This is a brave country, owning up to its past, to the injustices it has meted out. On February 13, 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized, on behalf of the Australian federal parliament, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – the indigenous peoples of this continent – who suffered as members of The Stolen Generations (see http://maginams.ca//2010/02/19/). The apology followed the shocking revelations of the Bringing Them Home Report tabled in parliament on May 26, 1997, which painted a detailed picture of the horrific trauma endured by children forcibly removed from their families, as well as that of families and communities from which those children were taken. The tabling of that report is now commemorated as Sorry Day, and this morning, I cycled to the Aitkenvale library to attend a 2010 Sorry Day morning tea.

It was a quiet affair, with posters and paper human ‘tracks’ on display boards, along with the invitation to write a note on a footprint and add it to the boards. I did so and read other notes, one of them profoundly honest and compassionate, which I photographed and have included. Others simply said ‘Sorry.’ Still another was an acronym: ‘S – showing, O – our, R – respect, R – recognition, Y – yearly.’

Dances and activities related to Sorry Day were being held elsewhere in Townsville, but I cycled home, with every bump on Charlotte Street and the Ross River Parkway jolting my head into pain. I paused in the Ross River Bush Gardens to observe a conference of honeyeaters in weeping paperbarks with bark peeling away in sheaves of thin parchment that cried out for matches or pens. Butterflies – purple crow, common crow, varied eggfly, grass yellows – flitted across a dirt path near the river.

While in the gardens, I heard the repetitive click-click-click of two sticks hit together, and children’s voices laughing. When I climbed the slope from the river’s edge to the paved parkway track, I saw, in a shady schoolyard corner, three young indigenous boys with pale cloths wrapped around their loins, and white markings painted on their bare chests, arms, and legs. As I watched from a distance, they enacted a wallaby hunt, with much laughter, while an indigenous woman clicked the sticks and guided them in their performances. I guessed the boys were students from the school and thought that their being encouraged to learn and celebrate their cultural heritage – rather than being robbed of it – was the real evidence I saw today that the time of The Stolen Generations is past.