Page 240 - Week 01 - Thursday, 14 February 2008
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As so eloquently put by the Leader of the Opposition, sorry has now been said and the apology has been made. For apologies to be truly effective, they must be accepted and forgiveness must be given. And my hope is that the Aboriginal people and the Indigenous people of Australia and the Torres Strait Islander people of Australia can find forgiveness for what was done so that we can, without ever forgetting it, put it behind us so that we can move on together as a community.
I think the genuine problem that is encapsulated in the saying of sorry yesterday was the total emasculation of the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from our history for probably 150 or 160 years since first settlement. It is almost like they did not occur and they did not exist, and that is why so much that has happened has been allowed to happen and has continued to happen and has not been acknowledged, because we simply did not know. If you grew up in the 1960s in Sydney, like I did, and you went to the local school, all we were taught about the Aboriginal people was they had boomerangs, we brought them God and flour, and were they not lucky that we were here.
We had no idea of the struggle or the work of Pemulwuy, Kalkadu Man, Windradyne or Yagan or what they actually did to defend their land. Out of that total emasculation of their presence from our history is the ignorance that underlies some of those who would still not accept today what occurred in our past. I think that the real answer is yes, issues like health and housing are incredibly important, but at the heart of the path forward is education—education of Indigenous people in this country and education of non-Indigenous people in this country as to what truly happened. If you do not know what happened, you cannot even begin to conceive the place that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been condemned to at the bottom of our socioeconomic structure that has become Australia.
It is interesting that, at the heart of the removal, was the concept that Aboriginal people could not care for their own and, in particular, could not care for their children. It is also put around that they did not resist. I cannot say it any more eloquently than a man called Fred Maynard, who in 1925 set up the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association. Fred was Aboriginal, and this is what he said in 1925 about what was going on in his country. The encyclopaedia says:
Using his own finances, he travelled the north coast of NSW, publicly speaking out for the rights of Aboriginal people and their wish to integrate with society. He believed that their family life should be held sacred and free from invasion and that children should be left in the control of their parents.
Many of the Aboriginal protection boards in the states were fostering the removal of children. He goes on to say:
The board’s response to the AAPA’s actions relied on the assertion that Aboriginal people were incapable of handling their own affairs. Maynard replied, “I wish to make perfectly clear on behalf of, our people, that we wish to accept no condition of inferiority as compared with European people. Two distinct civilisations are represented by the respective races … That the European people by the arts of war destroyed our more ancient civilisation is freely admitted and that by their vices and diseases our people have been decimated is also patent, but neither of these facts are evidence of superiority. Quite the contrary is the case. Furthermore, I may refer, in passing, to the fact that your present scheme—
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