Officials do not usually record facts of which they are ashamed. That is why competitors for the truth about colonial politics and Aboriginal history—Reynolds, Ryan, Windschuttle or Manne—have had to swim for the moral high ground through a swamp of unknowing. We will never know as a fact how many Tasmanian Aborigines were slaughtered by settlers or the secrets and whispering in the hearts of the dead.
Courts are not much good at finding and addressing old wrongs. Until the late 20th century the terra nullius principle rebutted the suggestion that Aborigines had been dispossessed. The High Court’s blazing demolition of that principle in Mabo has since been smothered by a legislative blanket that has also dimmed the light of human rights and public respect for alternative dispute resolution and specialist tribunals. Aboriginal survivors of the ‘stolen generations’ have not been able to prove their right to damages in civil courts under ‘white man’s justice’. How can you prove an official policy, passing from one government to another, to remove Aboriginal children from their culture, when the witnesses are dead and the memories are 50 years old? And that the dusty, incomplete files show that custodians consented to the removal of particular children?
What if it could be proved that Aboriginal children were taken illegally under the laws of the time; detained by force and deception without lawful authority; and their parents and kin were unlawfully deprived of their children? What if there were credible evidence that this was knowingly done to countless children and their families, because it was thought that it was morally acceptable to break the law?
So long as there is argument about the facts, we can dither about the relative merits of a justice or welfare response to the misery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. ‘Practical reconciliation’ assumes it is proper to address the needs rather than the rights of Indigenous children and their families. But if cultural dispossession, murder and the removal of those children did happen, then striving only for better health, education, living and housing standards, while necessary, seems an ethically inadequate aim. A just Australia for the survivors and their children requires more than the response of Western Australia to the shattering 2002 report of the Gordon Inquiry into the abuse of Aboriginal children in their communities today: a cluster of ‘multi-function’ police stations in remote areas.
There isn’t much of a market