February 13.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
A national apology
A Prime Minister says “sorry”.
Huge crowds converged on Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday, 13 February 2008. Indigenous people travelled from across the country to pack into parliament and outside. Across the country, tens of thousands of Indigenous people gathered at cultural centres to view the televised coverage. Former prime ministers, but not John Howard who was absent, gathered together with Indigenous leaders. Much of the nation stopped, and tuned in, as only happens for a Melbourne Cup race. Many wept or were deeply moved as [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd spoke clearly and strongly:
Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations – this blemished chapter of our nation's history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering, and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry...
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A History Since 1788, pp.347-349.
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The consequences of European diseases.
There were other insidious forces destroying Aboriginal people wherever there was white settlement. These included prostitution, alcohol, malnutrition and European diseases. It was a medical practitioner, George Worgan, who made the important observation during the first few months of white settlement that the Aborigines 'seemingly enjoy uninterrupted health and live to a great age'. He also made the ominous observation shortly afterwards that venereal disease, 'that scourge of mankind', made its first appearances among the convicts, not the Aborigines. [1]
This was one of many European diseases which were to wreak unimaginable havoc among the Aboriginal population, as yet lacking resistance to European infections. Governor Phillip recorded that within fourteen months of the first fleet's arrival, half of the Aborigines of the Sydney region were dead of smallpox:
In the beginning of the following year [1789] numbers of the natives were found dead with the smallpox in different parts of the harbour...one half of those who inhabit this part of the country died and, as the natives always retired from where the disorder appeared, and which some must have carried with them, it must have spread to a considerable distance, as well inland as along the coast. We have seen the traces of it wherever we have been. [2]
George B. Worgan, Journal of the First Fleet Surgeon, 1788, p.25. [Quotations from published version, Library of Australian History, 1978.]
Governor Phillip to Lord Sydney, 13 February, 1790, HRNSW, I, ii, p.308
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.39-40.