[Media Caucus] sorry seemed to be the hardest word to say....

[Tracey Naughton]

Friends, Colleagues and Rony,

Australia has recently had a significant change of government.
I am told (I am in Ulaanbaatar), the new golden boy Prime Minister has  
changed the atmosphere in the nation.

The long awaited apology to Australia's Stolen Generation, was made.  
For the first time, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians  
were involved in the opening of an Australian Parliament.

The draconian workplace legislation is being broken down.

Change is in the air. It's all good.

This note, and the poem, came from an Australian artist and friend,  
Megan Evans. Her husband a Koorie activist was a Stolen Child. In 1998  
there was a sorry day in Australia, to say sorry in the face of a  
government who stated they would not say sorry, and people were asked  
to sign a book. That was ten years ago. Megan wrote this poem then, in  
1998.

2008, is an important moment in Australian history. I hope this is the  
beginning of a better future in a post, post modernist de- 
colinisation, way forward ;-)

Tracey

tracey at traceynaughton.com
skype: tracey_naughton




In Response to National Sorry Day.

I haven’t signed the sorry book. It seemed to me to too small a thing  
to do to express a very big feeling.
My husband was one of the stolen children.
He was a year younger than me.

I’m sorry.
I’m sorry that when I was a child of seven wearing party dresses and  
carrying my suitcase to school, he was regularly being beaten with a  
strop strap at a Children’s Home and running away by hanging  
underneath a train all the way from Sale in Gippsland to Richmond  
station.

I’m sorry that his mother died in 1988, the year of the bicentennial,  
at the age of 46 and I am lucky enough to still have the company of my  
mother at the age of 75.

I’m sorry that I am about to embark on my 8th year of tertiary  
education and he had to study for his HSC from books he begged in jail.

I’m sorry that he was 9 years old when his mother was eligible to  
vote, having some small say in a future on his behalf, yet my parents  
took that right for granted for all of their life and mine.

Most of all I am sorry that I couldn’t ever know his pain or do  
anything that would take it away. He used to say that he wished  
someone from the government would apologise for the mess they had made  
of his life.

I am sorry that he died a lonely and painful death with a noose tied  
around his neck in 1993, the International Year of the World’s  
Indigenous Peoples.


Megan Evans 1998


*This was read out in the Senate by Senator Nick Boulkos at the  
closing of the Wick debate in July, 1998









-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/media/attachments/20080214/e94021bb/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: sealTracey.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 32180 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/media/attachments/20080214/e94021bb/attachment-0001.jpg