KEY POINTS:
If ever insult was added to injury it was the reluctance of the previous Australian Government to simply say sorry to the Aborigines. The insult lay in one of the reasons for its reluctance, the fear that an apology would invite a deluge of compensation claims. Former Prime Minister John Howard did not seem to comprehend that acknowledgment of a historic wrong could be valued by the victims beyond any monetary award.
The insult persists even now that the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has uttered the hardest word. Aboriginal leaders who are demanding that compensation follow the gesture discredit their cause. No amount of monetary compensation would do much to advance the position of the Aborigines in Australian society. If hand-outs could make much difference manymore Aboriginal communities would be living in better conditions today.
Pride makes a difference. When people feel a sense of pride in themselves, their heritage, their families and communities, they want to contribute, be useful, find their identity in work, social activities, raising children, seeing that they get ahead.
A formal apology alone might not bring self-respect to the squalid outback communities and the ghettoes near Darwin and Alice Springs, but nor would compensation. An apology risks reinforcing in the minds of the hopeless that society is to blame and they can do nothing to help themselves. But happily that is not normally the human response. People who feel themselves due an apology usually find it cathartic when it comes and more able to put the misfortune behind them.
Aborigines now have official national acknowledgment of their past mistreatment, in particular the so-called "stolen generations" of quite recent times. A glance at Australia's 19th century history suggests the nomadic natives suffered much worse crimes than the well-intentioned paternalism of the "stolen generations" but the record of the latter is clearer.
Historical apologies do their own injustice to the past. The public servants and religious orders who took mixed-blood children from Aboriginal communities to educate them for life in the mainstream were acting, they thought, entirely in the children's interest. A court case established the children were not kidnapped; their parents were induced to let them go. The ethos of that time did not value cultural roots as we do today.
Good intentions did not change the fact that the children did grow up to discover a sense of cultural deprivation to add to the older grievances at loss of tribal lands. The text of Mr Rudd's apology carries a reminder of the antiquity of Australia's indigenous peoples, "the oldest continuing cultures in human history". Some estimates put them on the vast island continent as much as 60,000 years ago. The earliest Maori are reckoned to have reached these islands a mere 1300 years ago.
Our problems of post-colonial reconciliation pale in comparison to those of Australia, which must come to terms with an itinerant indigenous culture that has hardly changed since the Stone Age and do so without the touchstone of a colonising treaty.
But it is a mistake to imagine all Aborigines live in squalor and neglect. Just as many live successful urban lives, educated and well employed, sending their children to mainstream schools, yet valuing their heritage. Mr Rudd intends his apology to set the scene for new initiatives to close the gaps in life expectancy, education and economic opportunity. If any single word can put the past behind and invest people with a new sense of self-respect, it is "sorry". From here we can almost feel Australia's relief.
