"I’m Sorry" Are Two Words That Mean Everything

“I’m sorry.”

These words are everything to Australia’s Aborigine community, and just a month ago, they were uttered by Australia’s new liberal prime minister Kevin Rudd. For more than a decade, the conservatives have ruled, and they were not about to apologize for what the white man has done to those who were already living here. But as I viewed photos of the new PM saying these historic words to Parliament today at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne, Dean Stewart explained to me how much they meant. He calls it a cultural tsunami, and the facts bear him out.

We walked up a stairway and past a replica of a River Red gum tree. At one time these white barked trees stood tall all over the city. But the English settlers cut them down, and with them came very important parts of the Aborigine’s lives. Dean showed me where his ancestors, members of the Wamba Wamba about four hours north, once cut the bark to make a canoe. And the possums that lived in these trees provided the pelts for the possum skin cloaks, that every native man and woman wore to keep warm.

“If you asked those kids over there playing football which tree is a river red gum tree, they’d have no idea. Nor would they know the sound of the Magpie Lark. But these things were engrained in the native people’s mind…this tree provided everything, from painkillers to bark for canoes, to oil for their skin, to honey for food.

Dean turned to me and said his grandfather had played for the Australian football team that won the championship. Yet when the census was taken back then, just two generations back, native peoples were not counted as part of the humans who lived here. “It wasn’t until 1967 that Aborigines were allowed to vote, and were actually counted.” He said this with a tolerant sort of incredulity that made his point eloquently.

He teaches school children about the more than 250 different languages that the original people here once spoke. So many of them were killed, on Tasmania there used to be a bounty for each native that settlers could kill. There was recently fossil evidence that put the age of the first aborigines here at 35,000 years ago. The English came in 1825.

Dean spoke excitedly about how part of the Royal conservatory a few years ago was replanted with indigenous plants, and the English ivy was torn out. Birds and bugs not seen in many years returned, sensing that this might be their new home. As children planted the native plants, two huge predator birds swept over the garden, birds that hadn’t been spotted in Melbourne in more than 40 years. They too, he said, must have sensed that the place was being returned to the way it was before the settlers changed everything.