Sunset, Bobby Randall found during the long search for his mother, was a time for women in Aboriginal communities to gather and wail over the many children taken away.

But last night, as tourists sipped champagne while watching the grandeur of Uluru's sundown, the Rock's Aboriginal traditional owners joined members of the stolen generations from all over Australia in a new ritual of hope. They hope it will mean there will never be cause for such wailing again.

As the Rock turned pink, purple, then brown, nearby the Mutitjulu people handed over 10 pairs of music sticks to those who had been taken away. These were painted with symbols carrying messages to be taken to all capital cities in ceremonies on May 26. Last year it was called Sorry Day; now it is the Journey of Healing. In an emotional day of welcome to about 40 "stolen ones" and some 100 of their friends and families, the politics of their plight was not forgotten. The symbols on the sticks include shackles, reminding of our penal colonies, and a boomerang. Message: Do not forget history. Tear-drops above the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags are a call on the Federal Government to apologise. Among those making the journey around the Rock were the NSW stolen generations' representative Ms Carol Kendall, who will take her two music sticks to a ceremony in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens.

"We are in the process of kicking the winning goal," said Mr Randall. He was elated. After the pain of being stolen and rediscovering family there was "niceness" in being recognised, he said.

Many wept as the Mutitjulu women joined him to sing his composition My Brown-Skinned Baby, They Take Him Away.A policeman took Mr Randall away on a camel from Angus Downs Station near Uluru, atthe age of seven, about 59 years ago. Motherless, on faraway Croker Island, he was sungto sleep at nights by the crickets. He only found his motherwhen she was in her grave.

Said Aboriginal leader Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue: "As a Yankuntjatjara woman taken from this country as a two-year-old child, I can only think of my mother who has had five children taken from her."

Mutitjulu elder Mr Rupert Goodwin told how his mother used to rub charcoal on his older brother Donny's skin and hide him in a sack to stop him being taken. But a policeman showered him, saw his skin colour and took him away. "The next time I saw him he had silver hair ... the Government has got to say sorry," he said.

A former prime minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser, sent a message to the gathering. "Other nations have healed deep wounds. France and Germany fought three wars between 1870 and 1945 and millions died; yet today they are friends," he said.

The Federal Opposition Leader, Mr Beazley, sent these words: "The message sticks you receive today and carry off to all parts of the country, leave here from the heart of the continent to reach the heart of all Australians."

Ms Audrey Kinnear, who has relations at Uluru, said: "When we were growing up in institutions, the only safe place was in bed at night - to go into our beds and cry." The policy of removing children to erase their Aboriginality had not worked.

She was among the stolen generation women who painted up with the local women and danced dusty traditional dances like that of the crow and of gathering bush tomato.

"We are back again," she said.

BETWEEN THE ROCK AND …. NOWHERE
Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 8/5/99
Debra Jopson reports.

THE Prime Minister has something in common with the blue-tongue lizard man, one of the Dreamtime Creation ancestors of Uluru, according to a traditional owner of Ayers Rock, Rupert Goodwin.

But John Howard need not feel flattered.

When the rock's resident Mutitjulu community this week held a ceremony of healing for more than 100 Aboriginal guests from every State and Territory, including about 40 members of the stolen generations, Goodwin told an ancient story with a contemporary political message.

"Stealing the kids is not good; like not saying sorry is not good. They [the Government] have got to say sorry, like the blue-tongue lizard story says."

This lizard man, the story goes, saw the bellbird man hunting and stole his emu meat as it was cooking. When the bellbird man caught up with him, he was brazenly eating it and denied he had stolen it. He refused to apologise.

"White men took the kids away. It's the same story. That man [Howard] has got to say sorry," said Goodwin, whose own brother Donny was found in his hiding place in a sack and taken away.

There are reminders of the thief story at the Rock. The Mutitjulu people say that the stolen emu's thigh is a spur on the Rock's south-east face, put there by the lizard man.

There were many reminders this week that the contemporary story of the stolen children is not going to disappear from the face of the earth, either, much as the Federal Government and others fearing compensation payouts might want it to.

In NSW, counsel Noel Hutley, SC, who is representing Joy Williams in her Supreme Court case against the State Government alleging breach of duty of care over her removal from her Aboriginal mother soon after birth 56 years ago, revealed that she is seeking damages of up to $2.2million.

Her test case before Justice Abadee will continue next week, with the State Government's legal team expected to argue that the Government was not responsible for any harm she suffered as a child.

Williams, a psychiatric patient, has been unable to give evidence through ill health. Meanwhile, in Darwin, stolen generation lawyers are waiting to see whether the Federal Government will appeal against a decision eight days ago by the Federal Court judge Maurice O'Loughlin refusing its request to stop a test case.

A solicitor with the Stolen Generation Litigation Unit, Koulla Roussos, said yesterday that at a directions hearing to be held next Friday claimants Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner will discover if there is one more hurdle or whether they can begin with evidence.

While lawyers for Aborigines battle lawyers for governments, those concerned with another reminder to the nation - the stolen generations commemorative day on May 26 - are using language which is not adversarial.

The co-chair of the National Sorry Day Committee, NSW stolen child Carol Kendall, said at the Uluru launch of the new day this week that it was about "recognition, commitment and unity".

The name Sorry Day is gone, replaced with "Journey of Healing" in an attempt to make it less painful for the stolen ones and to render the message more palatable to other Australians who may think "sorry" means apologising for something they did not do.

Said the Aboriginal leader and stolen one Lowitja O'Donoghue, who is a patron of the new day: "Let's try to move on... Some of the people who are nervous about the whole process ought to be able to take this journey with us."

Yet, so far, Federal Government ministers do not seem too willing to go along for the ride. The Minister for Reconciliation, Philip Ruddock, has turned down an invitation to speak at the National Press Club on May 26 alongside highly articulate stolen generations member Audrey Kinnear.

Federal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge has said he cannot make it to a commemorative event in Canberra's Great Hall.

In Sydney there will be an ecumenical service and a procession to the Botanic Gardens, while in Melbourne, events are yet to be decided.

However emotional and grassroots it seems, national politics will still be there. On one music stick in each pair that the Mutitjulu handed over at the rock this week, to be taken back to every capital, there were 54 dots, each representing a recommendation of the Human Rights Commission's Bringing Them Home report. A subsequent commission report has found that 35 of them have not been implemented. The commemoration day will mark a new push for governments to do so, including the creation of a National Compensation Fund to be administered by a board.

Unlike the court proceedings in Sydney and Darwin, there would be minimum formality, a recognition of indigenous cultural styles, including use of languages, and the rules of evidence would not apply.

The stolen ones who gathered in brilliant sunshine in a red dirt compound at the Mutitjulu community's cultural centre made it clear that there is much more to pay than money.

For O'Donoghue, who was taken from her mother in the Pitjatjatjara lands at the age of two to be raised in a children's home, a small measure of healing would be to get a birth certificate.

For Bobby Randall, whose grandfather wanted to spear the policeman as the seven-year-old boy was taken from his family in about 1940, money compensation would never replace the loss.

"The loss is a spiritual thing. If it [compensation] is materialistic, I don't know it will make any difference to me."

Now listed as a traditional owner of the Rock, he wants his children to be able to assert their rights in their traditional land.

But Clara Coulthard, a 70-year-old South Australian who, aged six, was taken by a policeman in 1934 and raised in the same mission home as O'Donoghue, is sad that she is not listed as an owner.

She helped the late father of her cousin, Reggie Uluru, to formulate the land claim which led to the Rock being handed back to Aboriginal ownership. Her dreaming is the kuniya carpet snake, for which Uluru is a major site, but through being taken away, she says, she missed out on being listed as an owner.

At this week's ceremony, a community leader, Charlie Walkabout, said: "These people sitting down in front of us have lost language, culture and tradition. We have to try to heal the wounds."

Coulthard felt the loss of language most severely 25 years ago when she finally found her grandfather at Ernabella. He could speak only Pitjatjatjara. She could speak only English.

"It was a terrible experience. I wanted to ask him so much. He was so excited I had come back, but we couldn't communicate," she recalled.

Coulthard is comparatively fortunate because she feels "healed", having begun to find her own people at the age of 20 at Oodnadatta. It has been her whole life's aim.

Discovering her alive, the women in the community frightened her by wailing long and hard.

"It's a custom. They thought I was dead. They had to wail for me because they knew I had lost my mother," she said.

A NSW member of the stolen generations, Helen Moran, who first asked the Mutitjulu community if they would hold the Journey of Healing launch, said they especially requested that Coulthard be invited as one of their own.

This week, Coulthard danced with other stolen children and the Mutitjulu women, painted up and bare-breasted, the paler skin which had led to their removal shaking alongside the darker skin of those left behind.

"We are doing this inma [ceremony] for them so they can feel some of the spirit of this place and be enriched by it, so they will become happy, feeling the spirit of this country here," explained one of Coulthard's relatives, Topsy Tjamiwa.

Coulthard feels she has made her own long journey back. For Glen Roe Atkinson, from Melbourne's North Altona, who was among two busloads of 74 Victorian Koories who travelled for three days to the Red Centre, was just beginning.

Taken from his family at Echuca at the age of two, he lived in Melbourne all his life not knowing Aborigines and not identifying as Aboriginal.

"I'm learning now at 40," he said. "This is why I am here. I have two teenage children and I haven't got anything to teach them. They know they're Aboriginal, but they don't know where they come from."

Yesterday the co-chair of the National Sorry Day Committee, the Rev John Brown, had the last word: " This year, more than anything else, we want the Government to sit down with a group of people who were removed from their families and talk through the issues."

But privately, many involved in the Journey of Healing believe the Government's response will be the more adversarial: "I'll see you in court."

The Timpilypa

During the inma, members of the Mutitjulu community will invite the stolen generations participants to receive timpilypa (music sticks). Ten pairs of timpilypa have been prepared - a pair for each State and Territory, for the Torres Strait islands₁ and a pair to remain with the Mutitjulu community at their request.

There are several reasons for the choice of timpilypa as symbols of the Journey of Healing. They are used to call people together, which the Journey intends to do. And two are needed to make music, expressing the need for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to work together.

The symbols on the timpilypa express the Journey of Healing's motto of Recognition, Unity and Commitment. On one of the pair, the following symbols have been painted:

1. Feet walking, representing the beginning of a journey

2. A boomerang, a map of Australia and shackles, representing our need to recognise the truth of our history.

3. Teardrops and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, representing the need for an official apology.

4. Black and white feet around a fire, representing our need to share and work together.

5. Black and white hands, clasped together, representing unity in healing the effects of the past.

6. A map of Australia, with tracks going out from the centre across the country, representing healing going out from Uluru to the whole country.

7. Sunrise with a track of footprints, black and white, representing journeying into the future together.

The other of the pair has 54 dots, representing the 54 recommendations of Bdnging Them Home, the report of the National Inquiry into the Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children from their families. These recommendations have a vital role to play in healing.