The practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families led to an estimated 25,000 children becoming part of the ‘Stolen Generations’. Almost all Aboriginal Australians were directly affected by the Stolen Generations. The issue of the Stolen Generations is a prime example of two competing conceptualisations of race discussed by David Goldberg, in The Racial State, discussed in Week 3 – racial naturalism and racial historicism. Some have claimed that Aboriginal children were taken because it would lead to the destruction of Aboriginality, whereas others have claimed that children were taken benevolently, for their own good. Questions of responsibility, social justice and pain are at the heart of the debate around the Apology for the Stolen Generations enacted by Kevin Rudd in 2008. Does the Apology uncover or further mask the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? What version of Australian national identity does the Apology participate in in an era in which individual rights are prioritised over collective identities? How can a nation-state be ‘sorry’? Can nations have feelings? Through looking at representations of state policies and the discussion on ‘reconciliation’, this week will introduce ideas about emotion, recognition and belonging to the discussion on race and the state.

1. FROM THEFT TO APOLOGY
A/Prof Alana Lentin
a.lentin@uws.edu.au
The Racial State
Week 7

2. OUTLINE
Part I:
The cultural and political conditions of ‘the
apology’
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Part II:
Apology as bearing witness
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✦What does the apology allow us to witness?
✦What is the significance of witnessing the
harm caused to Aboriginal people?

3. Part I: The cultural and political conditions of apology

4. Members of the Stolen Generation describe their experiences…
Movie explaining what it was like to be stolen from one’s family and where children were placed.

5. BRINGING THEM
HOME REPORT
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‘Practices and policies which resulted
in the separation of Indigenous
children from their families by
compulsion, duress or undue
influence’
1997 the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families
Federal Government report titled Bringing Them Home.
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‘Aborigines Protection Board’ was a result of the Aborigines Protection Act that was passed by British Parliament
in 1886. Among the Board’s functions was ‘the care, custody and education of Aboriginal children’.
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The philosophy of race behind the policies
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Almost 1 in every five (19%) Inquiry witnesses who spent time in an institution reported having been physically
assaulted there.
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assimilationist welfare
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Howard refuses to apologise despite the report.

6. GENOCIDE IN BRINGING
THEM HOME
‘When a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost,
often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The
Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible
removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.’
Bringing Them Home
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‘I didn’t know any Aboriginal people at all – none at all. I was placed in a
white family and I was just – I was white. I never knew, I never accepted
myself to being a black person until – I don’t know – I don’t know if you
ever really do accept yourself as being ... How can you be proud of being
Aboriginal after all the humiliation and the anger and the hatred you
have? It’s unbelievable how much you can hold inside.’
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Confidential evidence 152, Victoria, Bringing Them Home.
Cultural genocide

7. WHY ACKNOWLEDGE?
‘It should, I think, be apparent to all well-meaning people that true
reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indigenous
peoples is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgment by the
nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, oppression
and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. That is not to say that
individual Australians who had no part in what was done in the
past should feel or acknowledge personal guilt. It is simply to
assert our identity as a nation and the basic fact that national
shame, as well as national pride, can and should exist in relation to
past acts and omissions, at least when done or made in the name of
the community or with the authority of government.’
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Sir William Deane, Governor-General 1996, cited in Bringing Them Home (1997)

8. Part II: Apology or Bearing Witness?

9. Why Rudd in 2007?
OTHER FACTORS INVOLVED IN
CHANGING THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE
ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
• Aboriginal land rights and Native Title –
Mabo & Wik.
• Civil Rights – concepts of Indigenous
rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
• Tourism – industry
• 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody
• UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples 2007
• 2007 Northern Territory Emergency
Response, ‘the intervention’

10. Kevin Rudd’s Apology
Write down reactions to watching this speech.
Who is it for?
What does it leave out?
Not down any notable words/expressions.

11. THE LIMITS OF APOLOGY
‘When apology covers over shame in order to reach pride, shame can eclipse the very
histories whose recognition might transform the social fabric of shame in Australian society.
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Sara Ahmed (2004)
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‘The apology was framed within what has come to be called “reconcilliation”. Established
during the years following the two inquiries into Aboriginal trauma in recent times—deaths
in custody and then the stolen children—it has become the official ideology within which
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can now “move on.”’
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Tony Barta (2008: 210)
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‘There is a deeply seated impulse in Australian society to separate problems of Aboriginal life
and death in the present from the European attitudes to Aboriginal life and death in the
past.’
Tony Barta (2008: 209)

12. Utopia by John Pilger
Minute 1.25

13. TUTORIAL ANALYSIS
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Let’s watch a testimony from a
member of the Stolen Generation:
http://
stolengenerationstestimonies.com
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Write down the emotions that come
up, for the speaker, for you.