ABSTRACT
In post-conflict societies, public apology is a commonplace practice carried out by wrongdoers or descendants of the wrongdoers to reconcile with their victims. It is crucial to the establishment of historical justice in a nation inflicted by past trauma arising from a collective injury. There were public apologies offered by the state or state representatives after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa to the black population, in Canada to its indigenous people, and in New Zealand to the Maoris. Consequently, studies have been carried out to explore the politics, pragmatics, and the paradox involved in public apologies. In this chapter, I look closely at the public apology of 13 February 2008 delivered in the Parliament by Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010, to the Stolen Generations. I am especially interested in journalistic documentations that emerged in the Australian public sphere describing the responses to the apology for a worldwide audience and the theoretical discourse surrounding the practice of apology as such. How does the public apology of 2008 fit into the larger narrative of estrangement and belonging present in Australia? How far has the public apology gone in addressing the problems of restitution and reparation? All of the different segments of the chapter contribute to the assertion that in the specific case of Australia, the public apology, as it was between unequal parties, was never primarily concerned with the Aboriginal population but the two views or self-understandings of Australia – one reconciled and the other transgressive.
