ABSTRACT

Reconciliation is a concept that has framed much recent national debate about Aboriginal rights and status in modern Australia. Greater knowledge of Aboriginal history, particularly the tragic impact of taking Aboriginal children from their parents, has followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report quoted above. Aboriginal women and men from the stolen generations have described the emotional and psychological traumas of removal, and the long-term damage to their self-esteem and their ability to parent. Non-indigenous response to this painful history has focused in part on questions about how the ‘past’ relates to the present, not only between those individuals who carried out Aboriginal policy and those upon whom it so tragically impacted, but in terms of political relations between two polities, ‘the nation’ and ‘the Aboriginal people’.2 In 1996, Prime Minister John Howard directed historians to focus away from such questions. Dwelling upon the ‘regrettable’ past of racialist policies amounted to ‘obsessive and consuming national guilt and shame’; it was a “‘black armband” view of our past’ which obscured the ‘balance sheet of our history’.3