KEY POINTS:
When you see history being written you realise how much of it is mere legend.
Australia hasn't got a particularly exciting history. Once you've read past the convicts it becomes quiet and constitutional.
The closest they came to a civil convulsion was a goldfields rebellion by drunken Irish
miners, much celebrated today at the "Eureka Stockade", that lasted all of a Sunday morning in 1853.
They have nothing like the colonial wars in this country.
The displacement of Australia's ancient pre-colonial population was a largely private, casual and dimly recorded atrocity. It haunts the country's story rather than leaving a catalogue of battles that could be mythologised today.
So they have invented a legend from living memory. By "they" I do not mean only Aboriginal revivalists. The "stolen generations" story, now carrying the official imprimatur of this week's Federal Government apology, is as much a creation of white authors, journalists, film-makers, scholars and even jurists freed from the need of forensic proof.
Just about everybody now believes that as recently as the 1950s Aboriginal children were being dragged from the arms of clutching parents by cold-hearted agents of the state for purposes that could not be good.
I would believe it too if I hadn't read a paper delivered by a Melbourne lawyer, Douglas Meagher, QC, to a seminar in 2000.
His suspicions of the stolen generation story had been aroused when reading the 1997 report of an inquiry by a fellow jurist, Sir Ronald Wilson.
Meagher, whose father was in the state government, was surprised by a reference to someone he had known quite well. He found it impossible to believe this person, a highly respected Aborigine who ran a holiday project in Melbourne for children from northern mission stations, would have been associated with a scheme the Wilson Report said was designed never to return the children.
His curiosity kindled, he studied the report for the evidence. The accusation turned out to be based on a woman, identified by a number, who said that when in Melbourne on the holiday scheme she was billeted with people who applied to adopt her. Which they did, the report said, without reference to her parents.
But 56 pages later, the same witness mentions that while she was in Melbourne her mother had died and, a few sentences later, that her father had died too. The report glosses over the fact that she had become an orphan, noting heavily, "She never saw her parents again."
Meagher gave several other examples of policies and practices at the time that have been grossly misinterpreted for the stolen generations story. The report treats children as "stolen" even when they were state wards rescued from abuse or neglect.
He went on to act for the Commonwealth in a court case brought by former mission children in the Northern Territory after the Wilson Report called their treatment "a crime against humanity".
The trial was devastating for the stolen generations tale. Far from being kidnapped, the evidence showed that many in the mission hostels had been placed there by their parents and went home for holidays. The exceptions were child welfare placements, subject to court orders from 1953.
The hostels had Aborigines on their staff. Parents, relatives and tribal elders freely visited. When the children grew up many exchanged Christmas cards with staff and happily attended reunions. In fact, the litigants were to be seen embracing the now elderly mission sisters and reminiscing happily outside the court.
These people had a typical 1950s education, lacking today's cultural sensitivity. That's bad enough if you believe constant cultural connections to be essential but it probably fails to outrage you. Hence the hype. Ever the lawyer, Meagher was reluctant to say the distortions were wilful. But they are, I suspect. They are a symptom of a late 20th century intellectual disease called post-modernism.
Post-modernism holds that nothing can be known for certain, that anything is valid if enough people need to believe it.
Post-modernism does not do history, it does 'histories". Writers don't have to verify what they are told, they are saluted for enabling the downtrodden to tell their stories.
But authors of the stolen generations seem to have generously egged the pudding. Witnesses in the Northern Territory case could not confirm some of the lurid tales publications attributed to them.
When post-modern social propagandists use terms like "stolen" most people take them literally. Feature writers, documentary makers and film directors read polemical studies of "stolen generations" and imagine G-men in fedoras descending on remote communities.
But if Australia feels better that a Prime Minister has said sorry, does it matter? Aborigines deserve an apology for worse. It's tough on the reputations of well-meaning people now mostly dead, but that's history. It will be corrected sometime.
