At the start of its summer celebration of the cultural wealth of Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, the City of London Festival issued a challenge to Britain to harness the power of public apology.
On 30 June, 2010, the fifth day of the Festival, Aboriginal broadcaster and entertainer Mark Bin Bakar described the impact of the Australian Prime Minister’s apology on the ‘stolen generations’ of Aboriginal children who were taken from their mothers under Australia’s infamous assimilation policies. ‘Some Australians denied that this ever happened,’ said Bin Bakar, whose own mother was snatched as a toddler by the authorities. ‘The apology told Aboriginal people, “You were right.” It freed us to heal and move forward.’ Compensation was now needed for those who had suffered.
Bin Bakar, who hosts Aboriginal Australia’s most popular radio programme The Mary G Show was chosen as Aboriginal Person of the Year in 2007 and West Australian of the Year in 2008. He spoke with John Bond, a colleague in the ten-year campaign which led to the apology on 13 February 2008, the first Parliamentary action of the newly-elected Government of Kevin Rudd. They were speaking at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the heart of the City of London.
Many of those stolen were the children of white men, who often had other families, and Aboriginal women. ‘These were laws created by men to hide their guilt,’ said Bin Bakar. The Elders of his community in West Australia had chosen the native hibiscus as a symbol of the stolen generations, because of its capacity to survive in harsh conditions and its colour, mauve for love and forgiveness. They had recently passed a motion that it should also represent the suffering of the British children sent to Australia and other commonwealth countries without the consent of their families.
The Sunday Telegraph headlined a diary piece on the Festival, ‘Chance for bankers to hear apologetic talk’. Both the Australian High Commissioner and the Director of the Festival, Ian Ritchie, drew attention to the event in the official programme, where Ritchie speculated about the effect apology might have on the ‘economic and environmental wounds of the modern world’. In his speech John Bond drew attention to one such opportunity – the 400th anniversary in 2014 of the founding of Londonderry in Northern Ireland as an instrument of English power, paid for by London’s Livery Companies.
During their visit to Britain, Mark Bin Bakar and his wife Tania also spoke to 70 students at Rhodes House in Oxford. On 3 July Bin Bakar compered the Festival’s Family Day on Hampstead Heath, London, when 2,000 people came for an array of performances by Maori, Aboriginal and Pacific Islanders.any Indigenous performers.
English