Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an historic apology to Aborigines Wednesday for injustices committed over two centuries of white settlement, saying he wanted "to remove a great stain from the nation's soul."
The apology represented a watershed in Australia's often fraught history of race relations, with television networks airing it live and thousands of people crowding around huge screens in major cities to witness the event.
"We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians," Rudd told parliament. Parliament's public galleries were packed for the reconciliation gesture, with 3,000 people watching on screens erected on lawns opposite the building.
Many Aborigines had travelled thousands of kilometres (miles) to Canberra for the occasion, and some wept as Rudd said sorry for the wrongs the original Australians endured after British settlers arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788. "This is the most significant moment for our people that's happened in my lifetime," Aboriginal man Darryl Towney told AFP.
"For us, this is like the Berlin Wall coming down." Rudd's apology went much further than initially expected, drawing emotional applause, cheers and tears from the crowd and culminating in a standing ovation both inside and outside parliament.
It referred to the "past mistreatment" of all Aborigines, not just the "Stolen Generations" of children whose forcible removal from their families provided the initial impetus for the apology.
Rudd did single out the Stolen Generations, mostly mixed-race children taken from their families until 1970 in a bid to assimilate them into white society while full-blooded Aborigines were expected to die out. But he also offered a broader apology and repeatedly used the word "sorry," an expression that took on a huge symbolic meaning for Aborigines when Rudd's conservative predecessor John Howard refused to utter it when he was in power.
Rudd said sorry for the "pain, suffering and hurt" of the stolen generations and their broken families. "For the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry," he said. Rudd, who ended Howard's 11-year rule with a landslide election win last November, criticised his predecessor's refusal to apologise after an official report presented in 1997 recommended the move.
"From the nation's parliament there has been a stony and stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade," he said. Howard was the only living former prime minister who failed to attend the ceremony in parliament. His Liberal Party, now in opposition, supported the motion of apology.
Rudd said those present had come to deal with Australia's "unfinished business". "To remove a great stain from the nation's soul and in the true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land," he said.
Some 50,000 children were taken from their families, Rudd noted, saying there was "something terribly primal" in the first-hand stories of the Stolen Generations.
"The pain is searing, it screams from the pages, the hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses," he said.
Aborigines are believed to have numbered up to a million at the time of white settlement, but only some 470,000 remain. They are Australia's most impoverished minority, with a lifespan 17 years shorter than the national average, and disproportionately high rates of imprisonment, heart disease and infant mortality. Rudd said the apology was a symbolic gesture to help "the healing of the nation" and would be followed by practical measures to improve Aboriginal health, education and housing. The apology was warmly welcomed by most Aborigines, although some said it should include financial compensation.