Initiatives of Change - Hope in the Cities - Stories of community change

Former Governor-General of Australia Sir Zelman Cowen presents the Sorry Book he has just signed to Melissa Brickell (left) and Carol Kendall, Co-Chair of the national Sorry Day Committee

This year nearly a million people walked for reconciliation. The word “Sorry” featured on all those walks. Apology for past wrongs is the first step towards reconciliation. The next step is doing everything possible to overcome the harm resulting from those wrongs.

A tragic wrong was the removal of thousands of Indigenous children from their families, brought to national attention in 1997 by the Bringing Them Home report. As the report stated, “Not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of the removal policies.” Whatever the motives behind the, they caused untold harm, and the Indigenous community continues to suffer the effects in poor health, low self-esteem, substance abuse and broken relationships.

In 1999 the National Sorry Day Committee launched the Journey of Healing. Local communities have come together in initiatives developed by members of the stolen generations and aimed at helping those whose lives have been shattered as a result of the removal policies.

This community response has been vital to the healing process and contrasts sharply with the official response. Though the government promised $63 million in 1997 to implement some of the report, only a third of this sum has been spent, and a recent Senate Inquiry concluded that much of this funding “has been misdirected.”

But many people have not yet begun the journey, and many of the families and communities from which they were separated still bear grief and pain.

Next year (2001) the Journey of Healing will focus on those families and communities. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Chair of ATSIC Prof Lowitja O’Donoghue will continue as patrons of this initiative.

Some who were removed as children are already planning reunions with the communities from which they were taken. There will also be gatherings in regional centers, offering a chance for local people to come together and plan for healing; and for those from the cities to come and listen. We are inviting Government and no-Government agencies, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to help make this possible, and we hope the churches will be fully involved.

There are families in the cities whose children were removed, and we warmly encourage events to hear them, particularly on May 26 when Sorry Day and the Journey of Healing are commemorated. But the urgent needs of the Indigenous communities in rural and remote regions cannot be ignored. Journey of Healing 2001 aims to engender a national determination to heal their wounds and overcome their disadvantage.

Audrey Ngingali Kinnear, John Brown
Co-Chairs, National Sorry Day Committee

After the Corroboree
In recent years a movement has been growing in Australia, of people working to heal the harm done to Aboriginal Australians ever since the start of white settlement in 1788. Ten years ago a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established. In the past three years this movement found new momentum following the publication of the report of a national inquiry into a tragic episode in Australian history - the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families in order to assimilate them into white society, which went on until the 1970s. In 1998 a national Sorry Day was organized, and thousands of events took place across the country. Since then, the movement has grown steadily, and in May 2000, the largest march in Australian history took place across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, as over 250,000 Australians walked in support of reconciliation.

John Bond, one of the organizers, writes:

Ten days ago a member of the "stolen generations" phoned me, angry. She had read a message in the Koori Mail, inviting the stolen generations to walk with the Journey of Healing across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She told me of decades of abuse – physical, emotional and sexual – following her removal from her family, and said, "I will only walk with you if you remove your Journey of Healing banner. For me there can be no healing." I explained that the Journey was working for national policies aimed at overcoming the harm done, but this made little impact on her.

Yesterday she phoned again. "I walked across the Bridge," she said. "I looked up at the sky and saw 'Sorry' written there. (A skywriter had written the word). I looked around at the huge mass of people who had come because they cared. Tears rolled down my cheeks. And I found healing. I have been angry for years. Now I see I don't have to live with that anger. I phoned a friend this morning, and said to her, 'Something has happened to me. I am different.' My friend, who had also walked across the Bridge, said, 'I am different too.'" We have agreed to meet soon, and plan how to work for the implementation of the Bringing Them Home report.

The walk across the Bridge during Corroboree 2000 was easily the largest march in Australian history. It demonstrated the longing on all sides to heal the past and give Aboriginal Australians a fair go. Ordinary Australians have decided that they cannot leave others to heal national wounds, and are taking on the job themselves. It is a trend which gives great hope, not just in Australia but far beyond. When I walked across the Bridge, I found myself alongside a British researcher studying ways to national reconciliation, who had come to Australia especially for Corroboree 2000. We discussed the idea of a Sorry Day in UK to help heal Britain's painful relationship with the Irish.

At the heart of Corroboree 2000 was the Journey of Healing, a movement initiated by members of the stolen generations in response to Sorry Day 1998, when the Australian community apologized to them in thousands of events throughout the country. Since its launch last year, the message of the Journey has gone far and wide. As the Journey's patrons, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and former Chair of ATSIC Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue, pointed out to the media just before Corroboree 2000: "In the past two years members of the stolen generations have given immense leadership in overcoming the continuing consequences of the forced removal policies." Where else in the world are the victims of a tragic policy leading the way towards healing?

Mr Fraser and Dr O'Donoghue took the stage at the Opera House, together with other national leaders, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and the National Sorry Day Committee, in a ceremony which portrayed the Journey of Healing's approach to healing the wounds resulting from the forced removal policies. It ended with the audience of 2,000 – which included the Governor-General, State Premiers, Government ministers and most of the shadow ministry – joining enthusiastically in the chorus of a song written by Helen Moran, who was removed from her family at the age of two:

They took the children, they took the land
We've learnt the truth now, we understand
The day for Sorry we've shared together
And the promise to make things better.
Come join the journey of healing
Let the spirit guide us, hand in hand,
Let's walk together into the future
The time has come to make a stand.
Let's heal our hearts, let's heal our pain
And bring the stolen children home again.
To go forward together we must heal the past
For the lies of history are revealed at last
For our native children to trust again
We must take this journey together as friends.

There is a new air of hope. The challenge now is to translate this hope into national initiatives to answer Aboriginal disadvantage - social, economic and political. If that can happen in the coming months, we will not only set our country on the road to relationships of trust and respect. We will also portray a new picture of Australia to the world. In September, thousands of journalists will arrive here expecting to write about a country which trains elite athletes while leaving its Aboriginal people in Third World conditions. Could they tell a story of a country newly determined to change this situation?

(A corroboree is an Aboriginal term for a sacred or festive gathering.)