I was in Dili, Timor-Leste on Apology Day, 13 February 2008. I listened on the radio to the Apology offered by Kevin Rudd. Tears welled in my eyes.
The previous year, I had arrived in Dili to take up my post as Country Director of Caritas Australia's aid and development program in Timor-Leste. Early on I received an uncomfortable message from a very angry young man. 'What are you doing here, Malai? Have you come to make us like your Aboriginal people?'
I had no response for that young man. He and many of his compatriots were frustrated and hungry, and faced the prospect of perpetual unemployment. Their new country was again embroiled in conflict. The fabric of hope that bought these young Timorese together as a nation was, like many hearts at that time, broken.
I was representative of a country that was working for reconciliation. I was representative of an organisation that means compassion. Or so I thought.
In the space of a couple of sentences, a young man had challenged all of this. How could I be an ambassador of reconciliation and hope, coming from a nation that had not been big enough or aware enough to begin to seek reconciliation with its own First Peoples?
We could not say sorry until 13 February 2008.
'To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.' I wept as Kevin Rudd spoke.
Last Monday, I had tears in my eyes again — twice. In the late afternoon I read a report from our partner, Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation (KBHAC), a a group of survivors from the notorious Kinchela Boys Home (KBH). I was looking at the photograph posted above. A tear fell onto my keyboard.
These are Kinchela men, Stolen Generations men, with Victor, representing the next generation, and the missing gate, now found, from their once oppressive home.
Why the tears? I looked again.
The gate is broken, off its hinges, separated from the fence which had once supported it. It is weathered, torn, bent. This gate hasn't been cared for.
Once the gate was strong; once it had the power to keep boys imprisoned, broken and beaten down. Now it has more in common with the boys grown into men than with their persecutors. An oppressive gate, broken, has become the gate of repossession, of restoration, of reconnection, of reconciliation — a Lenten gate.
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