This column is an excerpt from the 2024 apology breakfast speech given by Shepparton Region Reconciliation Group co-convenor Dierdre Robertson.
The annual Shepparton Apology Breakfast is about truth-telling — a process of openly sharing truths after periods of conflict to allow for re-setting of relationships based on justice and human rights.
Truth-telling.
It takes courage.
Courage to tell stories — stories of grandparents, aunts, uncles and loved family members.
Over the years we’ve heard from many apology breakfast speakers: Khiara Harrison, Chris Walker, Ebony Joachim, Lena-Jean Charles-Loffel, Natarsha Bamblett, Tahnee Day and Jarvis Atkinson. We’ve heard them talk about the pain of family members being taken and how these stories have shaped them as the storytellers. Woven through the stories have been the underlying themes of truth and the strength of family and community.
A recent conversation on Radio National’s Speaking Out program between Larissa Behrendt and journalist and author David Marr about Marr’s new book Killing for Country: a family story, gave pause to consider truth-telling from a different perspective.
An uncle on Marr’s mother’s side asked Marr to find out more about his grandmother, Maude Uhr, someone his uncle knew little about. Marr was a journalist, so it made sense to ask him to help.
As Marr hunted through archives, libraries and other records, he discovered that four of his relatives — Richard Jones, Jones’ brother-in-law Edmund Uhr and Uhr’s sons Reg and Darcy — had a “really dreadful role on the frontier”.
The Uhrs were officers of the infamous native police and Jones was a sheep grazier, anxious to grasp as much land as he could. The “dreadful role” included horrific killings and work to enable these atrocities to happen, unfettered by any legal limits or intervention.
The more Marr uncovered, the more determined he became that he had a moral obligation to tell this story and tell it truthfully.
To tell that this land was conquered and that the taking of this land came at an enormous price. But also, to hope that other descendants of early colonists would have the courage to come forward with their family stories from the frontier, to be able to tell these stories truthfully.
On the anniversary of the National Apology to the Stolen Generations, it is time for some truth-telling from the other side — the white side.
To honestly acknowledge the history of Australia that is sitting in the many archives across the country — in letters, diaries, newspapers, government reports and laws.
To think about our own families’ settlement of this country, to delve deeper, to ask questions, to have the courage to find the truth.
To understand those hidden truths in stories of ‘taming the land’.
To understand the meaning of words like ‘cleanse’ and ‘dispersal’.
To understand the true price of nationhood and how this was a price so heavily paid by the First Peoples of this continent. Paid in loss of life, land, liberty, community and culture.
Despite direction to all colonial governors that the Aboriginal people had a ‘plain and sacred right to their own soil’, the clearing of lands of the native population took place throughout the country as white settlement spread and pastoral interests, particularly the wool industry, flourished.
The continent of Australia was conquered. It was a lengthy, bloody, brutal conquest, perhaps the most brutal of all conquests by the British Empire. With a few notable exceptions, no authorities intervened to protect the Indigenous owners of the land.
So, while wool had a dramatically beneficial effect on Australia’s economy, it came at a great cost. It led to the forced removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands. To countless massacres — massacres that continued well into the 20th century. This period in Australia’s history is sometimes referred to as the Frontier Wars or, for First Nations peoples, the ‘Killing Times’.
Cleansed from land, dispersed from land. No land gave no economic base in a new society where land was all. Possession was king.
Australia stands alone as the only Commonwealth that does not have a treaty or treaties with the many nations across the country. We have never reached an accommodation with those we conquered. We have not considered reparations. This is our ongoing legacy.
The protests about the unrestrained killings in the mid to late 1800s may have stopped the worst of the carnage, but they also led to a system of segregation and control. Missions, reserves, stations and the organised removal of children — the Stolen Generations.
So here we are today. The apology breakfast — a part of truth-telling.
Paul Keating in his Redfern speech said:
“It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.
“Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
“We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
“We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
“We committed the murders.
“We took the children from their mothers.
“We practised discrimination and exclusion.
“It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
“With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
“We failed to ask ‘how would I feel if this were done to me?’
“As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.”
We failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
The late Sir Ronald Wilson who, with Mick Dodson, co-authored the Bringing Them Home Report, said:
“An apology begins the healing process. It means an understanding, a willingness to enter into the suffering. It implies a commitment to do more.”
I read the many stories in the Bringing Them Home Report. I listened with my heart, felt the emotion that poured off the words. I’ve heard stories of the many speakers at apology breakfasts in the past.
This is why we are here today. To recognise that this removal happened. It was cruel, brutal, with long-term consequences for those taken, their families and communities.
“This report is a tribute to the strength and struggles of many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people affected by forcible removal. We acknowledge the hardships they endured and the sacrifices they made. We remember and lament all the children who will never come home,” The foreward to the Bringing Them Home Report says.
“We dedicate this report with thanks and admiration to those who found the strength to tell their stories to the inquiry and to the generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people separated from their families and communities.”
Listen to the words of the apology as they are read this morning. Listen to understand; to not just hear, but to feel the emotion of the words.
Reflect on the strength of Aboriginal communities across the nation and, in particular, in our local community. To have survived all that has been thrown at them, to be still here telling their stories, singing their songs, speaking their languages, is a testament to courage, determination and extraordinary resilience.
Can we, non-Aboriginal people, step into the space of our truth-telling? Can we find the courage to move past the euphemisms that smudged the reality of what happened? To realise that our past is still with us today, in our attitudes and in our blindness to see beyond ourselves.
As Larissa Behrendt in her interview with David Marr said, “if you understand the history, it gives us an obligation to think about the future. It’s not what you do about the past, but what does this mean for our future?”
What can we do?
As Sir Ronald Wilson said, we can make “a commitment to do more”.
There are no short cuts to the future. The path to the future passes through its past: the good and the bad.
Again, it’s not what you do about the past but what you do about the future.
To face and understand the links of the past as they are played out in the living of today: the ongoing removal of Aboriginal children over-represented in out-of-home care, deaths in custody — the list goes on.
To actually listen to Aboriginal voices because these voices hold the key to our future.
By being here, we are joining the healing journey, a journey that is so important for our nation, for us all to be part of solutions into the future. This is the spirit of the apology breakfast
Let’s all of us work together to make our community and our country one that is courageous enough to understand the transformative power of truth-telling for all of us.
To read the National Apology to the Stolen Generations, visit aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Icons/Apology_to_Australias_Indigenous_Peoples
To watch the delivery of the National Apology, visit youtube.com/watch?v=MDvome0bCXs
To listen to Larissa Behrendt’s conversation with David Marr, visit abc.net.au/listen/programs/speakingout/david-marr/103449574