Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Australia changed this week. I think it is really a very emotional and exciting week for this country. When I was first elected to this parliament in 2004, I gave my inaugural speech the following year and I said then:

What gives me hope is the increasingly loud and urgent cry from the hearts of Australians everywhere for a return to what we know in our heart of hearts is ‘country’—a return to the spirit of the land and the expansive values of goodness, honesty, justice, fairness, equality, generosity, freedom and ecological stewardship that are for Australians inherent in the concept of ‘country’.

I went on to say that what I was talking about in the concept of ‘country’:

... is a precious insight we have learned from our Indigenous people. It incorporates the land and their stories. It is not jingoistic. In talking about country

…            …            …

we must as a nation progress reconciliation with Indigenous people, we must also progress our own reconciliation with ‘country’—our own sense of place and identity.

Driving here this morning I could not help but be quite overwhelmed and very emotional as I came around the front of the parliament at half past seven in the morning. People were streaming to the parliament at that hour. I have no recollection of any other time in my experience where people were coming from all over the city to the parliament to join Indigenous people from all over the country, who had already arrived here for the convergence yesterday.

They were lining up in dignified silence but with quiet yearning and excitement about the fact that at last this parliament seemed to be in touch with the feeling of the nation. As I witnessed that, I thought this is actually a nation-changing event. It is something that I had hoped would have that impact, but I felt that as I saw all of those people coming towards the parliament.

In the coffee shop in the parliament, after the official apology given by the Prime Minister this morning, I had the good fortune to meet an Indigenous woman called Lois, who said, ‘I am proud to be an Aboriginal woman in Australia today, and it is the first time I have been able to say that in my life.’ So things have already changed.

Yesterday at the convergence I spoke to Lowitja O’Donoghue. She said of the rain yesterday as the welcome to country ceremony was taking place, ‘It is the tears of joy of our ancestors.’ She was referring to the fact that we the elected representatives of the people of Australia were seeking permission from the Indigenous owners of the land, the Ngunawal people, for permission to meet and walk on their land. That is what changed. It is extraordinary. Not only is it a really deep yearning inside Indigenous people for recognition and for an expression of sorrow and regret for what has been done to them but it is also a breaking down of the dam wall for all the people across Australia who have marched for reconciliation, who have moved, right across the country, for recompense and restitution for the wrongs that have been done to Indigenous people, and have not seen it happen.

Now there is a sense that it might happen. I feel particularly humble as well because I was in the balance of power in Tasmania in 1997 and I helped to negotiate the apology to the stolen generation in the Tasmanian parliament with a Liberal minority government. We did it in a tripartite way. We brought onto the floor of the house Tasmania’s Indigenous people and Annette Peardon responded for the Indigenous Tasmanians and the stolen generation. It was a particularly dignified occasion. Tasmania has moved on because of that ownership by all political parties of the apology—of the recognition of the wrong that had been done—and has now moved to a smooth process of compensation. The same is occurring in Western Australia; it can and it will happen nationally.

There are terrible stories of what has happened. For example, an Aboriginal boy runs through a Hobart street carrying 8½ pints of stolen milk. The milk has a value of, nowadays, $1.12. It is the 1960s. Within days not only the boy but the family’s three other children have been rounded up and made wards of the state. In court, a welfare officer says the boy’s behaviour is typical of ‘people of their origin’.

I cannot imagine what it would feel like, as a mother, to have your children taken from you in this way—in any way, but in this way. I cannot imagine the loss of living out one’s life and going to your grave never knowing. And the loss for the children who never know the love of their parents. In fact, the children in one of the submissions from New South Wales in the Bringing them home report said:

We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals.

The Greens have said sorry in the parliaments around this country, but I am very grateful for the opportunity to say sorry again and to support the Rudd government in making this official apology to the stolen generation.

I think in particular of people like Archie Roach, who was one of the stolen generation himself, who have campaigned for this day for many years. Archie Roach’s famous album in 1990, Charcoal Lane, included his song Took the Children Away, which moved the nation, and still does. In that song he said they:

Taught us to read, to write and pray

Then they took the children away,

Took the children away,

The children away.

Snatched from their mother’s breast

Said it was for the best

Took them away.

The welfare and the policeman

Said you’ve got to understand

We’ll give them what you can’t give

Teach them how to really live.

Teach them how to live they said

Humiliated them instead

Taught them that and taught them this

And others taught them prejudice.

You took the children away

The children away

Breaking their mothers heart

Tearing us all apart

Took them away

Today I note that Archie Roach said that, like many Aboriginal people, he hoped the apology would be a beginning rather than an end. He said:

Once this is done, perhaps we can then make inroads into other issues. I understand that an apology is not going to solve all the problems, or the plight of Aboriginal people, but it’s going to help. It’s going to help people to feel a bit more free to go ahead. It will help me and my children.

That is something which I find incredibly humbling. What I find in particular so overwhelmingly humbling is the dignity, the tolerance, the wisdom and the nobleness of the Indigenous people who are accepting this apology and accepting it in good faith as a first step. And it must be a first step to reparations and to compensation. It must also be a first step to saying to Australia’s Indigenous people that we are serious about reconciling with them and coming home to country and assisting them to come home to their country and that we, as Australians, recognise that this is a brand new day. In the words of Oodgeroo Noonuccal:

Look up, my people,

The dawn is breaking,

The world is waking,

To a new bright day,

When none defame us,

Nor colour shame us,

Nor sneer dismay.

This is a historic day and I am so pleased to be here to say sorry to the stolen generation of Australia’s Indigenous people.