Australia's stolen generations: Bringing them home?

IT was a defining moment when the country's rock band "The Midnight Oil" displayed a bold "sorry" emblazoned on their costumes in the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, even if the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd failed to bring himself to articulate the same sentiment for what is widely known as the lost generation of Australia's first people -- euphuism for the victims of a state-sponsored kidnapping of Aboriginal children.
Yet, the labour prime minister went someway towards allaying the concerns that he might be another version of John Howard, his predecessor, on the issue. History might absolve him, but the stigma will persist.
Being a prisoner of conscience -- back in 1995 -- Prime Minister Paul Keating for the first time instituted an enquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children that took place in every Australian state from the late 1800s until 1969.
As many as 100,000 children, called the "stolen generation," were removed. This took varying forms -- by putting them in government-run institutions, having white families adopt these children, or by having whites foster them. The policy had semi-surreptitiously been followed until as recently at 1970.
Two years later, an enquiry yielded a report -- titled Bringing Them Home -- packed with harrowing details of children being snatched away from their mothers or being lured away on false pretences and thereafter being denied all contacts with their families.
The profoundly racist motivation behind the practice was to breed out aboriginality to introduce an Australian version of apartheid, and nourish the hope of Aborigines eventually ceasing to exist. Of special attraction to the authorities were the mixed race children, born of white men and aborigine women, for the ease of assimilation.
However, the Aborigines had been living in the immense island for tens of thousands of years before the British "discovered" it, and turned it into their penal colony. The indigenous cultures of Australia are among the oldest in the world, and at the time of occupation there were 700 different indigenous languages spoken in Australia.
When the Europeans first came to Australia the assumption was that the Aborigines had no religion. But for thousands of years the land was steeped in an ancient system of belief called Dreaming. Spiritually looked at -- the indigenous Australians had their religious beliefs anchored to a sense of belonging to the land, and the sea around it.
Interestingly, many of the aboriginal tribes had a profound sense of accommodation, and weren't altogether averse to sharing the land despite their deep cultural and spiritual attachment to it, of which they considered themselves as only the custodians and not the owners. In spite of such magnanimity of the indigenous people the white settlement was frequently accompanied by massacres.
Notwithstanding such savagery on the part of the colonisers, it was the original inhabitants of the land who were denigrated as barbarians and often treated as if they were animals.
The massacres eventually diminished, not least because the reports from the antipodes caused a certain amount of consternation in British political circles; but they gave way in the 20th century to genocide by other means.
Aborigines were generally corralled in barren tracts, and were not even considered Australian citizens until a watershed referendum in 1967 empowered the federal government to legislate on their behalf.
In the 40 years since then, their relegation to the margins of the society has hardly been reversed. Most of them subsist in dysfunctional communities where the standards of health and education are way below the general Australian standard, reflected in the ghastly statistic that the aboriginal life span is at least 17 years shorter than the Australian average.
Sexual abuse and misadventures involving alcohol are relatively common in these communities. This is not entirely surprising, given the absence of opportunities for intellectual advancement or gainful employment. A high proportion of Aborigines tend to be imprisoned even for minor offences and deaths in custody are shockingly frequent.
The use of the word "genocide" in "Bringing Them Home" raised a few hackles, even though it accurately summed up the intent of the policy in question, but the term "stolen generation" was readily accepted as an apt description of the victims.
The report recommended a formal apology and generous compensation. Unfortunately, by the time the report was tabled in 1997, Keating had been replaced as prime minister by John Howard, whose views on race relation were not as enlightened as those of Keating. He refused to accept the recommendation and, instead, made mocking references to the "black armband" view of history.
Howard's myopic vision, steeped in bigotry was, ironically, endorsed by a couple of ideologically motivated historians, but wasn't completely accepted by his own Liberal Party. White Australians by the tens of thousands signed "Sorry books" and participated in reconciliation marches.
Since the Labour Party returned to power last year, and has been enjoying a comfortable majority recently, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd chose to rise on his feet in the House of Representative and delivered an eloquent and unequivocal apology to the "stolen generation" and to Aborigines in general for their maltreatment over the decades. In doing so he demonstrated the power of words to alter perception.
It was a symbolic gesture, but it suddenly felt like a different country -- the sort of Australia presaged by "The Midnight Oil's" mildly rebellions gesture in the Olympics.
The apology does not, in itself, spell the end of the Australian version of apartheid. But it was, at long last, a step in right direction. The Rudd government has indicated that it intends to travel far down the road to a demonstrably non-racist Australia. How it proceeds in the months and years ahead will be watched with an abiding interest.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.