TheBanyanTree: Saying sorry

[Roger Pye]

I arrived in Australia in January 1971 having left on the SS Fairsky from 
Southampton a month before with my first wife and our three sons. I knew 
the Fairsky like the back of my hand for I had sailed on her before, in 
1960 when she was a troopship, the SS Oxfordshire. We had departed from 
Southampton then too but gone east not south and the place I disembarked 
(Aden Colony, now S Yemen) was vastly different to Melbourne Victoria.

It was no big deal for me to come halfway around the world or so I thought 
at the time. The Royal Air Force had told me a year before that there would 
not be a position for me after November 1970 when my 12 year stint was due 
to end. The idea of staying in a country where it seemed to rain or be cold 
or foggy much of the time didn't stand a chance against the glossy 
brochures from the Australian High Commision in London which painted a 
rosy, sunny picture of a country where 'everyone' was tall, slim, 
fairhaired, suntanned - and white. Where the streets flowed with milk and 
honey. Where there were jobs for everyone who wanted them. And so on.

It was snowing in London and there were rolling powercuts on the 12th 
December 1971 when we caught the train which would take us to Southampton. 
I had signed on with the Royal Australian Air Force two days before as a 
Leading Aircraftman Clerk, two ranking steps down from the RAF but at twice 
the pay I had earned as a Sergeant. It was raining in Melbourne and 25 
Celsius when we disembarked 13th January or thereabouts. At 9pm I boarded 
the night train to Adelaide, stepped off it at 6am into 35 C heat. Three 
months later I left there, a lot fitter, suntanned, to go to Sale in Victoria.

Walking down the main street in Sale a short time thereafter I passed a 
blackfella, the first I had seen. Tall, rangy, raggedly dressed, he glanced 
at me very quickly from below dark eyebrows, as quickly looked away again. 
His demeanour was . . cowed, walk softly-softly, don't invite trouble.  He 
reminded me of the Arabs in Aden who stepped off the footpath into the 
gutter whenever a white person came along as if they had no right to be 
walking the same soil. I was ashamed then by those actions and I was again 
in Sale.

Even so the plight of the Australian Aboriginals in the 18th, 19th and 20th 
centuries did not begin to come home to me properly until about 14 years 
ago when the one man business I had established after leaving the RAAF in 
1990 crashed in the recession we had to have. I finished up in a workers 
hut at a disused sawmill near a village 50 kms from the nearest 
halfway-decent shops, a village with 9 permanent residents, the smallest 
place I had ever lived. I began to learn about aborigines there for they 
were around but never welcome in the village.

2002 a friend of mine on the south coast of NSW asked me to visit because a 
government agency was set on building a carpark at a headland popular with 
fishermen, bushwalkers, campers and aboriginals. I went, taking my dowsing 
rod and pendulum with me because they travelled everywhere I did. I had 
been dowsing again for several years but now it was for natural energy, the 
universal energy of the cosmos which I used in Reiki and earth healing. It 
was the dowsing that interested my friend and by the time I had walked over 
the headland (Mullimburra Point nr Bingie, Peter) I understood his 
concerns. The following day I performed a short healing ceremony at the 
headland, releasing the spirits of tribespeople who had been there long, 
long before. Peter mentioned murders and massacres and there have been 
those in plenty since the first white settlers stepped on shore in 1788. 
Our history has been rewritten every generation, perhaps a good thing, 
perhaps not, for it disguises the demographics and perpetrations of a 
nation which in 1800 allegedly had 300,000 indigenes and 120 years later 
only 20,000. In fact there were many more than half a million, the tribes 
covered Australia at the peak of their occupation.

Saying 'Sorry' to the Aborigines as will be done tomorrow for what was done 
last century, for the 'Stolen Generation' and to its members who are still 
around is a grand gesture and should have been done a long time ago. But in 
my book it is not the most important thing. It has already happened, this 
morning, with a traditional Welcome to Country by Indigenous elders, held 
in federal Parliament for the first time. These words from Ngambi 
Aboriginal Elder, Matilda House Williams, will be immortalised in the 
Hansard of the Parliament:

"A Prime Minister has honoured us, the first people of this land, the 
Ngambri people, by seeking a welcome to country. In doing this, the Prime 
Minister shows what we call proper respect."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd: "Despite the fact that parliaments have been 
meeting here for the better part of a century, today is the first time that 
as we open the Parliament of the Nation that we are officially Welcomed to 
Country by the First Australians of this nation."

Goodonya Kevin

roger



Peter Macinnis wrote:
> Tomorrow, in the Australian Parliament, the Australian Prime Minister 
> will offer an apology to the stolen generation, Aboriginal people of 
> paler skin who were deemed to be part white, and who were "rescued" from 
> their Aboriginality.
>