In recent years this has expressed itself in such popular acts as the ‘Sea of Hands’ displays in which hundreds of thousands of citizens have sponsored and signed a plastic hand in Aboriginal colours to be placed on the lawn in front of public buildings, including the Parliament in Canberra. Another ritual in which people have taken part by the thousand is the signing of names in national ‘Sorry Books’. Since 1998 there has also been an annual ‘National Sorry Day’ in Australia.7 Naturally, like all original sins, the one for which Australians are continually being invited to apologise could not conceivably be corrected. Many of the people who now live in Australia may be descended from Europeans and other settlers, but they themselves thieved no land and stole no generation. If they inherited any land, they did so without oppressing or usurping a soul. And although the economic and employment opportunities of the country’s Aborigines may still lag behind that of other Australians – and by a very long way – this resurrects an insuperable conundrum. For now, as in the past, Australians desiring to ‘correct’ their policies towards the Aborigines cannot square the circle of how to ‘preserve’ indigenous lifestyles without encouraging or forcing them to enjoy exactly the same lifestyle as everybody else – in the process wiping out their culture.

The Australian vogue for self-blame is no longer unusual. Indeed the 2008 apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to the indigenous people of Australia happened within months of a similar apology to the indigenous peoples of Canada given by that country’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.8 Both apologies were widely welcomed as demonstrating a statesmanlike atonement for a painful period of history. Few dissenting voices were listened to, and even the historical record seemed for a time incapable of being honestly assessed. In Canada, as in Australia and in all similar cases, the desire to talk up the scale of the crimes being apologised for should have been some giveaway. Anybody standing before a real court for real crimes who boasts of having performed worse crimes than those for which they were on trial would be deemed unfit to stand trial. Yet if one is not really in the dock or guilty oneself, but merely speaking for dead predecessors, perhaps the tendency towards hyperbole grows. For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.