government has done since has so far made much difference. Symbolic acts don\'t change anything, and they\'re never enough. But this one was an overdue and necessary first step.
Kate Grenville\'s novel The Lieutenant was published in paperback on 4 February
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]riginals-apology-disadvantaged
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