‘On the borders of the unsayable’: the apology in postcolonizing Australia

This essay examines the rewired circuits of desire, will and subjectivity that occur in postcolonizing settler nations such as Australia. Its explicit concern lies with an examination of the Australian process of reconciliation and with the call for, and giving of, apologies for past wrongs to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The essay argues that postcolonizing trends in Australia work to restructure the settler sense of national subjectivity. Within this changing context some settlers become afflicted with a form of postcolonial 'bad conscience' or shame, and imagine themselves as improper national subjects. They experience a kind of dispossession. For these 'sorry people' the apology becomes a lifeline through which a legitimate sense of belonging in the nation may be restituted.