Abstract EN:

Much work has been done on reconciliation, yet this study hopes to make a contribution: rather than see reconciliation as an implicit but definite set of ideas, political principles or processes that may or may not be respected by the States which embrace it, we take reconciliation as a broad ideal which does not commit the States to any particular policy or socio-cultural logics. The question we intend to answer is therefore not so much how Australia conformed to the broad and somewhat abstract concept of reconciliation during its ‘reconciliation decade’, in the 1990s. Rather, we intend to shed light on what the Australian reconciliation was in fact, depending on whether it helped the assimilation, integration or separation of Aboriginal people. On some conditions, all three types of socio-cultural logics are indeed possible expressions of the coming together or the harmony ideal for which reconciliation stands. This work therefore aims to determine: a) which of those three types was preferred by the Keating and the Howard governments; b) what socio-cultural processes were carried out by Australian institutions, organisations, groups or people; c) how the governments and the different players succeeded in making their preferred types dominant, taking into account their conflicting views, the weight of globalisation and the passage of time; d) what impact all these influences have had on the ground, and how it might have been different from one Aboriginal community to the other; e) everything considered, which sociocultural process was strengthened or accelerated in the 1990s, and thus, with hindsight, what reconciliation was.