These two quotations provide a useful framework for the ongoing discussion of the problematics of apology for past wrongs, expressions of which have become an integral part of a number of contemporary national discourses (in Canada, Ireland, and Australia, for example). For Kevin Rudd, the need for a symbolic act of apology to Australia’s Indigenous people, given in Parliament in February 2008 near the beginning of his term as Prime Minister, is justifi ed by the necessity for “human decency” and the righting of an “historical wrong” in the form of statutes enacted by successive Australian parliaments that “infl icted profound grief, suffering and loss.” However, he is also concerned, as he makes clear in this speech, that the apology is not merely symbolic (which would make it little more than, in his words, “a clanging gong”) but also substantive, involving closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the implementation of policies for material change.1 The overwhelmingly positive response to his speech by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians alike marked a turning-point in the process of reconciliation. This was in dramatic contrast to the negative response to the opening speech by Prime Minister John Howard at the fi rst Convention on Reconciliation held in May 1997 where, despite uttering the words “I am sorry,” his refusal to accept responsibility on behalf of Australians of “this generation” for “past actions and policies over which they had no control” deeply offended many in the audience, who turned their backs to him in a gesture of contempt.2 As Gooder and Jacobs point out, it was his decision not to apologize offi cially on behalf of the Australian government that led to other expressions of apology from state

governments, police forces, church groups, and indeed from ‘ordinary Australians’ in the form of the collective symbolic apology of a National Sorry Day in 1998 (signifi cantly held on the very date that marked the release of the Bringing Them Home report on the Stolen Generations) and in the form of ‘Sorry Books’ where people could leave their own messages of reconciliation. A clear link between ‘saying sorry’ and a process of reconciliation was made evident in the changing of the name Sorry Day to the ‘Journey of Healing’ in 1999.