Sorry
Page 20
One of the recommendations of the ‘Bringing them Home’ report was that a National Sorry Day should be declared. On 26 May 1998, one year after the tabling of the report, the first ‘National Sorry Day’ was held. It offered the community the opportunity to be involved in activities to acknowledge the impact of the policies of forcible removal on Australia’s indigenous populations. A huge range of community activities took place across Australia on Sorry Day in 1998, including marches for reconciliation in all major cities. Sorry Books, in which people could record their personal feelings, were presented to representatives of indigenous communities. Hundreds of thousands of signatures were received. On 26 May 2000 a highlight of the day was a walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge: an estimated 250,000 people turned out to support the reconciliation process.
On February 13th, 2008, Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, offered a formal apology to indigenous Australians. This novel, written in 2006, could not have anticipated the reconstructed understanding of the word Sorry, nor the forcefulness of this act of cultural intervention.
Sorry Day was an annual event between 1998 and 2004 and was renamed in 2005 as the National Day of Healing for all Australians.
For Aboriginal people, ‘sorry business’ is the term given broadly to matters of death and mourning. It refers to rituals, feelings and community loss. ‘Sorry Day’ now connotes the revival of the reconciliation movement and the restoration of hope.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel was completed at two writing residencies, one at the McDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire, USA, and the other at the Camargo Foundation at Cassis, in France. I am deeply grateful to both institutions for the provision of a quiet space to write and stimulating fellow residents. Anne McClintock and Alice Attie were both splendid companions, both artists of enormous astuteness, sensitivity and intellectual gifts. Poets Sue Standing, Glorie Simmons and Francis Richards, composer Andrea Clearfield and artist Dore Bowen, all offered specific and interventionist inspiration. Dr David Green in Boston patiently and lucidly discussed psychiatric issues of child trauma. I am deeply grateful to many supportive friends, particularly Susan Midalia and Victoria Burrows, who both read an early version of this text and offered wonderfully intelligent advice, as did Jane Palfreyman and James Gurbutt. Catherine Hill offered cleverly incisive eleventh-hour editorial commentary, which contributed significantly to the revision of the book. Sue Abbey, whose work I have respected for many years, also contributed clear-sighted and circumspect advice. Thanks too to Amanda Nettlebeck, for a timely and illuminating discussion on the ethics of writing, and Hilary Rumley who generously assisted with anthropological information. Both Michelle de Kretser and Elizabeth Smither provided for me the model of utterly wise, poised and dedicated writers; I thank both for our reassuring literary conversations.
I am particularly indebted to Carlos Ferguson, who cautiously, and in a spirit of artistic collaboration, showed me the beauty of sign language at Annamakerig. Thanks to Daniel Brown for his spontaneous generosity in offering me a special space in which to begin my final reading of the text. Professor John Norman kindly shared his detailed memories of Broome in war-time. Any errors, historical or otherwise, are of course mine.
My colleagues at the University of Western Australia have been, once again, magnificently supportive and Zoe Waldie has been a consistently brilliant literary agent.
My family share, or don’t share, my own early memories of Broome; in both cases they have been the source of wonderful conversations and the endlessly involving pleasures of nostalgia.
On this page cites words inspired by Emily Dickinson’s Poem 341 which can be found in ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems (London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987) p. 162.
The quote on this page is drawn from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin Classics 2000) p. 87.
Knowledge of the Broome woman spirit mentioned on this page comes from Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg’s book, Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing (co-edited, Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).
The quote from Rebecca is reproduced with the permission of the Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Daphne du Maurier and is copyright © Daphne du Maurier.
Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, Fetish Lives and The House of Breathing. Her first novel, Black Mirror, won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Fiction Prize in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards in 2003. Her second novel, Sixty Lights, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2005 Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction, and the Fiction and Premier’s Prize in both the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards 2004 and the South Australian Festival Award for Literature in 2006. Dreams of Speaking was shortlisted for the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier’s Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award, and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her latest novel, Sorry, was longlisted for the Orange Prize.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Sorry
9781742749877
Copyright © Gail Jones, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published by Vintage in 2007
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Jones, Gail, 1955–.
Sorry.
ISBN 978 1 74166 663 2 (pbk).
Friendship – Western Australia – Fiction
A823.3
Cover image by Getty Images
Cover design by Greendot Design
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