Gatherings: Coming Together in Truth and Reconciliation

Just as Holocaust memorialisation provides an opportunity to reflect on responsibility and complicity, as individuals and as societies, and as memor­ials to colonialism stand on site in order to attempt to create new stories, so too do Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC).^[1102] TRCs - to utilise a broad term emanating from post-apartheid South Africa to encompass a wide variety of commissions, hearings and movements - have now occurred across the world and have served to air a series of accounts of violence: testimonies both of the perpetrators and the victims, those who have enacted violence and those who have been subjected to it.

The hearings associated with the South African TRC served as an opportunity to produce memories, as well as forgettings, about violence pursued under apartheid rule. One documentary about the TRC, Long Night's Journey into Day (2000), asserted that the commission raised ‘some of the most profound moral and ethical questions facing the world today - questions about justice, truth, forgiveness, redemption, and the ability of brutalized and brutalizing individuals to subsequently coexist in harmony'. The TRC sits within a paradigm of ‘reconciliation', a political formation which ‘has emerged as a potent and alluring form of utopian politics' across ‘contemporary settler societies'. Such reconcilia­tion movements and moments - such as the bridge-walks which occurred across Australia in 2000 - can act as a moment of gathering, a performative expression of a vast set of emotions. In Australia, people were urged by Mick Dodson ‘to see today, this day, as the beginning of the reconciliation process. This day, this day is the dawning of that brand new day.'^[1103]

In other countries, such gatherings to speak and hear have led to formal government reports and apologies.

We turn now to examine the contemporary practice of public apologies, looking in particular at the memories created through apologies surrounding the violence of colonisation, violence of family separation, violence against children in institutional care and sexual violence against women. Public apologies are modes through which states and institutions frame, remember and forget violent pasts. We first focus on the meaning of apologies and then consider specific examples.