What happened on Sorry Day in 1997?

National Sorry Day in 1997 was the inaugural commemoration marking the first anniversary of the tabling of the Bringing Them Home report in the federal Parliament on 26 May 1997. The first National Sorry Day on 26 May 1998 saw events across Australia honouring the Stolen Generations, with particular focus on acknowledging the harm caused by the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families.

The original National Sorry Day was organised by the National Sorry Day Committee, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians led by Stolen Generations survivors and supporters. The day was marked through ceremonies, walks, and public events at city and town squares, parliaments, schools, and community centres. The Sorry Books initiative, which began on Sorry Day 1998, allowed Australians to record their individual sorries to the Stolen Generations: more than a million signatures were collected in books across the country over the following years.

Federal political response in 1997 to 1998 was limited. Prime Minister John Howard expressed personal regret but refused to issue a formal parliamentary apology on behalf of the federal government, arguing that current generations should not apologise for the actions of past governments. The Coalition government's position differed from that of state Premiers, who issued apologies on behalf of their states from 1997 onwards. South Australian Premier John Olsen, Western Australian Premier Richard Court, Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle, and later Premiers in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, the ACT, and the Northern Territory all delivered formal apologies between 1997 and 2001.

The Sorry movement built up across the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Corroboree 2000 on 28 May 2000 saw about 250,000 people walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of reconciliation, with similar bridge walks in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, and other cities. The Sorry Day commemoration was renamed the National Day of Healing for All Australians in 2005, although the original Sorry Day name has remained more widely used. The federal Apology to the Stolen Generations came finally on 13 February 2008 from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as the first item of business of the new Labor Parliament. National Sorry Day on 26 May each year now marks both the original Stolen Generations commemoration and the Bringing Them Home report anniversary, and is the start of National Reconciliation Week (27 May to 3 June each year).