National Sorry Day, Acknowledgement of Australia's Shame

May 18, 2010
Brian Cross

Australia's Torres Strait Islander Children - Flickr user Serendigity

The Australian indigenous children forcibly taken from their families and homeland are known as the Stolen Generation. In 2008 the Government said sorry.

On 26 May 2010 Australians will mark National Sorry Day. It is two years since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered an apology in the Australian parliament, “for the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations…..”

The Australian Government Apology

The government’s formal apology came eleven years after a sensational report and took a change of government. The 1997 report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, known as the Bringing them Home report, was a comprehensive study of the social engineering that had gone on since the earliest days of colonisation, right into the 1980’s in some cases.

Bringing them Home was a revelation to most Australians who were unaware of successive government policies towards the indigenous people of their nation.

On 26 May 1998 the first annual Sorry Day was held. It was a public response to Bringing them Home, and more than 24,000 Australians signed ‘Sorry Books”, their own personal symbolic apology. Those books, 461 in all, are now registered as important historical documents in the Australian Memory of the World Register, a UNESCO initiative to protect material of significance to Australia’s history.

Marking Sorry Day

Later, Sorry Day became symbolised by bridge walks. In 2000 more than 250,000 people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge in a march organised by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, an independent body that came out of Bringing Them Home. Now known as Reconciliation Australia, the organisation’s mission is “To work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other Australians to strengthen the mutual understanding, trust and respect essential to achieve our vision for reconciliation.”

Also symbolic of National Sorry Day are the colourful plastic feet that people carry on their bridge walks. They represent the Stolen Generation's “Track Home", described by the National Sorry Day Committee (NSDC) as “thousands of silent and unseen tracks of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were taken away under the forced removal policies. The moment the first Aboriginal Child was removed under these policies, was the moment the first step of these ghostly tracks was born. The Stolen Generations tracks are stamped all over Australia, lingering silent and strong.”

National Sorry Day, 26 May 2010

In Canberra, National Sorry Day will be marked with a memorial service, a Commonwealth Bridge Pathway Walk and a free community barbeque. The NSDC website also lists events in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, but the biggest event still takes place in Sydney.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge Pathway Walk continues to draw attention to National Sorry Day, and there will also be an organised walk on Anzac Bridge at White Bay.

On Saturday 29 May, a Sorry Day Festival and Concert will take place in First Fleet Park at The Rocks. Branded ‘Sorry. Still Living on Borrowed Time!’, the free concert will feature Aboriginal hip hop act The Street Warriors and a line-up of performing artists. The Aboriginal training vessel Tribal Warrior will sail by, and Australian Indigenous Artist of the Year Wayne Quilliam will present a slide production of his photographic exhibition 'Sorry: more than a word'.

On 26 May the National Sorry Day Committee invites all Australians to walk across their local bridges, carrying their Stolen Generations Track Home feet. In 2010 there is a plan to stop halfway, symbolising the fact that only half the job is done. There is still considered much to do for the Stolen Generation before they will have adequate compensation and justice.