This year, January 26 arrives in Australia with added resignation following the defeat of the “Voice” referendum late last year, which would have altered the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament. The Voice emerged from the Uluru Statement From the Heart, a petition written and endorsed by First Nations leaders calling for substantive constitutional and structural reform.
The Uluru Statement was released on National Sorry Day (May 26) in 2017, a day that remembers and acknowledges the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families and communities, known as the Stolen Generations. The brutal policy was carried out by successive governments from the mid-1800s right up until the 1970s, but it was not until 2008 that a formal apology was given by then prime minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian government.
For the speaker in Ali Cobby Eckermann’s “The Apology Day breakfast”, the apology and its accompanying function offer no substantive remedy to the intergenerational trauma inflicted upon her, rather it just adds another layer of intrusion (“how does one define the jigsaw / when the pieces are misshapen / by the constant hands of others?”) into the process of healing she has undertaken through her own conviction, “you offer breakfast and forget / I found my mother,” and force of imagination, “and rebirthed my son/ Together we are the Banquet”. A conviction and imagination that will need to be more resilient than ever this coming Friday.
Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara poet and artist from South Australia whose work has been published and celebrated around the world. Her poetry collections include little bit long time and the award-winning collection Inside My Mother. Her verse novels are His Father’s Eyes and Ruby Moonlight, which won the inaugural black&write! Indigenous fellowship, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, a Deadly Award and was named the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year. In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australia’s Poetry Ambassador, and in 2017 she received the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University.
The Apology Day breakfast
my mother did not grow up
with her mother I did not
grow up with mine my son
did not grow up with me
how does one define the jigsaw
when the pieces are misshapen
by the constant hands of others?
the gift of life is maternity
and the removal of this is
a reparation that has no price
the picture is askew in the portrait
you offer and rejection is the new
graffiti to rewrite the script
you offer breakfast and forget
I found my mother
and rebirthed my son
Together we are the Banquet
Go to Source
Author: Thomas Moody
