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THE  OTHER  HALF

The Haneef issue in particular raised questions about racism in Australia, a complex country and a lively democracy. It has undergone a significant demographic transformation in the last half-century with steady migration from Asian countries. Yet, the stamp of a “white” Australia has not been diluted enough to project an image of multi-culturalism. Above all, the unresolved issue of the treatment meted out to the country’s Aboriginal people is one that continues to haunt succeeding generations of Australians.

Until the 1970s, Australia had a policy of separating Aboriginal children from their parents by force in an openly racist policy of social engineering that began in 1910 but remained unquestioned until 1970. In an effort to virtually eliminate Australia’s Aboriginals who have a living history going back some 60,000 years, the government adopted a policy of forced assimilation of Aboriginal children into white society.

Books like Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara, later made into a film in 2002, brought out in moving detail the gross inhumanity of this policy. The book recounts the journey of the author’s mother and two other aboriginal girls who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, where they had been forcibly placed in 1931. The three girls walked for an incredible nine weeks covering 2,414 km, dodging the officials and trackers trying to find them, until they reached their home.

The Australian government had long been under pressure from human rights groups to investigate this “blemish”, as some have called it, on its history. In 1995, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission decided to look into the truth of these stories. Its report, Bringing Them Home, was presented to the Australian Parliament on May 26, 1997. It is a document worth reading. It reveals the kind of justification set out for this policy of forced separation of an estimated 50,000 Aboriginal children, referred to as the “Stolen Generation”. For instance, the Northern Territory Protector of Natives had this to say about the policy, “Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the Black race and the swift submergence of their progeny in the White”. The reference to “half-castes” is to mixed race Aboriginal children.

Successive Australian governments pursued this policy in the name of “protecting” these children. Instead, the children were hounded and forcibly taken from their homes, separated from their own siblings, and arbitrarily given other identities. They were allowed no contact with their families. Many of them did not know whether their parents were alive or dead. Sometimes they thought their parents or their siblings had died only to find they were alive. These children also experienced abuse and violence, much of which was never recorded or acknowledged.

Unfortunately, the completion of the report coincided with a change of government in Australia. The Liberal party-led government of John Howard took over and refused to accept the report’s recommendations, particularly one that required the government to apologise to the Aboriginal people. Howard held that the present generation of Australians should not be held accountable for the sins of the past.

Despite this, six State governments and two territory governments (like our union territories) did apologise to their local Aboriginal populations. But the Commonwealth or federal government under Howard steadfastly refused to do so.

For this reason, February 13, 2008 will be remembered as a historic day in Australia. For, on that day, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the Labour Party opened the 43rd session of the Australian Parliament with an unqualified apology to the country’s Aboriginal people.

“Today’s apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs”, said Mr. Rudd. “It is also aimed at building bridges between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians — a bridge based on real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt.”

“The act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and our most elemental humanity… the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end…Decency, human decency, universal human decency, demands that the nation now step forward to right a historical wrong.”

Mr. Rudd’s speech is exceptional and worth reading. The full text is available on this newspaper’s website ( http://www.hindu.com/nic/auspmapology.htm).