Cirrus@Austlit

'The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families provided a forum for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and others to speak of their experiences of removal in a national public setting. The testimony provided to the inquiry fulfilled a number of functions and operated at a number of levels. The telling of individual stories of removal was important to Indigenous people in terms of representing their experience and contributed to a level of ownership of the inquiry by those who participated. David Frances, chairman of the Kimberley Stolen Generations Steering Committee, for example, explained that the report was important in telling the ‘true story’ of what happened to Indigenous people ‘because future generations will read it to understand what happened to us’. In their work on Stolen Generations testimony, Rosanne Kennedy and Tikka Wilson point out that in the inquiry report, Bringing Them Home, testimony is used as evidence of the harms of removal, as part of the construction of a history of removal and as an address to the Australian community to solicit an active engagement from readers.' (Introduction)

'Ray Lawrence’s Australian film Jindabyne is a powerful national allegory about the denial of historical responsibility and the politics of post-colonial apology across a ‘traumatic contact zone’ of historical injustice.1 Released in 2006, Jindabyne was produced during a period of stalled reconciliation in Australia. Like many nations in the past 20 years, Australia has been engaged in a painful and uneven process of coming to terms with historical injustice—a process that remains incomplete and unsettling. In 1991, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, inaugurated under a federal Labor government, anticipated that reconciliation would be achieved by the centenary of Federation in 2001. In 1996, in what subsequently became a landmark event in the nation’s attempt to respond to the divided legacies of settler-colonialism, a national inquiry was conducted into the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities.2 The final report, Bringing Them Home, found that the removal of children of mixed descent, with the aim of alienating them from their culture and assimilating them to white Australian culture, breached Australian common law and international human rights conventions.3 The national inquiry did not address issues of justice or responsibility. Instead, it documented Indigenous suffering and solicited an affective response from non-Indigenous Australians. By May 1997, when the national inquiry tabled its report calling for a national apology to the Stolen Generations, there had been a change of government. The then Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, did not believe the current generation of Australians should be made to feel responsible for the past and notoriously refused to offer a national apology. Instead, he expressed his ‘personal regret’ for the suffering and hurt caused by past policies of child removal. For the next 11 years, no apology was forthcoming, and by the new millennium, the reconciliation process had stalled. In a climate of widespread support for reconciliation generated by the national inquiry, Howard’s refusal to apologise became a stain on the nation. In 2008, the first order of business for the new Labor government of Kevin Rudd, after opening Parliament on 13 February, was to offer a national apology to the Stolen Generations and their families and communities.' (Introduction)