Australia to apologize for mistreatment of Aborigines

Feb 11, 2008, 18:12 GMT

Sydney - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will stand up in Parliament this week and say sorry to the nation's 500,000 Aborigines for a now discredited assimilation programme that saw black children separated from their parents and brought up in white institutions.

The programme ran until the 1970s and, according to a 1996 government report 'not one indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal.'

The children were taken mostly when they were teenagers, the boys trained up to be farm workers and the girls fitted for domestic service. Their training done, many were employed on low wages and with poor conditions.

But it was the break-up of families that caused the most grief.

'I remember being taken up to the convent, there were six of us taken and we ranged in age from 4 years old to about 9 years old,' Zita Wallace recalled. 'We were bathed by the older girls and put into clean clothes and we were put in the back of a truck and we were told that we were going to Alice Springs to do shopping. That was the last that we saw of our families.'

For some, the official apology for what the Bringing Them Home report declared were the 'stolen generations' will close the page on a sorry chapter in Australia's history.

'Whatever happens, a sorry is OK for me because this is what I waited for and I knew it was going to happen one day and this is my moment,' indigenous activist Lorna Cubillo said. 'People disagree, but that's OK. I'm not asking for anything more, just sorry is good enough.'

Cubillo will be among 1,000 indigenous Australians invited by Rudd to hear an apology for what he said was a 'blight on the nation's soul.'

Thousands more are expected to ring Parliament House for an apology not only 10 years in the making but also the very first act of Rudd's new Labor government. Big screens are going up in cities around the country and Australians are being encouraged to join in a collective act of reconciliation.

But others see the mea culpa as the start of atonement by white Australia that will have run its course only when billions of dollars have been paid in compensation to the stolen generations and their descendants.

National Aboriginal Alliance spokesman Les Malezer said the apology must be backed by 'reparations, which is part of forgiveness, as part of admitting that the wrong thing was done.'

Rudd, who has yet to release the wording of the apology that previous prime minister John Howard refused to give during his 11 years in office, has insisted there will be no pay-out. For him, as for many, the apology should stand alone as a touchstone in relations between the settlers and the indigenous people of the continent.

'This is a unique and necessary moment in our history,' Cynthia Breusch wrote to The Australian newspaper. 'Such symbolism carries with it the oxygen of respect.'

There are some Australians who can't easily come to say sorry. Howard's mantra was that it was unreasonable for one generation to be asked to apologies for the deeds of another.

Opposition indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott said he would support the apology.

'But we'll be getting behind it in a way which acknowledges our true history, that's to say the good things that happened as well as unfortunate things that happened,' Abbott said. 'Yes, some kids were stolen, and this is shameful, but many were helped and some were rescued, and I think we need to be honest about that.'

Some are even more reluctant to bow the head. University of the Sunshine Coast politics lecturer Ivan Molloy said that 'the notion of inherited guilt which such an apology would support has no place in a civilized world.'