Australian Memory and the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous People

Abstract

The transformation of global politics in the early 1990s marked the end of the ‘short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 1994) and its Cold War certainties. If the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of apartheid in South Africa and fall of Latin America dictators indicated the victorious extension of the international liberal order, the outbreak of genocidal ethnic conflict in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Caucasus also heralded the return of integral nationalism. These events marked a new temporality and resultant new type of politics (Olick 2007). Because socialist hopes of a post-nationalist horizon had been dashed, grievances were now framed in terms of ethnic and national histories, which some observers interpreted as a regressive political imaginary of identity politics that divided peoples and occluded the persistence of structural oppression and inequality (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 171–86; Torpey 2006). In particular, the plethora of official apologies, truth commissions and reparations payments for ‘historical injustice’ suggested a preoccupation with the past rather than the future.1 Certainly, there is no doubting the transnational extent of apologies by governments, heads of state, professional and commercial groups, religious organizations and spiritual leaders to exploited individuals and abused communities, living and dead (Celermajer 2009; Nobles 2008; Torpey 2002; Cunningham 1999, 285–93). Consider the following sample.