By Rod LeFlea

[Tuesday this week was National Sorry Day, acknowledging the Stolen Generations. My good friend, Rod, who identifies as an indigenous Wiradjiri man, published the following thoughtful article on facebook the same day. I commend it to all as a great read.]

I identify as an indigenous Wiradjiri man. I also identify as a Scotsman and an Englishman and an Australian. Ethnically I am a combination of all those things.

Most importantly though I identify as hu-man.

When my ancestors fell in love with their partners it didn’t concern them that their offspring might have a defective melanin gene that made fair skinned folk susceptible to skin cancer. It didn’t prevent them from having children simply because their kids might be a little, or a lot, darker than their school buddies. Their philosophy was more noble than looking at the outward appearance.

Being a mix of at least three cultures, I am wholeheartedly pleased that, whatever Australia was called in 1770, English folk migrated here. After all, if my great great great granny hadn’t married an Englishman then I would not be writing this article.

Nonetheless as a man with differences in culture and appearance, I confess I have in my nature something which causes me to show adversity to those who are different. The concept of a “noble  savage” is a product of a fanciful romantic and I am far from that.

No doubt there was barbarity, and probably still is, from all nations during what we call white colonisation. Mass slaughter is well documented in historical archives. Indigenous people suffered terribly and cruelly at the hands of agricultural settlers, while lonely white skinned shepherds tending livestock were mercilessly killed by some indigenous people.

Even today there is hatred between Australians.

Ironically, I have been vilified and abused by one young fellow who called me a “white dog” when, only after he being instructed by his friend as to my indigenous heritage, he apologised saying “I’m sorry uncle Rod I thought you were one of those white – – – – -”

So, there are things we should be sorry for, and Kevin Rudd articulated some of that in his Sorry Speech 17 years ago. We should be sorry for the way men on horseback hunted down young indigenous men on a Sunday for sport and killed them, just as fox hunters do in England to this day. We also should be sorry that the wife and children whose husband and father were murdered by marauding indigenous men and were left bereft of a loving provider. There is lots that should humble each one of us and cause us to be sorry.

Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser distilled all this when he said, “Just because I say I’m sorry that your grandmother died, doesn’t mean I killed her”. Two hundred years after an event I can say sorry and I can genuinely mean it

Recognising where hatred comes from is another matter.

Just as Cain killed Abel his own brother, none of us are that far removed from hatred from within. Jesus is clear when he says: “If you hate your brother (other people) you have killed him”. Someone cuts us off in their car and we seethe vitriol from within. We even have shorts bursts of hatred for our parents, partners, and children when they cross us.

We are all susceptible to hate because of that old fashioned word sin. When the man on horseback clubbed the black child to death or the indigenous man massacred a secluded white family it was because of in-dwelling sin. In this respect we are all like one another.

When the complexities of the human genome emerged in 2000 AD science proclaimed that all of us are from the same race. Twenty first century science had finally caught up with God’s statement in Malachi 2:10, “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another?”. Acts 17:26 echoes the same fact: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”

The Bible is clear when it says “Of one blood God has made all nations.”

Jesus gives us clear instruction on kindness and compassion, and perhaps that is why Bible believing Christians were the ones known for tending to sick and wounded indigenous folk. One lady writer of the day wrote that the Bible believing church looked after suffering aborigines because “… they are our kinsmen our race”.

We would all do well to identify as sinners ourselves before trying to shoehorn one another, or even ourselves, into an ethnic thimble from where barbs of hate can be so easily fired.

My own prayer to my Father is that I might become humble in recognising my own sin. Only then will I be able to truly say “sorry”.