In Bass Coast, First Nations people and Allies have commemorated Sorry Day for many years, and everyone is invited this year to attend on May 26 at 10am at the Cape Paterson Surf Life Saving Club. Aunty Patrice Mahoney speaks at a smoking ceremony.
By Marg Lynn, Bass Coast South Gippsland Reconciliation Group
The Bringing Them Home Report, released in 1997, told all of us about the devastating impacts affecting Stolen Generations, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who were removed from their families and communities up to the 1970s.
Removal destroyed the link with their culture and left many thousands of children and adults with lifelong trauma.
Sorry Day was first commemorated on May 26, 1998, the year after the report brought down 83 recommendations to address this cultural genocide. Only five of those recommendations have ever been fully implemented. Another 12 have been given a qualified pass, 45 have never been implemented, 10 have partly failed and another 10 have a dubious status.
The Healing Foundation, an organisation set up to care for the interests of Stolen Generation people, has recently issued an urgent call to all political parties, governments, churches and other agencies across Australia to work with Stolen Generations organisations, survivors, and The Healing Foundation itself, to finally deliver on the full recommendations and intent of the Bringing Them Home Report.
The Healing Foundation Report states:
"Whilst the Bringing Them Home report and the testimonies of the Stolen Generations survivors left an enormous legacy, progress against its recommendations has been woeful. It is hard to conceive that gross human rights violations, documented and bravely retold by survivors in public forums, can be met with systematic inaction in so many areas. Yet that is the confronting reality that exists in Australia.
"The urgency to act now arises from not only the past moral failure but the fact that survivors are all ageing; most have already passed away. The Healing Foundation's report is titled Are you waiting for us to die?
"Their report calls for a comprehensive national healing package to address survivors' pressing and complex needs. Such a package must include reparation in all states and territories. Victoria has established a reparation scheme, but many other states have much work to do.
"It also calls for rehabilitation and research: culturally safe services to be provided to survivors which also address the inter-generational trauma of their descendants; and research to establish the needs and develop best practice. Another need is for access to records, to family tracing and reunion.
Further, education and training in all institutions need curricula about the removal of children and their intergenerational effects, so that we develop a whole of society understanding of our collective past, and all professionals working with Stolen Generation survivors contribute to, rather than hinder, their healing."
In Bass Coast, First Nations people and Allies have commemorated Sorry Day for many years, and everyone is invited this year to attend on May 26 at 10am at the Cape Paterson Surf Life Saving Club.
