It’s easy to overlook the importance of reconciliation. What does it mean to you? To me? To the bloke down the street with his designer clothes? Graeme Cordiner’s memoir pulls back the layers of history to reveal a long-term commitment to the act of reconciliation.
A journey on a road that, to make it, makes perfect sense. It’s a journey that, in a way, each Australian is being asked to make now that we’re facing the prospect of a referendum on a Voice to Parliament. But it’s easy to miss the turnoff even when we feel that something is wrong. We have centuries of abuse to deal with.
As Cordiner says in his book, Aboriginal people have given us a gift in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Whichever model is chosen to proceed on the path to closure for all Australians – remember that we have prospered while they have been – among other things – killed, raped, and had children stolen from their parents – we should take the time, as Cordiner has done, to understand the full breadth of the issue.
Written over a period of 20 years, ‘Find Our Heart at Myall Creek’ charts the trajectory of one man. Taking a view that privileges early settlers as well as convicts, Cordiner tries to come to terms with the fact of the word “Sorry”. What does it mean to an Aboriginal person to hear the word? What does it cost a white man to utter it? What kinds of relations become possible once the fact of the matter has been admitted, in all of its real and imagined ramifications? What kinds of relations are prevented from happening in its absence?
Drawing on personal memories, in a series of short, punchy chapters, Cordiner unveils an image of forgiveness and shows that it will cost us more to ignore than to recognise the depth of the injustice that has been perpetrated in our name. He doesn’t spare iconic names, such as the Sydney Morning Herald – a booster of colonial enterprise that disparaged the prosecution in the case of the crown at the time of the Myall Creek murder case – because Sydney was involved as much as was New England, where the crimes took place at a remote cattle run in 1838.
Not only were around 30 Aboriginal people killed, in the aftermath of the massacre Sydney was troubled and generations have been troubled in kind. The map of the territory is still being drafted, but we can all lend a hand in opening a passage through the thickets.
