National Sorry Day Ballarat 2021: Why this day is so important

I am Faye Clarke, a proud Aboriginal woman, descended from my Grandmother's people, the Muandik and Ngarrindjeri of South Australia, and my Grandfather's people, the Wotjobaluk and Gunditjmara of Victoria.

I have worked here as a nurse for the past 12 years, and I have been involved as a community member of Ballarat and District Aboriginal Co-operative for more years than I look old enough to have lived!

Let me first acknowledge the traditional custodians of this area, the Waddawurrung people of the Kulin nation. The Waddawurrung were here before anyone. They traversed these lands and waters, taking care of all living things. They took great care no doubt to ensure that they lived in harmony with the land, never taking more than they needed, ensuring there would always be plenty for the next generation.

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It was this universal understanding and respect for the cycle of life that dictated every day life for the Waddawurrung just as it did for all of our ancestors. As Indigenous communities around the world understand, what we do now affects many generations to come.

As we begin the formalities today let's honour the Waddawurrung and thank them for their custodianship of this country, and pay respects to their Elders, those who have gone before, and who would have fought for this land, who either were killed or were taken from their mother country and placed somewhere else on mission land far from here. I also acknowledge their Elders now, who work to rebuild their rightful place here, and their younger ones who are growing into tomorrow's leaders.

These countries that I mention are important. There are hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander countries in this one large continent of Australia. Let me remind you all here today that we are not one people, but we come from many different nations, all with our own stories to tell. I also acknowledge the ancestors of all those here today from those countries.

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There are many things we have in common. One of the major things is that we, as the inhabitants of the Australian continent before invasion, were here for many thousands of years... maybe even 100,000 years or more. We can proudly boast that we are the oldest ongoing culture in the world. We have been profoundly affected by colonization and today we will hear about this in some of the harshest ways, but today, as then, we are people who are strong, resilient and most importantly, still here to tell our story and demand justice for what has happened to us, our brothers and sisters, Aunts and Uncles, Mothers, Fathers and Grandparents.

I want to welcome you all here today to be part of our acknowledgement of National Sorry Day.

Thank you to Karen, The Board, and Larry Kanoa, the Chairperson for hosting this community event. Thank you to Uncle Frank, Rob and Zane for the smoking ceremony to welcome us today.

Our most special guests are of course those members of the Stolen Generations, and their descendants.

This day is a significant day in the National Calendar. Australia first started acknowledging Sorry Day in 1998 which was the first anniversary of the Bringing them Home Report. It is a day on which we pause to reflect on the hardship and mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that were forcibly removed from their families under Government policy that sought to assimilate mixed race children under its White Australia Policy. The people removed under these policies are now known as The Stolen Generations.

May 26 1997 was the day that The Bringing them Home report was tabled in the Federal Parliament following a 2 year National enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their families. The enquiry was conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now known as the Australian Human Rights Commission) and was facilitated by President Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson the Social Justice Commissioner.

The enquiry listened to the stories of 1000 people all who had been removed from their families and placed in institutions, or into placements with other families, many of which failed.

The report revealed stories of significant hardship, trauma, abuse, neglect and sadness. The people who bravely came forward to share their stories were finally heard and acknowledged. They hoped that in the telling of their stories it would never happen again to others.

Estimates of how far reaching this practice was are that at least 1 in 10 families had children removed, and at worst, 1 in 3 families. They say that every Aboriginal family has been affected by these policies. It doesn't take much scratching of the surface to reveal the truth in that. My Grandmother can tell stories of her family fighting to get children back from the Authorities. My Grandfather had family that were taken to the infamous Kinchela Boys Home where they suffered untold abuse and neglect. Many of our community here would recall the fear and dread of the Welfare cars as children scuttled away to hide.

It is the lived experience of many in our community that casts a grey shadow over our lives. We have all felt the specter of the White Australia Policy that essentially was a tool used by the Government to wipe us out.

The President of the Enquiry explained that what he came to understand after his review was that the policy of removing children was in fact Genocide. The fifth clause in the definition of the Genocide convention states that "The removal of children from their communities with a view to extinguishing their culture" is a feature of Genocide. This is what the Assimilation policy was doing. It took kids away from their families to make them white. It was deemed that in order for the children to survive they needed to become civilized. The policy was designed to take the Aboriginality out of the kids, seeing Aboriginality as being a problem. Aboriginal kids were made wards of the state from birth simply because of their Aboriginality. The laws of this country that enabled removal of Aboriginal children was an act of Genocide.

Remember that this was affecting people both older and younger than me. These practices went on from the 1800s with the establishment of Aboriginal Protection Boards, and specific laws that were enacted across the country by 1937 that sought to assimilate Aboriginal children of mixed descent. Certainly, throughout the 1950s and 60s the removal of children was rife. Children continued to be taken into the 1970s albeit with the era of self-determination looming enabling a much louder voice from our Aboriginal organizations to mount a defense to the large number of families this was affecting.

But as we know the impact does not end there. The effect on people living in institutions for their entire childhood cannot be undone. We can't give them back their parents, love, family, connection to country, culture. We can't undo what was done.

We can't undo the ravage and torment of their mothers as they grieved daily for the loss of their children. Mothers who had their babes taken from their arms after giving birth, or toddlers who knew nothing except the warm bosom of their mothers, young children taken on the promise of a good education but effectively stolen as they were never allowed to come back. Those mothers have known pain like no other. And what did it do to them? It wrecked them.

Their pain was often silenced in their powerlessness to get their kids back, and they must have felt like they were failing their children. Deemed by the system to be not good enough to raise their children. White Authorities creating laws that applied just to them, so their children could be taken.

Not to mention the lies that were told. Your mother doesn't want you. Your mother has died. Parents denied access to their children, told they were not allowed to make contact. Letters and communications withheld.

An excerpt from the Report:

"... the consistent theme for post-removal memories is the lack of love, the strict, often cruel, treatment by adults, the constantly disparaging remarks about Aboriginality - and the fact that the child should be showing more gratitude for having been taken from all that - and of course, the terrible loneliness and longing to return to family and community. Some commented that `I thought I was in a nightmare ... `I couldn't work out what I'd done wrong to deserve this...'; `It was like being in prison...', `It was very strict - you weren't allowed to do anything; (submission 20 page 6)."

The report listed 54 recommendations, one of which stated that each year we would hold a National Sorry Day to commemorate the history of forcible removal and its effects.

At this point I would like to offer you a moment of reflection. As we light a candle and take a minute's silence, I ask you to take this time to consider the bravery of those who have told their story. Perhaps consider the hardships and injustice those many thousands of children were put through in the name of White Assimilation. Maybe have a think about what you can do in your role in some meaningful way, to make sure this doesn't happen anymore.

So here we are 24 years since the report was tabled, and what has changed?

Gratefully members of the Stolen Generations now have acknowledgement. They have voiced their stories and had validation that their experiences have been shared so that we can learn from them. This was not an easy path and took a lot of courage and bravery to open up to a hearing about what must have been raw and painful.

We have had a National Apology to Members of the Stolen Generation given by Kevin Rudd in 2008 and remembered each year on February 13. Thousands of affected people sat and watched the apology that day, perhaps hopeful at what it might mean. Others felt distrustful that it would amount to anything else but a word fest. And remember how long we had to wait for that given that it took a change of government who were prepared to even take this step. The Government led by John Howard were never going to take that step and offer an apology.

13 years later and what has changed for members of the Stolen Generations. Not much I would presume. They are a little older, perhaps a little more jaded about the Government and what they could possibly do to deliver the full suite of recommendations from the report. Reparations remain few and far between by the Government. Many States have set up reparation processes, but the Commonwealth are yet to do so. Those who have received financial reparations are more likely to have done so from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and not for the injustice of having been forcibly removed from their family in the first place.

But there are other flow on effects that we are left to grapple with now. We often hear about the next Stolen Generations. Children continue to be removed from their Aboriginal families at rates never seen before. It is estimated that one in five Aboriginal children are living in Out of Home care. This is a tale all too familiar to our families.

As has been said before Aboriginal people are not inherently bad. In fact Aboriginal people are very family oriented. We value highly the extended family and traditional society was heavily built on that assumption. The role of Aunts, Uncles, and Grandparents was built in insurance for survival in a communal society. There was no understanding of what we now call the nuclear family. Children were part of the mob, the community, the social fabric. And not just traditionally but even now extended family matters.

Grandmothers and Grandfathers, fight just as hard for their children as ever.

But what is going on here?

A big factor is transgenerational trauma. Those White Australia Policies that raised children in institutions, the attitudes of the times that saw Aboriginal children as a problem to be solved, resulted in the abject abuse of those children. Those children grew to be adults.

Excerpt from the report: "Because the objective was to absorb the children into white society, Aboriginality was not positively affirmed. Many children experienced contempt and denigration of their Aboriginality and that of their parents or denial of their Aboriginality. In line with the common objective, many children were told either that their families had rejected them or that their families were dead."

Most often family members were unable to keep in touch with the child. This cut the child off from his or her roots and meant the child was at the mercy of institution staff or foster parents. Many were exploited and abused. Few who gave evidence to the Inquiry had been happy and secure. Those few had become closely attached to institution staff or found loving and supportive adoptive families.

It is difficult to capture the complexity of the effects for each individual. Each individual will react differently, even to similar traumas. For the majority of witnesses to the Inquiry, the effects have been multiple and profoundly disabling. An evaluation of the following material should take into account the ongoing impacts and their compounding effects causing a cycle of damage from which it is difficult to escape unaided. Psychological and emotional damage renders many people less able to learn social skills and survival skills.

Their ability to operate successfully in the world is impaired causing low educational achievement, unemployment and consequent poverty. These in turn cause their own emotional distress leading some to perpetrate violence, self-harm, substance abuse or anti-social behaviour.

Issues around trust, love, attachment are all reliant on a sound parental relationship. Where that is absent it is left to the child to figure out what to do.

We often hear now the difficulty that people had when they had their own children. The stress and trauma lays deep under the skin, and in fact now we understand it passes along in the genetic messaging to future generations.

Not everyone survives intact. For many the mental health impacts, the need for substances to block the memories, or not having the support or access to escape violent relationships, can lead to problems for the next generation.

Whilst we may see issues like this in the current day Child Protection era, we must find better ways to support our young parents. Those structures and systems that have developed along the way continue to be based on white views, white assumptions and white bias. The value of organisations like VACCA, the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, has to be held in high regard as they continue to advocate for the needs of Aboriginal families. BADAC and other Co-ops are at the forefront of this work, creating new systems and changing the way children are managed in this system. We must continue to develop our own ways of being. Finding culturally appropriate ways of working with families, supporting them to succeed and not waiting for them to fail is paramount.

We must always act in the best interests of the child as set out in the Bringing Them Home report but remember that the best interest of the child is not to deny or remove them from their cultural heritage, their identity and their connection to their country, their story.

We must do everything we can to keep our children with their family. Families have long held on to this aim but yet we still struggle to find places for some kids. We need to act fast as time waits for no one. Children grow while we are busy fighting things out in courts back and forth.

BADAC is trying to get this right. We are still doing what we can to give it our best shot. Aboriginal Children in Aboriginal Care is our aim.

We do have families that are in the middle of this struggle. They may well have had generations of trauma rippling down the line. The cumulative effect of that trauma manifests in environments that may not be right for our children right now. We work hard with those families to wrap around them and provide the supports they need to do better. Ideally this is the best option so that kids can stay with their parents.

But when this is not enough and kids are not in a safe situation, our next aim is to keep children with the extended family. What is key to us at this point is not losing our connection with those kids. We need to ensure that their family has a way of keeping them connected to their culture and to their community. The use of Cultural Support plans is one way of ensuring that carers know how to provide the children with those opportunities. Kids in care is an area of work that is extremely contentious, it is devastating for kids and families to be caught up in this system. Child Protection, Courts, orders, rules and restrictions make life incredibly tough for these kids.

Emotions are high, the human cost is significant. We know that kids brought up in the 'system' are much more likely to end up worse off. The juvenile justice system is full of kids who lost out. The mental health system is full of kids who trod this path.

We all have a role to play. Whether you're in the front line working with families, and kids or whether you are part of the broader team it is really important that you remember this history.

It was the White Australia policy that took us down this track for the last 100 years or so. Yes, we are in the grip of high case numbers right now but if we can really push to get our families connected to their culture, and using that strength and resilience we are so renown for we can shift this trend.

Transgenerational trauma can be halted, but it takes multi-disciplinary teams. We need the family support workers, the doctors, the mental health teams, and we need the wisdom and support of the Elders. We need people who will step in and provide that guidance to the younger ones. That was what our community was built on and that is what will get us out of this despairing situation.

Most importantly we need people to listen. We need workers who will listen to the needs of the families, the children and the people who are advocates for Aboriginal ways. This skill is the single most important thing you can do. Listen carefully and respond with respect to those expressions. The people at the centre of these issues need to be truly heard.

IN THE NEWS

In conclusion, I want to thank everyone again for coming along today and for creating such a great addition to the day for those that decorated the hands to commemorate the day.

Sorry Day precedes Reconciliation Week and in respect to that I want to take the opportunity to thank our non-Aboriginal friends and allies for coming today. Sorry Day is for acknowledging the trauma and loss but it also allows us to think about healing as Australians, so by sharing in this day I hope it will lead to a greater understanding, and in the end propel us towards greater outcomes for reconciliation.

Remember that what we do now will affect many generations to come.

If you or someone you know is in need of crisis support, phone Lifeline 13 11 14.

Help is also available, but not limited, via the following organisations. The key message is you are not alone.

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