ABSTRACT
In May 1997, Bringing Them Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report on removed Aboriginal children, was tabled in the Australian Federal Parliament. The report represented the culmination of two years’ gathering of testimony from individuals who were separated from their families by state agencies. Its authors, Sir Ronald Wilson and Professor Mick Dodson, chose to preserve the witnesses’ accounts in their own words rather than paraphrasing them. The effect of this choice is a profoundly moving document: presented in the first-person voice, the testimony of Bringing Them Home is addressed to the reader directly, and, as such, stages anew the distress and trauma of those who tell their stories. The report appeals to readers’ sense of compassion, and is intended to motivate a desire to act in accordance with such compassionate feeling. This gesture recalls a tradition of understanding political subjectivity that has roots in modern thought from Hutcheson to Rousseau. It bids its audience to access a part of the self that resonates with the vulnerability all humanity shares, but to which some are materially more exposed than others. It appeals to a capacity to internalize the other’s suffering that has been fostered by liberal political culture since the eighteenth century. The effects of such internalization, however, are not straightforward.
