Australia's black-white divide still stark

Feb 13, 2008, 7:56 GMT

Sydney - A police car pulled up outside Glennis Saunders' primary school 35 years ago and quite literally transported her to white Australia.

She was taken out of the care of loving Aboriginal relatives for a bed in an orphanage and a life as a ward of the state.

Saunders, 46, was among thousands of indigenous Australians in Canberra to hear the historic apology to those like her who were removed from their families in what's now seen as a misguided attempt at inducting blacks into white society.

'It will be sad because it will bring back memories of what happened to my family,' Saunders said. 'But it will also be a good day because I reckon we'll all feel relieved when the prime minister says sorry to us.'

Relieved, yes. But after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his longed-for apology to what are called the stolen generations, the realities of Aboriginal Australia remain depressingly the same.

Despite over 2 billion Australian dollars (1.9 billion US dollars) spent annually on special health and welfare projects, indigenous males die on average 17 years earlier than their white counterparts.

Infant mortality is four times as high among the 500,000 who identify as descendents of a 60,000-year-old culture. Suicide is twice the national rate, murder six times the rate, and blacks are 11 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites.

Professor Mick Dodson, director of Aboriginal studies at the Australian National University, is convinced that the symbolism of Rudd's apology to the stolen generations will eventually show up in practical improvements in black welfare.

'The reality is that how you feel about yourself, and whether you feel your culture and history is acknowledged and respected, is a key part of facing your problems and being able to turn things around,' Dodson said.

In the crowds outside Parliament House to hear the apology there was a palpable feeling that a breakthrough in race relations had been made, that an impediment to progress had been removed.

'We've just had the most momentous thing happen in the history of this country as far as I'm concerned,' a joyous Christine King from the Stolen Generations Alliance said. 'We cry together, we laugh together, we hug one another, we say 'don't we have a wonderful country, that we can look forward to a greater future.''

Symbolic gestures are not new. A reconciliation walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2000 drew 250,000 people. The federal parliament is the last parliament in Australia to tender a formal apology to the stolen generations - all six state parliaments have already done so.

In the Northern Territory, where a quarter of the population is Aboriginal, member of state parliament Terry Mills said black welfare had gone backwards since the apology to the stolen generations six years ago.

'We're going to put our hope in an apology resulting in some kind of positive action? We haven't seen that occur in the Northern Territory and I'm so wary of tokenism,' Mills said.

John Howard, Rudd's predecessor as prime minister, was implacably opposed to an official apology. He put his faith not in political gestures but in practical measures like quarantining part of welfare payments so that dole money wasn't blown on alcohol and gambling but spent on food and rent.

Howard sent police, and even the army, into the Northern Territory's remote communities to tackle the sexual abuse of children.

His guide in engineering 'practical reconciliation' was feisty magistrate Sue Gordon, who was taken from her parents when she was 4 years old.

'You've got to look at the issues which face aboriginal people today and the violence in aboriginal communities, the child abuse in aboriginal communities,' she said when named to head a panel advising Howard. 'All that sort of stuff far outweighs the stolen generation wanting to be said sorry to.'

But Gordon was in Canberra for the stolen generations apology and she can't help but have been moved by the euphoria that the apology brought about.

Many are hoping that the absence of an apology by federal parliament to the stolen generations was a much bigger roadblock than they had thought.