Dear Friends,

I attach a significant article by John Hewson in last Friday’s Financial Review. Last month Malcolm Fraser urged non-Indigenous Australians – ‘especially those of my sort of age, who were brought up with quite a false story of what happened during the white settlement of Australia’ – to see Rabbit-Proof Fence. Now John Hewson is urging the Government to see it.

Meanwhile all over the country, people are preparing for Sorry Day. The Sydney Opera House has just announced an outstanding programme of Indigenous speakers and musicians to commemorate the day. Melbourne City Council will fly the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags on the Town Hall with a large Sorry Day banner between them. In cities, towns and rural areas, local groups are arranging walks, barbecues, concerts, art displays to bring the community together.

We would be glad to carry news of these events on our website – http://www.journeyofhealing.com. With nearly 100 people viewing the pages each day, it is a useful way to let people know. The webpage also carries information about Journey of Healing badges, posters, T-shirts, CDs, etc. We are receiving some large orders. It would help us if you can get your orders in soon, so that we can get reprints in time if they are needed.

With thanks,

John Bond Secretary Journey of Healing

~~~

Australian Financial Review, 12 April 2002

A moving picture of hope

John Hewson hopes that the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence acts as a catalyst for the long-overdue reconciliation

John Howard and his ministry should, as a matter of compulsion, take the first opportunity to see and discuss the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence. And, not just because of this movie, they should then immediately say ‘Sorry!’ along with, and on behalf of, the rest of us.

Something needs to jolt our political leaders into action on Aboriginal reconciliation. Hopefully this movie proves to be that catalyst.

The film sensitively portrays the true story of three mixed-blood Aboriginal girls, Molly (aged 14), her sister Gracie (10) and their cousin Daisy (8). It shows them being forcibly removed from their parents by the West Australian police and then details their ‘escape’ from the Moore River Native Settlement. They were sent there, under government policy, to both ‘help’ them assimilate with White Australia and hopefully ensure their ‘breeding out’.

The film focuses on their quest to return to their mother/aunt and their travails – constantly being pursued by black trackers and the police – by following the rabbit-proof fence over some 1,600 kilometres, and taking a little over three months.

This will prove to be one of our most controversial movies: already people such as Sydney Daily Telegraph columnist Piers Akerman, former Aboriginal Affairs minister Peter Howson and the director of the Institute for Private Enterprise, Des Moore, question the extent of the film’s veracity, while others such as commentator Robert Manne document its authenticity. I personally still cannot deny that White Australia stole several generations of our Aboriginal people, and it’s about time we apologised.

We can’t as a nation, go on pretending that Aboriginal children were not forcibly removed; that mixed-blood people were not forced to assimilate, or subjected to policies, state by state, to breed them out. While there is undoubtedly exaggeration and truth on both sides, we can’t, as a nation, secure our future without acknowledging the inadequacies and failures of our past.

Two things struck me about the movie. First, the then chief protector of Aborigines in WA, English-born bureaucrat A O Neville, reportedly remarked to a group of Perth society ladies in 1931 that, ‘in spite of himself, the native must be helped.’ But, as film critic Richard Kuipers remarked, Neville was not portrayed in the film as ‘a monstrous villain’, but as ‘the product of an unenlightened age’; a misguided missionary whose convictions, though reprehensible by most modern Australian standards, reflected widely held views of the day.

Second, I was struck by the way the movie sensitively conveyed the role of the ‘carers’ of these stolen children.

These two aspects particularly resonated with me as a devout Baptist through my early and teenage years. And I suspect they should with John Howard as a Methodist of a similar era.

For the first 25-odd years of my life, the Baptist Church was my life. I taught Sunday School, regularly attended Christina Endeavour and Men’s Teas, played Protestant Churches Soccer and Cricket, attended weekly Baptist youth and prayer fellowships, was baptised by immersion (our belief), and became a deacon of the church at the age of 12.

I emphasise this because we were taught that our role models were the missionaries we supported. Every other month they spoke to one of our services and detailed their activities on our behalf.

I distinctly recall, because I reacted to it and was questioned at the time, some of our inland missionaries making Neville-like statements such as ‘we have to protect these savages’ or ‘heathens’ or Aborigines from themselves.

They genuinely believed, and we were expected to accept, that stealing children was God’s work – to educate them, to care for them, to assimilate them, to train them, to make them Christians etc.

The world in which John Howard and I grew up idealised a national tragedy. We were expected to admire and support our missionaries. Yet, this was racial prejudice.

I not only questioned it at the time but, as a graduate student in the late 1960s and early ’70s in the US, I really got to understand the extent and depth of racial prejudice – I lived in the Baltimore student ghetto, just half a block from the black ghetto. (I used to jog with an African-American, which stopped the whites setting their dogs on him on a daily basis.)

Ironically, this is not an issue that should be subject to politics. It is bigger than Piers, Peter, Des and me. It’s a question of what our country needs to do. We need to acknowledge and accept the responsibility for our past and put in place a structure that takes our nation forward.

I recall Mahatma Gandhi saying: ‘My idea of democracy is that the weak is improved as much as the strong. Democracy is an impossible thing unless the power is shared by all.’

Our Government prides itself on being fiercely democratic, but is happy to ensure that the power is not shared by all.

John Hewson is an investment banker, company director and a former leader of the Liberals

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