Tears in Australia Over Gov't Apology for Mistreating Aborigines
Many aborigines in Australia were tearful today as they heard Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologize for decades of mistreatment by prior governments.
The apology came more than a decade after an Australian Human Rights Commission report described Australia’s removal of tens of thousands of indigenous aboriginal children from their families between the 1880s and the 1960s as “attempted genocide,” reports Reuters.
“To this day, I have this, this feeling about the taste of blackberries. I was holding on to mum’s dress, she took me blackberry picking, and the welfare officer said that we were going to a circus,” says Lola Edwards, who was taken from her family at age 4 and didn’t see them again for decades. Now 61, she cried when she heard Rudd’s apology today, the news agency reports.
As discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post, the issue of possible compensation still has not been settled. Although the commission’s report called for it, the government so far has said it will not pay.
