This is not a day for red appleologies.

This is not a day for yellow appleologies.

This is not a day for green appleologies.
It’s a day for sincere apologies,

a day when a country says it’s sorry to First Nations people,

a day to pet countless screams, moans, cries, and silence.
May 26, 2023, afternoon. I met Samantha on Zoom and she said
Today is National Sorry Day.

A day to remember the children of the stolen generation.
Among the children who were dragged away crying

were brave girls who ran away from white institutions.

In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Molly, Gracie, and Daisy

walked 1,600 kilometres to return home.

The rabbit fence erected by white people

who failed to prevent the breeding of wild rabbits

became a signpost that guided them to their hometown.

However, after her marriage, Molly was again transferred to a government settlement

and attempted to escape with one of her daughters.

The daughter left behind in the settlement was Doris Pilkington Garimara,

who wrote the novel.
Samantha, from Moa Island in the Torres Strait,

said she was writing a book called Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia.

She said she was writing the language of a disappearing tribe with annotations.

I asked about the small flag on the screen.

As I guessed, it was the Torres Strait flag.

She said that green symbolised the earth, blue symbolised the sea,

and the black line between them symbolised people.

The male dancer’s white headdress

and the star representing the five island clusters also appears.

However, the tribal dances, festivals, and myths have disappeared,

and now the flag is only flown in the corner of her bookshelf in the city.

The longed-for island lies far away, only in dreams and poetry.
Today is National Sorry Day.

A day to confess and pay respect to the memory of the stolen generation.

A day when the white nation apologises

to the land, sea, and sky of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

and to their descendants.



 In Australia, National Sorry Day is observed annually on May 26th. For 100 years, from 1869 to 1969, the Australian

government enforced a policy of assimilation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, forcibly separating

children from their families and housing them on missions. The people who were taken as children are known as

the Stolen Generations. A fact-finding survey began in the mid-1990s, and children were sent home. In 2008,

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an official apology for this dark history. On National Sorry Day, the country

apologises to the Stolen Generations. ↩