Why We Owe An Apology

Alan Ramsey has a very shocking articlce in today's SMH which explains why we need to say "Sorry" and confess our national sin.

Weasel words won't hide monstrous shame

Before he died in November 1984, aged 83, Xavier Herbert gave an interview in central Australia in which, during 3½ hours, he talked of the widespread practice in Australia's north and north-west of what he called "gin rooting", as well as boasting of having been, as a young man in the 1920s, "the biggest gin rooter around". If I've got your attention, and Brendan Nelson's too, the Fairfax group, still controlled at the time by the Fairfax family, bought the interview and published 7000 words of it in two extracts in the now-defunct weekly The National Times in January 1985.

I know this because I was the paper's fill-in editor that month. I recall vividly an interview, recorded by the Alice Springs writer and ABC broadcaster Dave Richards, that was often as confronting as it was rambling. In it, Herbert, born and raised in the North-West Cape area of Western Australia, tells at one point how he wrote the first draft of his monumental novel, Capricornia, under the title Black Velvet, but after travelling to London in 1930 he couldn't find a publisher. It wasn't until he reworked the novel and returned to Australia that it was eventually published in Sydney on Australia Day, 1938, exactly 70 years ago last weekend.

To quote: "We used to go up to Broome for our holidays and I knew, all through Western Australia, black velvet was the thing. It's changed a lot in recent years but the perfect mate for the bushman was the black girl or the yellow girl, and I thought I'd write that novel, Black Velvet. I'd discovered the story potential of the Northern Territory, particularly the Top End. It was very colourful in those days. I went in there in 1927 and worked everywhere and [material] just kept turning up. So I built this thing up and went to Britain with it, but they wouldn't take the book.

"For one thing, I suppose, it was amateurish. I was unknown, it was the depth of the Depression, 1930, and also it was too avant-garde. There were some terrible stories. One particular thing, in the Kimberleys. The pearling industry was established in Broome and the pearlers used to go up into the Kimberley country and steal the young [Aboriginal] gins to work as pearl divers. Of course, they used to rape them, too, and when they got too pregnant they'd chuck them overboard.

Read the rest here