My Apology

Very moved by this video of Abraham Nouk's (Abe Ape) apology.

Its shameful really that he has been so fully able to express, in one short period of his life in Australia, what I have felt, thought, believed and worked towards for so long. Is it my whiteness that makes me relatively silent. I wonder how I would be seen if I were to say exactly what he has said but as a white person. What stops me? Somehow I feel he has the right to take the moral high ground enough to do this but I don't. Maybe this is diminishing his sincere and wonderful apology. I think that all of these thoughts are just an indication of the complexity of whiteness and the way I shrink from my own privilege while at the same time inhabit it so blindly. This brings to mind the prose piece I wrote when National Sorry Day first came into being. My first reaction to it was anger. I was outraged by what I felt were the well meaning but empty apologies that people were speaking into the ether, not directed to any Aboriginal person because most of the people saying sorry didn't even know an Aboriginal person.
It was read out on ABC radio and then eventually in parliament by Senator Nick Bolkus at the closing of the Wik debate which was the longest debate in Australian parliamentary history.

In Response to National Sorry Day

I haven’t signed the sorry book. It seemed to me to be too small a thing to do to express a very big feeling.

My husband was one of the stolen children.

He was a year younger than me.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that when I was a child of seven wearing party dresses and carrying my suitcase to school, he was regularly being beaten with a strop strap at a children’s home and running away by hanging underneath a train all the way from Sale in Gippsland to Richmond station.

I’m sorry that his mother died in 1988, the year of the bicentennial, at the age of 46 and I am lucky enough to still have the company of my mother at the age of 75.

I’m sorry that I am about to embark on my 8^th year of tertiary education and he had to study for his HSC from books he begged for in jail.

I’m sorry that he was nine years old when his mother was eligible to vote, having some small say in a future on his behalf, yet my parents took that right for granted for all of their life and mine.

Most of all I am sorry that I couldn’t ever know his pain or do anything that would take it away. 

He used to say that he wished someone from the government would apologise for the mess they had made of his life.

I am sorry he died a lonely and painful death with a noose around his neck in 1993, the International Year of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples

Megan Evans 1996

Please watch Abe's video. It is what we all need to do.
I now fully appreciate Sorry Day as an important and powerful event for both black and white Australians.