Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd will this month say sorry to the country's Aborigines. In some parts of Australia, such as the remote township of Balgo, the apology is long overdue, writes Adam Harvey
The west Australian Aboriginal community of Balgo, which sits on a remote desert escarpment about eight hours' drive from the nearest sealed road, is one of the most depressing places you'll ever visit.
I was last there in 2004. Then, obese, drunken adults sat around a dusty main square, gambling with piles of $50 notes earned through mining royalties or cheques from indigenous artworks painted in the community. The betting only stopped when a local woman picked up a fist-sized rock to swing at the head of a neighbour. The brawl went on for about five minutes before she was disarmed. The blood spilled was invisible in the red soil.
The ruins of squalid homes, some repaired and cleaned just weeks before only to be destroyed again, sat abandoned and uninhabitable. Children raced amongst the adults, mucus and fluid pouring from infections in their noses and ears. Lessons at the local classrooms were amplified through loudspeakers because middle-ear infections had burst the students' eardrums, damaging their hearing.
The government-paid workers - police and nurses and repairmen - lived in homes protected by giant cages. The teenagers were invisible in daylight, coming out at night to throw stones, drink, or sniff petrol smuggled in to this supposedly "dry" community. Several of the local boys had recently hanged themselves from the town's water tower. A coroner called it "Australia's shame".
Balgo is a part of Australia that's never seen on the TV travel programmes, or those glossy supplements promoting the outback experience. If you don't have a permit from the Aboriginal community, you're not allowed in. But it's places like Balgo, or areas with similar problems, such as Sydney's Redfern and Mutitjulu in the shadow of Uluru, that will be in the minds of Australians on February 13th, when the country's new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, stands up and apologises to Aborigines for their mistreatment at the hands of successive Australian governments.
RUDD KNOWS THAT the human wreckage in communities such as Balgo - built on the site of a former church-run mission for Aboriginal children - is due in no small part to callous or misguided official policies. Back in 1996, then-governor general, Sir William Deane explained it succinctly: "The present plight, in terms of health, employment, education, living conditions and self-esteem, of so many Aborigines must be acknowledged as largely flowing from what happened in the past. The dispossession, the destruction of hunting fields and the devastation of lives were all related. The new diseases, the alcohol and the new pressures of living were all introduced."
Rudd's "sorry" speech will be a momentous event in Australian politics, a grand gesture that's a first step towards repairing a 220-year-old rift between white and black Australia. Technically, Rudd will be apologising to the "stolen generations" - the approximately 55,000 indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in institutions such as the Balgo mission, or with white foster parents during the first half of the 20th century, in a failed attempt to "assimilate" them into white society. But the symbolism of the apology goes beyond the stolen generations. It is official recognition of the damage done to Aborigines by European settlers and successive governments.
Former prime minister, John Howard, resisted pressure to make an official apology. "Regret" was about as strong as it got from Howard, and Rudd's critics say that the new prime minister is a fool, because he is accepting blame and will open the government to lawsuits from members of the stolen generation and their relatives. No-one knows what Rudd will say in his speech. His Australian Labor party colleagues say that compensation isn't on the cards, and it's all about reconciliation between whites and blacks.
The vast gulf between the two communities was opened as soon as the settlers of the First Fleet set up their tents on the shores of Sydney Harbour in 1788, and went about the business of settling a continent with no more concern for the locals than for the thick scrub that stood in their way. From the start, Aborigines were enslaved, jailed and killed. Resistance was met with brutal retaliation. Instances of blacks attacking whites were used as justification for ruthless, organised massacres of entire communities.
BY THE TURN of the 20th century, government officials charged with "protecting" Aborigines spoke of the hopelessness of "full-bloods", and the need to assimilate the so called half-castes. Children were plucked from their parents and packed off to Church-run institutions in programmes that were operating as recently as the 1960s. At a government inquiry, a Tasmanian woman spoke of being taken from her island community along with seven brothers and sisters.
"The children were screaming and the little brothers and sisters were just babies of course, and I couldn't move, they were all around me, around my neck and legs, yelling and screaming. I was all upset and I didn't know what to do and I didn't know where we were going. I just thought: well, they're police, they must know what they're doing. I suppose I've got to go with them, they're taking me to see Mum . . . But then we turned left to go to the airport . . ."
The children were all fostered to different families. A government inquiry estimated that up to 30 per cent of all Aborigines born between 1910 and 1965 had similar experiences.
The mistreatment has its echo today in the difficult existence of a large proportion of Australia's 270,000 Aborigines, who on average live 17 years less than other Australians, are 13 times more likely to go to jail, and suffer from diet and hygiene-related health problems that seem to be getting worse, not better.
There are still only a handful of Aboriginal university graduates, and indigenous role models are almost always sportspeople - such as 2000 Olympics champion Cathy Freeman, two-time Wimbledon winner Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Australian Football League players Michael Long and Nicky Winmar.
Mostly, Aborigines have warmly greeted the announcement of an apology. "I think this is monumental. It is something people have waited for, for a very long time, " said Aboriginal leader and co-chairman of Reconciliation Australia, Mick Dodson. "It's hugely important to us as a nation and to members of the stolen generations."