We were all agog, or were we? But this is what we should have been remembering from yesterday:
Lizzy Brew, Katherine Rendell and Christine Cole told me how their children were wrenched away so soon after birth.
How they were denied basic support and advice.
How the removal of their children led to a lifetime of anguish and pain.
Their experiences echo the stories told in the Senate report.
Stories that speak to us with startling power and moral force.
Like Linda Bryant who testified of the devastating moment her baby was taken away:
When I had my child she was removed. All I saw was the top of her head – I knew she had black hair.
So often that brief glimpse was the final time those mothers would ever see their child.
In institutions around Australia, women were made to perform menial labour in kitchens and laundries until their baby arrived.
As Margaret Bishop said:
It felt like a kind of penance.
In recent years, I have occasionally passed what then was the Medindi Maternity Hospital and it generates a deep sadness in me and an odd feeling that it was a Dickensian tale about somebody else.
Margaret McGrath described being confined within the Holy Cross home where life was ‘harsh, punitive and impersonal’.
Yet this was sunny postwar Australia when we were going to the beach and driving our new Holdens and listening to Johnny O’Keefe.
As the time for birth came, their babies would be snatched away before they had even held them in their arms.
Sometimes consent was achieved by forgery or fraud.
Sometimes women signed adoption papers while under the influence of medication.
Most common of all was the bullying arrogance of a society that presumed to know what was best…
Any Australian who reads the Senate report or listens to your stories as I have today will be appalled by what was done to you.
They will be shocked by your suffering.
They will be saddened by your loss.
But most of all, they will marvel at your determination to fight for the respect of history.
They will draw strength from your example.
And they will be inspired by the generous spirit in which you receive this Apology.
Because saying ‘Sorry’ is only ever complete when those who are wronged accept it.
Through your courage and grace, the time of neglect is over, and the work of healing can begin.
And indeed this:
Prime Minister, Shane Mortimer, Parliamentary colleagues, but most of all, people impacted by the policies of forced adoption.
Your presence here today in such numbers and with such obvious power is a sign of how much this issue matters.
I add my own words to the eloquent and heartfelt statement that we have just heard from the Prime Minister.
In 1977, someone very important to me had a baby that was adopted. A few years later, still unmarried, she had another baby that she raised herself because, having surrendered one child, she couldn’t possibly do it again.
The late Kathy Donnelly was a beautiful person and a fine mother who loved all her children. She deserved nothing but love and support, not coercive expectations, social stigma and – I say this with more than a pang of personal guilt – men in her life who had failed to live up to their responsibilities.
I haven’t known a more courageous or a more admirable person ever. Her predicament and that of Daniel, the son she didn’t know for 27 years, was so frequent in an era when abortion was difficult, contraception unavailable, and when, for all sorts of reasons, marriage was thought to be impossible.
We are all living with that legacy.
I cannot imagine a grief greater than that of a parent and a child parted from each other.
I cannot imagine an ache greater than the fear that “mum didn’t want me”. Especially, since it wasn’t true….
Instead yesterday is remembered rather as a day of political circus. For example:
It was a day full of farce, from Simon Crean’s contradictory push for a leadership spill right through to Kevin Rudd’s eleventh hour announcement that he was never going to challenge, writes Barrie Cassidy.
“Clowns in search of a circus” was the page two lead of Thursday’s Financial Review. By the end of the day, the clowns had found their circus, and what a performance it was under the Canberra big top.
An entire Caucus rushed around for almost three hours, arm-twisting, testing and re-testing numbers, abusing one another face-to-face and by text message, only to find there would be no ballot after all.
The Prime Minister was to remain Prime Minister, leaving the public to wonder out loud: what was that all about?…
It was therefore refreshing to watch NITV News at 5.30 which did indeed report on the circus, but gave more attention to the much more important things – like that apology for forced adoptions, and the fact it was also Close the Gap Day.
Mind you, this report on SBS is a bit consoling:
The British press in some cases have been more interested in Julia Gillard’s apology to victims of forced adoption than the latest Labor leadership woes.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard made headlines in the United Kingdom on Thursday but not just for the farcical leadership spill.
Ms Gillard’s apology to people affected by Australia’s forced adoption policy between the 1950s and 1970s was one of the top news items on the BBC.
Morning radio bulletins didn’t even mention the spill which turned out to be a non-event after former prime minister Kevin Rudd refused to run for Labor’s top job.
The BBC website’s world page ran a news story headlined “Australia sorry for forced adoptions” while the government’s internal troubles were covered in an an analysis piece by Sydney correspondent Nick Bryant….
Update 23 March
They were about a week late, were they not? After all, the Ides of March was Thursday last week.
That Nick Bryant item is well worth a look: Australia’s coup culture. Very gentle coups by world standards though. Then today in the Sydney Morning Herald an article I tend to believe: Rudd was behind spill move – Crean. It also makes Rudd appear a bit of a hypocrite.
Sacked minister Simon Crean, who sparked Labor’s leadership crisis this week, says Kevin Rudd’s camp had fully endorsed his intervention to demand the Prime Minister call a spill.
His account directly contradicts the version of Mr Rudd, who on Friday said he had ”not expected the spontaneous combustion of Mr Crean’s” demand for a ballot, and promised he would never again seek the leadership.
Mr Rudd’s last-minute decision to back out of a challenge has led to bitter recriminations among his supporters, with Mr Crean describing Mr Rudd’s key support group as ”disorganised, unbelievable and shameless”…
We clearly are even more certain to experience the very mixed blessing of an Abbott government after, or possibly even before, 14 September.
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