NATIONAL DAY OF HEALING

The National Sorry Day Committee has decided on a radical new step. We have decided that Sorry Day, 26 May, should become a National Day of Healing – for all Australians.

Sorry Day has been the annual focus of the Journey of Healing for the stolen generations. That Journey will go on until the Bringing Them Home report is implemented wholeheartedly. We cannot stop while several thousand Indigenous people are still searching for family members from whom they were separated.

But the stolen generations cannot heal in isolation. Their healing depends on, and contributes to, healing among the wider Indigenous community. And healing among Indigenous Australians depends on, and contributes to, healing in the non-Indigenous community.

The healing needed in the Indigenous community is clear to anyone who saw the agony of spirit which made Michael Long walk to Canberra last December to ask help with ‘the tragedy that is destroying my people’.

So far we have not seen much response to his plea. Non-Indigenous Australia seems unable to feel the pain of Indigenous people. As any doctor knows, a person who cannot feel is diseased, and the disease must be diagnosed and cured.

The National Day of Healing is aimed at diagnosis and at cure. We need to understand why Indigenous culture is unable to thrive alongside Western culture in Australia. The stolen generations have shared their stories on Sorry Days, and that has opened the eyes of many to our history. Now more of us need to follow their lead.

If healing is to come, it will come through a grass-roots movement of people who feel each other’s pain across the gulfs which divide us, and commit themselves to work for justice. The National Day of Healing aims to help build that movement.

Ray Minniecon, Gillian Brannigan
Co-chairs, National Sorry Day Committee