Cirrus@Austlit

Gail Jones's new novel Sorry (2007) seeks to allegorize the contemporary settler condition in Australia, especially as its sense of civic integrity is seen to have been compromised by the recent revelations about the Stolen Generations. Jones clearly wishes to displace the familiar narrative of settlement in favour of a more disquieting alternative. This article offers a decoding of Sorry's allegory of trauma, as well as a glance at its political implications for Australia post-apology - not losing sight of the latent ironies implicit in a frame of representation whereby the Aborigines emerge as the victims of history, and the settlers as those subjects who suffer traumatization (author's abstract).