Picture an image. The lawn of Parliament House, the seat of government and the symbol of the state, is planted thick with thousands of green, red, blue, yellow, black, and white hands, rooted in the earth and reaching up to the sky. Each has been placed there by a citizen to mark his or her apology for the theft of Indigenous land and Indigenous children. In the following five years, tens of thousands more added their ‘hands’ to a growing ‘Sea of Hands’ which, like the apology movement, swept across the country, a national ritual saluting the children who had been shoved into institutions and foster homes and the broken families and communities left behind in their tracks. A land marked with a history of violence against its Indigenous peoples was now being reinscribed with a collective apology.

If the scene strikes us as an odd description of contemporary politics, this is hardly surprising, given its dissonance with the fundamental principles and standard institutions of modern secular liberalism. One might well expect to see a ritual of repentance in the church, but not in the world of secular politics. We deal with wrongs of the past through the institutions of justice, by either punishing individual wrongdoers or compensating victims. And if pre-moderns believed that the sins of the fathers were brought down upon the heads of the sons, we secular moderns distinguish ourselves by insisting that our institutions of justice hold responsible only those who personally committed wrongful acts.