Stan Grant on Rudd Sorry Address

Eight years ago this week Kevin Rudd spoke to and for the Australian people about what he termed “this blemished chapter in our national history”.

It was his first act as prime minister – opening federal parliament with the word Aboriginal and Islander people and a legion of non-Indigenous Australians had longed to hear: sorry.

It was an apology for “the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians”

The words of the speech – searing, challenging, cathartic and healing – spoke to the pain deep inside all Indigenous people and especially those for whom this apology was intended: the members and survivors of the stolen generations.

As Rudd pointed out in his speech, between 1910 and 1970, between 10% and 30% of Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families. Now was the time to offer amends.

“For the pain suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry,” he said.

It was a moment in time when Australia was being asked to reconcile with its past. It was an apology that sought forgiveness in return. It was a speech handwritten in a long night in the study of the Lodge inspired, Rudd says, by the ghosts of leaders past – Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam – from the prime minister’s pen to the hearts and minds of the Australian people.

Ahead lay days of triumph and failure, of bitterness and treachery, of tears and redemption but even Kevin Rudd’s most trenchant critics would allow him this moment of history.

Each year Rudd revisits the apology with a speech to mark its anniversary. It coincides with the annual Closing the Gap report – a fact check on the state of Indigenous affairs conceived to add practical measure to the symbolism of “sorry”. Instead it has become a sobering and shaming reminder of the seeming intractability of the malaise that sits at the heart of too many black lives and communities.