Reconciliation to a European Dreaming?

I have been saved - a couple of times. Once most memorably by Billy Graham, when I was a 12-year-old. But the conversions always wore off, because no conversion can last when assent is wrung from the emotions despite the mind. If someone at this "function" had said "If you want to give your life for reconciliation come forward," I would have had an urge to go.

That is how crowd psychology works, and once away from the event the urge soon wears off. At the back of my mind as well would have been the knowledge that had I expressed any sentiment of apostasy the crowd might have turned maenad and torn me limb from limb.

Back here on our front verandah in Queensland things look different. My Methodist Deaconess mother, more or less the same age as Sir Ronald Wilson, and a staunch opponent of Pauline Hanson, says that she doesn’t like what he is doing. He should admit that the only reason children were taken from their families was because the families didn’t want them, and that if there were wrong done, then his church was there with the best of them.

I challenge her, because I have seen proof that contradicts her on many points. She will hear none of it. When she was a girl in Cairns, they had been visited by missionaries who told them of their work with Aboriginal children. There had even been collections in the Sunday School to help this work.

I cannot win the argument because the tone of the Stolen Children Commission’s advocacy makes me suspect some of its conclusions; and because my mother and my father find the accusation of wrongdoing an affront to their sense of themselves as moral beings.

In some ways they are right. What was done to Aboriginal Children wasn’t done with the same intent as the Race Laws were enacted in South Africa. The public motive was one of care - discrimination on the basis of improving the lot of an "impoverished" race. Most people didn’t think wrong was being done.

Now they feel that someone is trying to take advantage of them. By rewriting history they fear that an ambit claim is being made, and that they will be asked to pay up. This is not reconciliation, but more in the way of commercial bargaining.

This is the nub of the problem. The matter has become the stuff of faith and belief, and therefore not susceptible to logical proof. On both sides, you either believe, or you are damned.

On top of that there is no possibility of reconciliation. When we talk of Aboriginal reconciliation, we are not using it in the financial sense where you reconcile a cheque book with your bank statement, but in a religious sense where we become reconciled to God. That reconciliation is not the act of ticking off entries and making it add up on both sides of the ledger. That reconciliation is the act of forgiveness, freely asked and given. There are no lines drawn in the sand. No demands for more, but an acceptance of things as they are, and a determination to go forward into the future, leaving the past behind.

In Australia today we are all schismatics, those of us who are not agnostic or atheistic on the issue. What is needed is not more displays of sect loyalty, but a creed and a sacrament that we can all join in. We need to encompass the past, but not in a way that alienates the future. This is harder for Aboriginal Australians, perhaps, than the rest of us. They have lost a continent, and they will never get it back.

But they will enjoy even less of it if they and their close friends fail to realise that older Australians have their own land to lose in this whole process. That things were done that were wrong, but that people like my parents did not know that at the time, and will not acknowledge it now if there is any suggestion of lack of good will on their part.

We are talking about a European Dreaming. Of a time still remembered by older Australians just before Australia lost her innocence in World War II. Years of Federation and Nation Building. Not years without blemish, but things are never as they seem. We need to believe that they are, or we would all go mad. We have some way to go before reconciliation is possible, because we need to develop a shared dreaming. European and Aboriginal Australians need some project that will unite them so that there can be a creed to which we can all assent.

It is really too early to talk about reconciliation. At this stage we are still negotiating a peace settlement. Until that is behind us, demands for reconciliation will merely be a rallying cry for one side of the argument against the other.