National Sorry Day (May 26) and National Reconciliation Week (May 27 – June 3) remind us that “the debt that Australia owes to the descendants of our first peoples still needs to be paid,” reflects ANDY HAMILTON SJ.
The business of Sorry Day and National Reconciliation Week is to remember grief as well as healing. This year the call to join it might be drowned out by the horror of the mass killing in Iran, Gaza and other parts of the world, and the almost impossible task of building peaceful relations between people who have suffered so terribly. People become angry and sorry at what their people have suffered but find it hard to say sorry to one another.
That is why these two celebrations are so important. They invite us to be ashamed of much in our own history, to say sorry to others for what our fellow Australians have done, and to work together to make a more just society.
National Sorry Day commemorates the launch of the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report on the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families. National Reconciliation Week bookends two dates: the 1967 Referendum and the 1992 Mabo Judgment. The memory of these events and the celebration of this week promote reconciliation. The theme of National Reconciliation Week this year is All In. It marks the need for all of us to participate in building respectful relationships and reminds us that reconciliation is not a spectator sport.
The days also remind us that in Australia the scars of the people of the First Nations from their dispossession and assaults on their culture remain, as does the discrimination against them that arose out of inherited feelings of fear and guilt. The debt that Australia owes to the descendants of our first peoples still needs to be paid.
Sorry Day and National Reconciliation Week also speak to us at Jesuit Social Services because the Christian Church whose tradition we inherit were part of that history of dispossession and discrimination. They were also part of generous attempts to serve Indigenous people, many aspects of which we now realise are misguided. Sorry business now is all of our business.
