Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on the 16th anniversary of the National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the Closing the gap annual report. I was here in Parliament House in 2008 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered the formal apology to Australia's Indigenous people, with a special focus on the stolen generations, on behalf of all of us in the nation. It was an honour and a privilege to be present alongside so many people from my community in Newcastle. It was very important that the Labor government acknowledge that those laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments had resulted in the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and that those actions had inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on our fellow Australians. The apology was a powerful recognition of the destruction caused to families and communities at the hands of former governments and acknowledged the very real and ongoing pain and trauma caused by forced removals.

Last week I was reading and reflecting on the life of one member of the stolen generation, Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue, a trailblazing Aboriginal woman and leader who died on Kaurna country surrounded by her loved ones just last Sunday. Like so many people in the House, I grieve her passing. Like so many Aboriginal people of her time, Lowitja's life was as extraordinary as it was heartbreaking. Lowitja's mother, Lily, was a Yankunytjatjara woman and her father, Tom O'Donoghue, was a first-generation Irish Australian. At age two she was taken from her mother and placed in a mission home in South Australia. Her name was Anglicised and she was prohibited from speaking her own language. There was harsh discipline and no love and, like many Aboriginal children the country over, she was raised to be a servant. Without a birth certificate, the white missionaries gave her the birthdate of 1 August. For those that don't know, that is the horse's birthday in Australia. It was the day that she celebrated throughout her life. I can tell you that in my time living in Fitzroy Crossing up in the Kimberley time and time again I came across people's births registered as 1 August. It says something about those times. Let's not kid ourselves that they were that long ago.

At age 16, Lowitja was sent to Victor Harbour as a servant for a large family where she served for two years until she fought to train as a nurse. When the matron at the Royal Adelaide Hospital refused because she was Aboriginal, she took her battle to the state Premier and anyone else in government who would listen. She went on to become the first Aboriginal nurse, the first Aboriginal person named a Companion of the Order of Australia, the first Aboriginal person to address the UN General Assembly and the first chair of ATSIC, overseeing its most successful years, including leading very complex negotiations with then Prime Minister Keating following the High Court Mabo decision.

Lowitja did go on to be reunited with her mother as an adult following a trip to Coober Pedy when she was working with the South Australia department of Aboriginal affairs. Her biographer, Stuart Rintoul, described how not long after arriving in Coober Pedy she heard a group of people sitting outside the store saying, 'That's Lily's daughter.' From there she learned that her birth name was Lowitja and that her mother was a heartbroken woman living in poverty in Oodnadatta. She had five children taken from her. In the weeks that followed, Lily waited for her daughter in the outback town of Oodnadatta, staring off into the desert. The reunion at the age of 30 was not an easy one. There was tension and there was a language barrier. These are stories repeated across the nation. Rintoul writes that she would later talk of their reunion as a lesson in 'the limitlessness of hope and the strength of patience'. Let me say that again: the limitlessness of hope and the strength of patience. So many First Nations people have demonstrated that limitlessness of hope and strength of patience over and over again. The national apology was one such moment. Of course, apologies are never the full stop in the process; they're just the very start. Each year we mark this anniversary, it is a timely reminder of how much work we still have to do as a country, as a parliament and as a community to help right the wrongs of the past, to address and improve the inequalities and injustices that remain and to help heal the ongoing pain and trauma passed down from generation to generation.

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