Today we have an apology. The Government has consulted about its contents, hoping that both sides of politics will support it and that indigenous people will accept it.
The consultation and the concern to find a generally acceptable form of words have been proper. Any apology made by a government, on behalf of a nation which did not own it, to its indigenous people who were insulted by it, would be destructive. Whether the apology could have been bolder will be much discussed.
Some Australians still believe that apologies by national governments, particularly for actions of previous generations, are incoherent and unreasonable. They argue that responsibility can be attributed only to individuals for actions in which they have been involved. So only individuals can apologise.
Most Christian groups have argued strongly that the government should apologise. It sits easily with stories told in their tradition about the shared responsibilities of peoples for their history and for its consequences. The prophets did not simply sheet home the abuses of tyranny, of extortion, of manipulation to the officials responsible. They imputed them to the whole people, who would also suffer the consequences. Similarly, virtuous behaviour in public life would be rewarded with national prosperity.
In the Gospels, too, Jesus preaches the Kingdom of God to the whole people, and demands its conversion. His followers saw the beginnings of the promised Kingdom in his rising from the dead. They also recognised in the faith of those who accepted Christ the seeds of a world made new. They focused first on what God had done for all human beings, and only then on the individuals whom God loved.
So in the Christian tradition apologies and acknowledgement of sin were always in order, whether made by individuals, by churches, by nations or by the human race. Because nations carried their history and were shaped by it, the passage of time never removed the need for an apology. Where scars remained from ancient injustices, and where one part of a nation still benefited from what its forebears had done while another suffered from it, apologies needed to be made. Nor did individual apologies satisfy for the symbolic need for the nation to apologise through its rulers.
Apologies, of course, are symbols. They do not of themselves mend the harm caused by wrongful actions. But in the Christian tradition of reconciliation, apologies must have certain qualities if