Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to give my absolute support to the motion offering an apology to Australia’s Indigenous people. I am of an age that, had I been born in a different place to different parents, I could have been one of the stolen generation. In fact, children were still being removed from their parents some 10 years after I was a toddler. I cannot really imagine what it would be like to have been removed from my parents. When I think of that possibility I imagine my mother, even though she is now 70 years old, still standing beside a road somewhere waiting for her four girls to come back. Sometimes I see her with my father as well, but generally, when I imagine this happening to our family, I see my mother alone, because I cannot even imagine my mother’s marriage surviving 50 years of such incredible grief.

People say this happened in the past, but for people my age who experienced this and for people like my mother, still living, this is very much their present; this is the life they live. Between 1910 and 1970, around 50,000 children of Aboriginal background were taken from their parents, placed in institutions or missions or fostered and largely trained for domestic service. They are shocking figures, and the stories we hear are shocking also, briefly brought into the light in the Bringing them home report some 11 years ago and then buried and denied again for some 11 years. Finally, on Wednesday last week, we as a nation said sorry—sorry to the stolen generation ripped from their families, from their culture and from their lives and placed on a different path filled with grief, sadness and loss. Among those in my community that I have spoken to since, there is overwhelming support for the words spoken in parliament last week, but there are some who still have reservations. To them I would like to speak just briefly. There are some who say that it is in the past and we should not apologise for actions taken in the past. To them I say again: for those who were taken from their families, this is their lives. We apologise for their lives as they are now.

For those who say, ‘I didn’t do it,’ I say that the apology last Wednesday was not from any of us individually, although many of us have said it individually; it was for the nation. We as a nation over 200 years have benefited from the choices we made earlier on when we decided that the welfare of one culture—of the first inhabitants of this country—could be put aside for the development of the nation as a whole. The nation actually made those decisions; governments made those decisions and the government apologised for them on Wednesday. I have also had some people who have also experienced pain in their lives say to me that, for example, their mother was taken from her mother when she was eight years old, that she was not an Indigenous person and therefore we should not be apologising to this group. With all respect to these people—and I understand their pain—this is not a competition for pain, this is not a race where only one group wins and where by recognising the pain of one person we somehow diminish the experiences of others. This is an act which acknowledges the experience of many Australians and recognises our responsibility in it. It does not in any way diminish actions we may have taken or the effect of our actions on other people—not at all.

What happened last week was not a trivial event, although, again, there are a small number of people who think it was. This was not a trivial event. This was about the systematic removal of children from their families. It was a deliberate act taken by not just one government but many governments over 60 years that devastated the oldest continuous living culture in the world, left families ruined and left a generation living now who have not experienced family life and who are struggling to create solid families in their present as well.

I cannot imagine what has been lost by the stolen generation. I cannot imagine what was lost, not just by them but by others of the Indigenous culture who were ripped from their land or whose ancestors were ripped from their land and their culture and who are just finding their way back. I do know that, when I meet a member of my local Indigenous community, I feel grief at what we as a nation have lost. When we decided as a nation to put the development of the nation ahead of this particular culture, we lost an extraordinary cultural history—an extraordinary body of wisdom dating back tens of thousands of years. I know that I can never meet my local Barramatugal clan of the Darug nation in its full strength. I can never do that now. Just 200 years from when they lived free and strong on the land on which I now live, I cannot do that. There are some elders and some families who remain but the language is largely lost; the history is largely lost from my local clan. It is an extraordinary loss for the nation and for the world and I grieve for that. In fact, my grief is still at a stage where I grieve for the loss and I am not yet ready to look at what we still have, to look at the future, because grief sometimes moves in those ways. You deal with what you lose first. I cannot imagine what they must feel; I cannot imagine. My loss is tangential; I have lost what might have been, I have lost people I might have met. The Barramatugal clan of the Darug nation have lost their own history and, while I feel grief when I look at them, many of them must feel grief when they look at themselves in the mirror and that is a much deeper grief than mine. Again, it is not something I can ever fully comprehend and I cannot fully comprehend the pain of the stolen generation but what we did on Wednesday was an act of trust.

We looked at a people; we brought them into the light and we accepted and acknowledged their experience even if we could not fully understand the depth of it. I believe that what they needed was for us to say sorry, to bring them into the light, see them and validate experiences that are theirs and theirs alone which we really cannot ever comprehend without going through that ordeal ourselves. They needed to be seen, they needed to be acknowledged and they told us that. That act of trust on Wednesday, I believe, has moved this nation down the path of healing. I would hope that in the near future we all can look at each other, look each other in the eyes, and see the strength of what we can have in our Indigenous population and feel less real, immediate grief for what we have lost. I am sure as a nation we will always feel that, but I hope in the very near future we will see each other for what we can be and not for what we have been.

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