Does it matter? I kept asking myself this on a warm day in February 2008 as I stood with thousands of other people in Federation Square listening to our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, make a very long apology to the stolen generations.
Throughout my life I have physically and emotionally suffered the prejudices of a people who were educated by the Australian and state governments, and the society they created and perpetuated, to believe that my people were inferior. Yet I know that to many of the indigenous people around me that day, the apology did matter.
At first I had unexpected feelings of rage. How many of my friends and relations might still be alive if this apology was made 40 years ago, when the Commonwealth referendum on indigenous citizenship was won? The apology seemed to be focusing on the stolen generations, who were systematically removed from their parents and placed in institutions often administered by church groups working in cahoots with government, aimed at "breeding the black out of them".
The psychological anguish for many of the stolen has never subsided: many drank or drugged themselves to death at frighteningly early ages. I have never forgotten an old man who said to me in 1984 in Alice Springs: "We got nothing, bloody nothing, when we lose that," meaning our cultural ways of thinking.
How can any non-indigenous Australian imagine someone walking down their street and removing every child from every home in their suburb? Would everyone go to work the next day? Carry on regardless? Or go to the authorities, the police, only to be told that this was the law?
Although the focus of the apology from the point of view of the media was the stolen generations, it must be remembered that for those of us in indigenous communities who were not "stolen", there was still an impact. I played for the Fitzroy Stars football club here in Melbourne, a mostly indigenous side. At one time, a third of the team were former wards of the state. We became brothers in arms, but I often felt guilty that I was lucky enough to have a mother and father.
What I find infuriating is that people often talk about this period as if it happened in the dim, dark past, a past that is not part of our generation. Former prime minister John Howard played on this as a way of avoiding governmental responsibility. (One wonders, then, why he placed wreaths every Anzac Day if it wasn't his decision to send troops to Gallipoli.)
We should all hang our heads in shame, not for what we have done as individuals, but collectively to mourn the many thousands of lives wasted or torn apart by this insidious policy. We mourn what might have been.
It struck me that day - February 13, 2008 - that deep in the core of my heart I needed some form of acknowledgement. But I did not know how to articulate that, and never knew if receiving an apology would put out the flames of resentment I had for this uncaring society. I was not a stolen child, I had been educated, I had a job. What right did I have to complain? All these emotions were surging through me as I watched the Prime Minister deliver his apology, with the cameras panning to Parliament's public gallery where hundreds of indigenous people listened intently.
Researcher Jennifer Biddle, in her essay Sentiment and Absence: The Stolen Generation Apology (about artist Cathy Busby's laneway artwork Sorry), questions the sincerity of Rudd's speech. She comments on his body language and how he kept looking down, hardly looking at the people to whom the apology was being directed - the indigenous people packing the gallery of Parliament House.
For Biddle, the apology took the focus off the people damaged, and on to seeking forgiveness for our own actions.
In the past few years, leaders - from the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt to the Pope - have apologised for a litany of past wrongdoings. In her art, Cathy Busby dissects this phenomenon of apologies, which she sees as pervasive at a grassroots level as well. What does it all mean?
After saying "sorry", Rudd has made no effort to repeal the legislation that created the federal intervention in the Northern Territory. Indeed, he has rolled it out on all people, including non-indigenous, on welfare payments in the territory.
We are one of the few indigenous races with no treaty in place. While Rudd goes forth, dispensing medicine, the true solution is a treaty. What form that takes I leave to our indigenous communities, but it would create a sense of independence and a radical shift away from a negative paradigm. We can be masters of our own destiny when truly recognised as the traditional owners of everything as far as the eye can see.
When in 1996 I travelled to New Zealand as an SBS reporter covering the election there, I interviewed 18 Maori candidates standing for a variety of parties from across the political spectrum. That year, Winston Peters became deputy prime minister. Here in Australia, we not only lack indigenous people in Parliament, but we also have no system in place to ensure that such representation can be achieved.
We need to reprogram our society to create a more equitable country. Politicians will respond only when we as citizens vote according to the kind of fair and beautiful country we want our children to inherit.
I look back on the day of the apology and all these thoughts rush through me. I have never been so stimulated. I felt elation, anger, resentment, a great burst of love for all my people, pride in being indigenous (in the words of Steve McQueen, playing the title role in Papillon: ''We're still here, you bastards"), and the sense, for the first time, of being an Australian.
I was at Federation Square that day in February, but the relief and joy I saw emanating from those lucky enough to be in Canberra spoke for every march I'd ever led or been on, every violent confrontation I had experienced in the name of prejudice, every one of the seven times I saw the inside of a jail cell simply for being black, every time I stood up for the rights of a proud, resilient race. We fight for those who fought for us. We fight for the voiceless as any Australian should. Are we sincere? You betcha!
John Harding is a poet, playwright and filmmaker. This article was written for Site Unseen, part of the City of Melbourne's Laneway Commissions, on display in Little Bourke Street until July.