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The Forum > Article Comments > Knowing when to say 'sorry' > Comments

Knowing when to say 'sorry' : Comments

By Russell Marks, published 11/2/2008

The overarching aim of a national apology is to set the nation on a path of healing.

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Healing?

Then as now, children were removed to save their lives, to protect them from rape and starvation and prostitution.

Healing will come when the people who created those conditions in their own communities apologise to their victims, and accept responsibility for change.

The many, many aboriginal people who are quietly and successfully looking after their families deserve protection from the substance abusers, rapists and paedophiles that prey on them. SORRY puts the responsibility on the people who DIDN'T do the worst.
Posted by ChrisPer, Monday, 11 February 2008 3:23:17 PM
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"The overarching aim of a national apology is to set the nation on a path of healing." The nation; that's all of us. Here "healing" seems to mean the coming together of two parties, one of whom has wronged the other. I came here in 1979, and have never been involved in acts which harmed aboriginals. I have been harmed by others myself, leading to extreme depression, to come out of which I had to realise that whatever others did, I was causing my own pain by being unable to let go of what was done to me - the perpetrators had probably long forgotten it. Throughout my time in Australia, there have been non-aboriginals who have encouraged the maintenance of pain, of "victim-hood." Those people should apologise, for having made it harder for aboriginals to put aside any past wrongs and get on with life.

The article in the Australian 11-12/2 on the so-called "stolen generations" casts further doubt that a significant body of such people actually exists. I think that an apology may have the perverse effect of making unhappy a large body of people who feel that they have nothing to apologise for, without helping the much smaller number who seek an apology.
Posted by Faustino, Monday, 11 February 2008 4:54:59 PM
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One cannot “set the nation on a path of healing’ with QUACK prescriptions. And an apology or a ‘sorry’ is a quack remedy coming with the compliments of the Rudd government.

http://kotzabasis3.wordpress.com
Posted by Themistocles, Monday, 11 February 2008 4:55:06 PM
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I note that a number of posters dispute the very existence of a “Stolen Generation”. I don’t see how that is possible.

Section 6 of Queensland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act 1865 declared that “Any child born of an aboriginal or half-caste mother” was automatically a “neglected child” for the purposes of that Act, and was therefore subject (under ss 7 and 8) to being “immediately apprehended…without any warrant" to be “detained” in an “industrial school” “for not less than one year nor more than seven years”. Records show that “at least” 167 “half-caste” (sic) children were thus apprehended in Queensland before June 1905. That state’s Chief Protector, Walter Roth, believed that even “more stringent measures should be insisted on with a view to raising the social status of the half-caste children”, and saw no better way to do this than by taking “all such infants” from the camps to be “brought up as white children”, and prevented from “inbreeding” with “full-bloods”. The racism (the belief in the superiority of one’s own race over another) in these and many other statements of the time is clearly evident.

The NT’s Acting Administrator in 1911 wrote that “one of the first works to be undertaken is to gather in all half caste children who are living with aborigines”. “No doubt”, he continued, “the mothers would object and there would probably be an outcry from well meaning people about depriving the mother of her child”. The Ordinance of 1918 gave the Chief Protector power to, “at any time”, “undertake the care, custody, or control of any aboriginal or half-caste” – as the CP was the “legal guardian of every aboriginal and half-caste child, notwithstanding that the child has a parent or other relative living”. In 1933 the CP wrote that “Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour”.

The ‘Travelling Protector’ in WA in 1909 wrote that: “I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief may be at the time. They soon forget their offspring.”
Posted by RussellMarks, Monday, 11 February 2008 5:20:21 PM
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The term "stolen generation" is not generally being applied to the period 1865-1909, but to much more recent events. It implies a wholesale removal and non-return which some historians, e.g. Keith Windschuttle, dispute on the basis of evidence they have researched - cf his article in the Weekend Australian.
Posted by Faustino, Monday, 11 February 2008 5:49:04 PM
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Apparently we can say sorry to the Vietnam vets for being done wrong by past governments but not to Aboriginals ?
Posted by westernred, Monday, 11 February 2008 6:01:09 PM
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