Abstract
On 15 February 2010, exactly two years after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People as the first act of the reconvened parliament, Australian author Kate Grenville was invited to contribute an opinion piece to the Guardian. In her article, Grenville looked back on the progress that the project of reconciliation had since made and conceded that, while there had been some movement, ‘the Rudd government can’t point to any spectacular policy changes or huge improvement in outcomes’. Rejecting the notion, however, that the Apology had been just ‘hot air, a cynical exercise in spin’, Grenville discussed the difficulties faced by the government’s housing programme for Indigenous communities as one example of ‘just how tangled the problems are’. While symbolic acts were never enough, she concluded, the Apology remained an ‘overdue and necessary first step’.1
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Notes
See N.N. (2009), ‘Acknowledge the Aboriginal Wars with a Memorial: Grenville’, Australian Associated Press General News, 2 March.
See Jane Housham (2010), ‘Review: The Lieutenant, by Kate Grenville’, Guardian, 30 January.
N.N. (2008), ‘Troubled Relations’, Daily Examiner, 8 November.
Cassandra Pybus (2009), ‘“Not Fit for Your Protection or an Honest Man’s Company”: A Transnational Perspective on the Saintly William Dawes’, History Australia, 6 (1), 12. 1–12. 7.
Kevin Rudd (2008), ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People’, House of RepresentativesOfficialHansard, 1, 13 February, http://www.aph.gov.au/Hansard/repsldailys/dr130208.pdf, accessed 30 August 2010.
Ruti Teitel (2006), ‘The Transitional Apology’, in Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn (eds), Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 101–14, here p. 101.
Michael Fagenblatt (2008), ‘The Apology, the Secular and the TheologicoPolitical’, Dialogue, 27 (2), 16–32, here 21.
Gillian Whitlock (2006), ‘Active Remembrance: Testimony, Memoir and the Work of Reconciliation’, in Annie E. Coombes (ed.), Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 24–44, here p. 24.
Robert Murray (2007), ‘Hollywood on the Hawkesbury’, Quadrant, April, 67–9, here 68.
Kerry O’Brien (2008), ‘Kate Grenville Joins 7.30 Report’, Australian Broadcasting Transcripts, 22 September.
Katrina Schlunke (2009), ‘Home’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 108 (1), 1–26, here 24.
This has been mentioned by Kate Mitchell (2010). See Dominick LaCapra (2001), Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 13.
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Schwarz, A. (2012). ‘That’s Not A Story I Could Tell.’ Commemorating the Other Side of the Colonial Frontier in Australian Literature of Reconciliation. In: Assmann, A., Shortt, L. (eds) Memory and Political Change. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354241_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354241_9
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