Australia says sorry for 'stolen generations' of Aborigines

[Dale_M]

Indigenous Australians finally heard the word they had been waiting for today when Parliament formally apologised for past injustices towards them, including the forced assimilation of tens of thousands of Aborigines known as the “Stolen Generations”.

The watershed gesture of reconciliation came in a parliamentary motion proposed by Kevin Rudd, the country’s new Prime Minister, and backed unanimously by MPs which apologised "for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians”.

The apology was directed especially at Aborigines forcibly taken from their families as children in assimilation policies that lasted from the mid-1800s until 1970, during which time up to a third of Aboriginal children were ‘stolen’.

timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article3362062.ece