National Sorry Day

Today is National Sorry Day in Australia ‘to commemorate the history of forcible removals and its effects’ though this is not recognised as an official holiday.

Between 1995 and 1997 an enquiry was held into the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families — the ‘Stolen Generation’. The final report, Bringing Them Home — Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families was released in 1997. The following year National Sorry Day was instituted to help the healing process by acknowledging the wrong that had been done to indigenous families. Many politicians participated, with the notable exception of the Prime Minister, John Howard. 

Sorry Day is also in remembrance of the general mistreatment of the Aboriginal people and not only of the children and families of the ‘Stolen Generation’: indigenous Australians were only given the right to vote as recently as 1963; they were denied land rights — a court ruled in  1971 that Australia had been terra nullius before the European settlement and that no concept of Native title existed in Australian law; and only this week the Australian Medical Association said it is ’shameful that in a prosperous modern society, an Indigenous child born in Australia today can expect to die 17 years before a non-Indigenous child’ at least partially due to ‘institutionalised racism — a systematic, and often unconscious, discrimination by services that results in Indigenous patients receiving lesser treatment’.

update 30/05/2007: The BBC reports the story of Leonie Pope, one of the ‘Stolen Generation’ who now lives in Wales.