Community involvement and education in the 1991-2000 Australian reconciliation process

In 1991, the Australian Parliament implemented a formal 10-year process of reconciliation. The aim of the process was to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by the end of 2000. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) was established to promote the process. The process had three broad goals: improving education, addressing Indigenous socio-economic disadvantage and developing a document of reconciliation. This 10- year process achieved several successful outcomes, including the 'People's Movement' and the 'Walks for Reconciliation'. The outcomes were predominately linked to the broad education goal and occurred due to the involvement of the Australian community in the reconciliation process. In this paper, I explore two inter-related programmes developed by CAR - community consultations and encouraging community involvement - that encouraged the involvement of the Australian community in reconciliation and were significantly responsible for the success obtained by the education goal. However, I also argue there were two issues involving many non- Indigenous people - their ignorance of reconciliation and Indigenous issues and their nationalist understandings of reconciliation - that ensured that overall the goals, despite some successful outcomes, were not fully achieved by the conclusion of the formal reconciliation process