By GREG ANSLEY
SYDNEY - Mick Dodson cannot understand a system that would jail his father for loving his mother.
Nor can he understand laws that would take his sisters from their family and hand them to German missionaries, and try to remove him from his uncle and aunt when he became an orphan at 10.
Dodson, now aged 50 and a leader of indigenous Australia, was born 11 years after Prime Minister John Howard, and is part of a generation Howard and his Government denies exists.
Because of this, Howard has become the largest political barrier to reconciliation between black and white Australia - so large that Aboriginal leaders claim he has set their cause back a decade.
Howard's refusal to walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge with 250,000 other Australians in support of reconciliation last Sunday deepened anger at his continued rejection of a treaty with indigenous people and his refusal to apologise for past wrongs.
His argument has always been that while he may be personally sorry for the injustices of 200 years that have left Aborigines as - in his own words - the most profoundly disadvantaged group in Australia, the responsibility lay with earlier generations.
Reinforced by the view that a formal apology on behalf of the federal Parliament could open the floodgates for massive compensation claims from Aborigines forcibly taken from their families as children, Howard will not budge from the tenet that the sins of the father cannot be visited upon the son.
But in a deeply moving address to the weekend's reconciliation Corroboree 2000 at the Sydney Opera House, Dodson fixed his own life to that of the Prime Minister.
In it, he said: "Our Prime Minister was in his 11th year when I came into the world.
"According to Commonwealth and state policy at the time, my destiny, as a native of Aboriginal descent, lay in my absorption by the people of the Commonwealth.
"Fourteen months before I was born, a magistrate in the court at Broome [northern Western Australia] refused my grandmother's application for a certificate of citizenship. Part of his reasons were that she had not adopted the manner and habits of civilised life."
He detailed family experiences ranging from how native Australian authorities pestered his Irish Presbyterian great-grandfather to give up his daughter, and eventually they were successful. He placed her in a West Australian mission run by German Catholics.
Dodson's mother and two of his sisters ended up in the same mission.
"My father was jailed for 18 months [for] cohabiting with my mother.
"I will never understand a social, political and legal system that could jail my father for loving my mother. What sort of system is it that condemns love as a crime?
"As required by law, when he was released he managed to secure the permission of the chief protector of natives to marry my mother."
In 1960, when university student Howard was taking an interest in politics Dodson was travelling to Darwin in the back of his uncle's old Chevy truck.
"They had both been former mission victims and ... did not wish the same fate to befall their young nieces and nephews.
But his aunt and uncle had to fight a protracted battle with the authorities to keep them.
A 1967 referendum which arguably killed off the assimilation policy did not stop the removals and it did not change attitudes.
"In 1977 I graduated from law school. Howard was a Government minister and vice-president of the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party.
"In 1978 a sign appeared at a pub at Daly Waters [Northern Territory]: 'Keep Australia clean. Kill a coon.' The Queensland act which controlled and regulated the lives of Aboriginals was still in force and it was to be a further seven years before it was fully repealed ...
"These are but a few of the things that have touched my life and ... just as importantly, they occurred in the lifetimes of the two Johns, Howard and [Aboriginal Affairs Minister Senator] Herron.
"Where or who is this generation of Australians Howard blames for the removals and the assimilation policies? Are my sisters part of this generation? Are not John and John part of this generation? Indeed, am I not part of this generation?
"Where is this mythical group of Australians who made these laws, adopted these policies, put them into practice? Who took the kids? ...
"Denialism is the enemy of reconciliation."
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.