FROM THEFT TO APOLOGY

DR SARAH CEFAI

S.CEFAI@UWS.EDU.AU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

LECTURE OUTLINE

AIM: To analyse apology

METHOD:

1) The cultural and political conditions of ‘apology’

How did Rudd’s apology come about?

2) The nation as a subject and object of feeling

How can we understand the relationship between nations and feelings? How was the nation portrayed as the

subject of an apology?

3) Apology as bearing witness

What does apology allow us to witness? What is the significance of witnessing the harm caused to Aboriginal people?

DISCUSSION: Question time

Similar lecture structure to…

but with an emphasis on feeling and emotion

PART 1

The cultural and political conditions of apology

The cultural and political conditions of apology

1997 the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families Federal Government report titled Bringing Them Home.

• policies involved and the philosophy of race and nation behind the policies

• number of babies, children and young people forcibly removed

• how, where and under what conditions children were removed

• testimony

• effects on those affected by child removal

WHY RUDD IN 2008?OTHER FACTORS INVOLVED IN CHANGING THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

• Land rights – Mabo & Wick. Northern Territory Land Rights Act (), Native Title land rights act

• Transnational context of Civil Rights contributing to concepts of Indigenous rights and Indigenous sovereignty.

• Tourism

• 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and 1997 Bringing Them Home

• UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007

• 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response, ‘the intervention’

PART 2

The nation as a subject and object of feeling

OBJECTS & SUBJECTS OF EMOTION

Aren’t feelings just natural? Personal? What have feelings got to do with thoughts and ideas? What have feelings got to do with the politics of nations?

Sara Ahmed (2004), ‘the cultural politics of emotion’

Objects

Subjects

Examples of feelings that have ‘others’

Hate – others are the cause of injury

Love

Shame

NATIONAL FEELINGS- Nations need national ‘others’ – race is a primary signifier of

national difference as well as national inclusion or belonging.

- There are national feelings, e.g. national pride, national sorrow. We can be nostalgic about the way things were. We can express anxiety about preserving what is important to us. How do these feelings work? These are collective feelings, which means they are ‘imaginary’ (Benedict Anderson, imagined communities)

- Nations are the subjects of feeling. Nations have feelings. These feelings are bound up with identity. For instance, a nation can be strong and masculine, or weak and feminine (think of conversations about asylum seekers, examples where nation is being portrayed as strong or weak)

- Nations are the objects of feeling. Nations are things about which we feel as subjects of the nation. E.g. pride. We can feel proud about being Australian (being subjects of Australia).

METHOD: FEELING AUSTRALIAN / AUSTRALIAN FEELINGS

1) Discourse analysis (analysing conversations)

Look at representations in the media, politics, public debate. See how subjects and objects of emotion are constructed.

Start by thinking about a) your feelings, b) what ideas and images might have influenced these feelings, c) what larger ideas these images and ideas are part of, d) whereabouts you might see these larger images and ideas being represented

2) Analyse historical events (analysing what happened)

Look at events that are emotive.

Start by thinking about a) your feelings in relation to the event, b) how you are implicated by the event, c) possible responses to the event (what kind of new social relations might form?)

WHAT DO WE FEEL?

Pain

Regret

Anger

Sorrow

Sadness

Loss

Devastated

Depressed

Unhappy

Overwhelmed

Confused

Worried

Anxious

Afraid

Ashamed

Guilty

Remorse

Distressed

Uncomfortable

Uncertain

Hopeless

Responsible

SHAME VS GUILT

emotional landscapes of apology.

PART 3

Apology as bearing witness

How do you witness to lives that are impossible to imagine?

To bear witness is to make lives imaginable, to bring that which is currently hidden into the public domain.

To bear witness would mean to imagine a different kind of Australia.

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE

8:20 - 12:26

THE LIMITS OF APOLOGYSara Ahmed (2004)

When apology covers over shame in order to reach pride, shame can eclipse the very histories whose recognition might transform the social fabric of shame in Australian society.

Tony Barta (2008)

‘The apology was framed within what has come to be called “reconcilliation”. Established during the years following the two inquiries into Aboriginal trauma in recent times—deaths in custody and then the stolen children—it has become the official ideology within which Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can now “move on.”’ (210)

‘There is a deeply seated impulse in Australian society to separate problems of Aboriginal life and death in the present from the European attitudes to Aboriginal life and death in the past.’ (209)

Bringing them home

It should, I think, be apparent to all well-meaning people that true reconciliation between the Australian nation and its indigenous peoples is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgment by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, oppression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. That is not to say that individual Australians who had no part in what was done in the past should feel or acknowledge personal guilt. It is simply to assert our identity as a nation and the basic fact that national shame, as well as national pride, can and should exist in relation to past acts and omissions, at least when done or made in the name of the community or with the authority of government.

Sir William Deane, Governor-General 1996, cited in Bringing Them Home (1997)

3 Apologies

1. Rudd

2. Keating

3. Jindabyne

These apologies can be analysed as events: What happened? Who was involved? How did the event change a context? What was unanticipated about the changes that followed the event?

These apologies can also be analysed as discourses: What was the conversation about? Who were the speakers? Who were the audience? In which media and forums was the apology represented? What are some of the ways in which these apologies are spoken about today?

Kevin Ruddhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKWfiFp24rA

Paul Keating

Jindabyne

WHY SAY SORRY?

Responsibility

Lived responsibility in the everyday…

Guilt as a block – source of anger and ignorance.

Change relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

To bear witness to the structural inequalities

- Differences in life expectancy, education, employment, wealth

- Differences in representation by the government and by society

Constructing EmotionsKEATING

Redfern parkLocal eventTelevised by ABCAnger, lack of belief, turning awayAboriginal audiencePast ongoing in presentAll Australian identities not separate from ATSI identities (subject of the apology should be all who are non-Aboriginal and who live on Australian [Aboriginal] land)1991 Royal Commission Inquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custodyIdeology of social democracy

RUDDOpening of parliamentNational eventTelevised by multiple stations

Outpouring of griefAboriginal audiencePast separated from presentAustralian governments are sorry (subject of the apology are people implicated by governments)

Bringing them Home report

Ideology of equity of opportunity

ABORIGINAL PERSPECTIVES

The sorry day campaign

The tent assembly

Stolen generations testimonies

Judy Atkinson Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines

Scholarship

Not talk about Aboriginal people as objects of knowledge

Not express pity for Aboriginal people (also objectifying)

Challenge ways in which Aboriginal people are represented as a social problem (challenge assimilationist perspectives)

BEARING WITNESS

We are all implicated in this history. We all partake in discourses that position Aboriginal people as a source of national pain and shame, even if we ourselves are Aboriginal people.

Responsibility in the everyday – if we keep looking to governments to come up with the answers it won’t work.

Learn about Aboriginal rights, social justice for Aboriginal people, have to undo narratives of whiteness and start speaking about and representing histories that continue to be repressed.

My view is that we all partake in the pain of dispossession, even in denial, in anger towards minoritised groups (non-white Australians or asylum seekers)