No apology to Australia's stolen generation

In spite of pressure from home and abroad, the Australian government has declined to apologise to the thousands of Aborigines known as the "stolen generation" who were taken from their mothers, many never to be reunited. Robert Milliken reports from Sydney on a wound that will not heal.

It took seven months to happen, but, when it finally came yesterday, the one crucial word - sorry - was not there. The conservative coalition government, headed by John Howard, announced yesterday that it would pay A$63m (pounds 25m) towards reuniting divided Aboriginal families, setting up a national archive to trace devastated communities and preserving Aboriginal languages.

It was responding to a report last May of an inquiry into past practices of removing Aboriginal children from their families and placing them in white foster homes, practices that the report described as genocide and crimes against humanity. But the government's response ignored the report's three key recommendations: that it make a formal apology, compensate the victims and inaugurate a "national sorry day" for the stolen generation.

The issue of the "stolen generation" is one of the most traumatic that Australians have faced in recent times. The inquiry by Sir Ronald Wilson, a former High Court judge, heard that babies and children suffered physical and sometimes sexual abuse in the foster homes that were meant to offer them a better future.

Under the auspices of churches, and state and federal governments, the practices went on over 60 years, up to the 1960s, involving an estimated 100,000 children. The policy was based on the belief that the aboriginal race would eventually die out.

Over recent months, Mr Howard and Sir William Deane, the governor-general, have publicly made personal apologies for what happened to the "stolen generation". But Mr Howard's government has made it known that it will never make a formal, national apology because it fears opening the floodgates to litigation. One unnamed government official was quoted in a Sydney newspaper last week suggesting that an apology was also inappropriate because 40 per cent of Australian citizens were not born there, and thus knew nothing about what went on in the past. The actual proportion of overseas-born Australians is about half this figure.

Aboriginal leaders such as Mick Dodson, the Aboriginal social justice commissioner, have derided such explanations as "mean-spirited excuses". He said yesterday: "We can't go forward unless there is an apology. That's crucial."