Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an emotional apology to the nation Wednesday morning in the parliament, particularly to the indigenous people for their sufferings and griefs.
He was saying sorry to thousands of families whose members were separated by the previous government policies.
By reading the motion of apology to the House of the Representatives, Rudd told one story of many sad indigenous families, of an elderly indigenous woman, part of the stolen generations, who the prime minister visited a few days ago.
"An elegant, eloquent and wonderful woman in her 80s full of life, full of funny stories despite what has happened in her life's journey," he recalled.
Rudd said his friend told him of the love and warmth she felt while growing up with her family in an Aboriginal community just outside Tennant Creek.
In the early 1930s, at the age of four, she remembers being taken away by "the welfare men".
"Her family had feared that day and had dug holes in the creek bank where the children could run and hide," Rudd told the story.
They brought a truck, two white men and an Aboriginal stockman who found the hiding children and herded them into the truck.
She remembered her mother clinging onto the side of the truck, with tears flowing down her cheeks as it drove off. And she never saw her mother again.
After living in Alice Springs for a "few years", government policy changed and the young girl was handed over to the missions.
"The kids were simply told to line up in three lines ... those on the left were told they had become Catholics, those in the middle, Methodist and those on the right, Church of England," Rudd said.
"That's how the complex questions of post-reformation theology were resolved in the Australian outback in the 1930s. It was as crude as that," he said sadly.
She didn't leave the island mission until she was 16 when she went to Darwin to work as a "domestic".
"Families, keeping them together is very important, it's a good thing that you are surrounded by love and that love is passed down the generations - that's what gives you happiness," the prime minister said.
Source: Xinhua
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