Today is Sorry Day in so-called Australia. "Sorry" does not refer to apologies. It's based on Indigenous practices of Sorry Business; a collective process in times of grief & loss.
It's a day of remembrance for the 10000s of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families: the Stolen Generations. Taken between late 1800s to early 1980s, the children were placed in church-run institutions or (later) put up for adoption without parental consent.
Up until the late 1950s, the children were trained for domestic servitude and unpaid labouring and sent to white businesses and households. The abuse and neglect in the institutions and elsewhere was rampant. Many died in these places; not everyone who survived found their families; and most have passed away without seeing any justice.
Every Indigenous family has one or more members that were part of the Stolen Generations. And the trauma of this particular act of genocide is intergenerational.
Sorry Day was one of the recommendations of a royal commission - the Bringing them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Which was tabled with the Australian
Parliament on 26 May 1997.
Another recommendation was a national apology, and that occurred on 13 February. Otherwise, very few of the 54 recommendations have been actioned.
In more recent years, in addition to commemorating the Stolen Generations and advocating for their rights, this day is also for fighting for the rights of Indigenous children who are being taken away in record numbers.
Today, I think of my family members who were stolen by the government, and forced into servitude as children. Fuck the government, churches and others who participated in this race-based cruelty; who used Aboriginal blood, sweat and tears to build a white nation on stolen Blak land. Yes, Sorry Day is also a day of anger.
According to the study, “The apparent absence of pottery in Australia, as noted by early and more recent European observers… both reflected and was used to support, racist social evolutionary hierarchies characterizing Aboriginal societies as lacking cultural complexity.”
In an area just 90 x 90 cm, archaeologists found 82 pottery shards that are 2,950 to 1,815 years old.
Another day, another unflattering portrait of a public figure, and this time, the Streisand effect is in play too. TIME magazine reports on Australia's wealthiest person, Gina Rinehart, and her attempts to get a painting of her removed from the National Gallery of Australia. The portrait by Vincent Namatjira, an Aboriginal Australian artist, is part of a series in which he uses humor and exaggerated features to portray the rich. “People don’t have to like my paintings, but I hope they take the time to look and think, ‘why has this Aboriginal bloke painted these powerful people? What is he trying to say?’” he said in a statement shared with TIME. The gallery, to which Rinehart is a donor, is not backing down, saying it “welcomes the public having a dialogue on our collection and displays.”