Thank you for the March 2008 issue - one to keep. The Comment by Mark McKenna, followed by Robert Manne's timely reminder, "Sorry Business: The Road To Apology", has made it an issue with specific historical resonance. Putting the achievement of the apology as delivered by Prime Minister Rudd in context with Manne's amazement that the anti-sorry culture was as deeply entrenched as it was uncritical of its premise provides the reader with a point from which to meditate upon the "soul of the nation". Yet I was surprised, indeed put out, by Alex Miller's assertion that "people who claimed that they hadn't known ... that Aboriginal children had been forcibly removed from their families were lying." The assertion is made from the point of view of ignorance about life in Australia before Dr Miller arrived here.
During the 1950s and early '60s, when I was at school between Lismore and Byron Bay, we didn't see Aboriginal children. At high school there may have been as many as eight who came from Tukirimba, a reserve. When I swam at Byron Bay, stayed at my grandfather's house and went to the cinema with my aunt, I didn't see Aboriginal children. In some districts, like Tweed Heads, Aboriginal children were visible. But not around Lismore. This pattern of discrepancy, between one district and another, seems to be consistent across the nation. In some rural areas, Aboriginal people were visible; in others they seemed to be absent.
I say seemed to be because, as children, we were taught not to see. The child who was ‘acceptably' brown may have been told to say, as in Sally Morgan's My Place, that he or she was Indian, Greek, Italian, Syrian, Sikh. Our questions about where the Aboriginal people were, where they had gone, were answered evasively. Cabbage Tree Island was mentioned, but not in the context of forcible removals from family. From memory, it was described to me as a place for drunks. Occasionally, we were instructed that the Aboriginal people were a dying race that would be submerged into our own, an idea that many nineteenth-century newspapers had propagated.
The twentieth-century newspapers, The Northern Star and The Courier Mail, were the main sources of information in the area known as New England. Neither was Aboriginal-friendly. Neither would carry stories about the forcible removal of children from their families. The radio carried little information about Aboriginal presence, and television did not arrive in most of our homes until Wes Hall played cricket in a Test series. I have noticed over my 60 years that people are frighteningly easy to lead blind up blind alleys by politicians, the unscrupulous as well as the self-righteous who were sure that their attitudes were for the best. For my first 24 years, I lived in that climate, and remember the election of Whitlam's Labor as being a moment of epiphany. For years, some of us guessed that we were being misled about a lot of things, but very few of us knew the true nature of the misinformation.
History, Alex Miller, is complicated by being in the past tense. Australia is geographically vast and continues to be politically conservative; the means of disseminating information that is not palatable to business and entrenched positions is difficult to divulge and spread. The Monthly and publications like it are important for that reason.
