Phil Coomes, picture editor, on the BBC usually has excellent article and this about Australian photographer Aletheia Casey is another.
Photographer Aletheia Casey recently returned to Australia after living abroad for five years and began work on a project looking at the process of reconciliation and apology to indigenous Australians. To mark National Sorry Day in Australia, Casey writes about the work.
Shortly before I left Australia in 2008, the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology to the First Peoples of Australia and recognised the ongoing trauma and dislocation that the colonisation of Australia has had on the Indigenous Peoples of this land. He also made a specific formal apology for the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their homes which occurred from the 1920s until well into the 1970s in Australia.
I was struck by what an important statement it had been for the government of Australia to recognise the trauma that it had directly inflicted in the past. I did wonder, however, was it, as many people felt, simply an acknowledgment of ‘White Guilt’? And did this Apology have long-term healing effects on the people who had been directly affected by the laws of the past?
Photographer Aletheia Casey recently returned to Australia after living abroad for five years and began work on a project looking at the process of reconciliation and apology to indigenous Australians. To mark National Sorry Day in Australia, Casey writes about the work.
Shortly before I left Australia in 2008, the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology to the First Peoples of Australia and recognised the ongoing trauma and dislocation that the colonisation of Australia has had on the Indigenous Peoples of this land. He also made a specific formal apology for the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their homes which occurred from the 1920s until well into the 1970s in Australia.
I was struck by what an important statement it had been for the government of Australia to recognise the trauma that it had directly inflicted in the past. I did wonder, however, was it, as many people felt, simply an acknowledgment of ‘White Guilt’? And did this Apology have long-term healing effects on the people who had been directly affected by the laws of the past?
Kim Hill
Eliza Pross
Jenny Moylan Coombes
Jasmine Haby-Atkinson
Caroline Glass-Pattison
I would recommend you go to Aletheia’s website here and see more of her work
Phil Coomes
Oxford School of Photography 