“Today we begin with one small step to set right the wrongs of the past,” Mr Rudd said.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1275’s parliament has opened with an Aboriginal welcome, ahead of an apology for past wrongs inflicted on the country’s indigenous community.
In a special ceremony, an Aboriginal elder handed a symbolic message stick to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
On Wednesday Mr Rudd is due to deliver a historic apology to Aborigines for past assimilation policies.
Under these policies, in place until the 1960s, thousands of children were forcibly taken from their families.
Didgeridoo-playing Aborigines overturned hundreds of years of British tradition by marking the official opening of the session in their own way.
According to the BBC correspondent Nick Bryant, this is perhaps a sign of the new reconciliation which the country’s new prime minister is trying to nurture and nourish.Aboriginal elder Matilda House, wearing a coat of animal skins, delivered a traditional message stick to Mr Rudd, and spoke of “the hope of a united nation through reconciliation”.
“Today we begin with one small step to set right the wrongs of the past,” Mr Rudd said.
The first act of parliament will be to apologise to the Stolen Generations – young Aboriginal children taken from their parents in a policy of assimilation which lasted from the 19th Century to the late 1960s.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a motion to acknowledge the “profound grief, suffering and loss” as well as the “indignity and degradation” caused to the Aboriginal community by previous policies.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7240382.stm