Sorry

When Rudd won I told my American boyfriend that the new Government would apologise to Indigenous Australians. Said boyfriend isn't especially racist, but he couldn't see the value: you either compensate people or you shut up, there's no point saying sorry.

I was standing in the changing rooms in my gym in Dublin today when it was reported on the radio that Rudd's first act in the new parliament would be the apology. I can't speak about what it means to the first Australians, but the sense of relief that I feel is beyond words. I was alone, which is just as well because I burst into tears.

For all that Howard was PM for 11 years, the thing, maybe the only thing that will be remembered about him is that he is the man who wouldn't say sorry. We actually do need the word. There was an annual Sorry Day instituted while Howard was in power and the organizers would have skywriters write the word. People would sign petitions saying that they wanted to apologise personally, if the nation wouldn't do it. Clarke and Dawe's The Games made an episode around the apology, the text of which they offered to 'any other John Howard' who might want to use it: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/thegames/howard.htm

The opposition to the apology has always argued that no living Australian is personally responsible for the Stolen Generation. This is utterly untrue because people were still being taken as late as the middle 20th century. It actually doesn't matter whether it's true. Howard said that it wasn't the role of Government to apologise. But that's just it, it is the role of Government. When a Government apologises, the collective, not the individual acts.

Howard always said it played into 'the Black Arm Band' view of history - something that never bothered the ex-PM when he was mourning soldiers fallen in WWI. Paul Keating said in the famous Redfern speech 'However intractable the problems seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragged down.' He went on to say, in a Don Watson phrase (one of many) which won him my undying love, and pissed off nearly everyone else 'That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.'

Everything about the Western World's self-narrative at the moment is to do with bottom-lines and what Australians call 'Economic Rationalism'. But actually, everyone is most profoundly concerned with culture politics and ideology. Howard was an ideological politician. Kennett was about balancing books, but Howard wanted the hearts and minds. Bush is the same. Which si why there has been such a kick in the opposite direction. When Australia voted for Rudd, people started to adopt Whitlam's election motto and talk about the First Hundred Days, just as people are trying to make a Bobby Kennedy out of Obama. The War in Iraq is about ideology as much as the Crusades were. (I am the historical consultant for a production of Macbeth at the moment and when I mentioned the Crusades continuing on into the 17th century, one of the actors said 'They're not over yet.')

Dr Nelson stills thinks we shouldn't apologise - he got the leadership of the conservatives at least in part because Turnbull said he would support an apology. But seriously! Even Ted Bailleu thinks we should 'do the decent thing.'

So, we are finally going to get the word itself. This is a section from Keating's Redfern speech:
We non- Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us.
Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia?
Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the fist Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We fail to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

Rudd wants to 'get it right'. I really hope he asks Watson to write it.