If some terrible wrong has been done to a people or group of peoples, to thousands or millions of individuals, by what principles is an appropriate form of restitution and compensation to be fixed on, as owed to them and/or their descendants? What did Germany owe to those who survived the death camps, to the children of the victims, to the Jewish people? What is owed by beneficiaries of the slave trade to the descendants of slaves? What by European colonizing countries to Africa? I don't know. I haven't much thought about this issue and I've certainly never looked into it in a systematic way.
I'm confident, all the same, that what has lately been argued by an Anglican leader in Australia is misconceived in a number of respects. In the New South Wales Baptist Union's annual John Saunders Lecture, the Reverend Peter Adam has said that Europeans in Australia should either leave or ask the indigenous peoples what recompense to them would be appropriate; no recompense could be satisfactory in any event, given the magnitude of the injustices they have suffered. There's a report here, a piece by Peter Adam himself here, and a defence of his argument here.
At least three things are wrong with it in my view. First, what is indeed appropriate by way of restitution to the victims of injustice is not necessarily what they themselves judge to be appropriate. I don't know how the scale of it should be set, but it can't be that just anything may be demanded. Second, all human beings have rights and therefore not only the wronged have rights; others do as well. Present-day Australians of European origin are not to blame for past wrongs even if they are the indirect beneficiaries of these. The idea that they may be uprooted from their homes and obliged to leave their country of origin at the say-so of others itself opens the way to new violations of human rights. Third, it is in one sense true that there is no adequate recompense for grave crimes: a life taken cannot be returned, great suffering and oppression cannot be made good. Compensation for such things is only ever a partial attempt at restoring a loss that is irreparable. But this must not be taken as a license for thinking that no limit of any kind can be placed on forms of restitution - which have to be constrained by the need to respect the rights of living people. For the crime of murder, even mass murder, one may not under civilized law impose as a punishment the enslavement or the torture of the murderer. Just so, the compulsory 'repatriation' of Australians of European origin would not be a just form of restitution to the indigenous peoples of Australia, even if this were what was wanted by a majority among the latter. And there's much else of which the same would have to be said.