Sorry. But very, very proud to be Australian

Somebody wrote on Facebook today "A brave man walked into Parliament this morning. A great man walked out this afternoon".

Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations of indigenous Australians is one of the great speeches of our time. His predecessor John Howard, imho, didn't make great speeches - he was more a 'soundbite and spin' kinda bloke. And a miserly sod sadly lacking in human decency.

The Stolen Generations are not just a product of actions by people a long time ago. I know a woman just two years older than me who was removed from her aboriginal family in about the same year I was born (early 1970s). Aboriginal people didn't have the vote until 1966. And the communities that were fractured by those past policies are still often full of broken families today.

We see the proof of that in indigenous communities, where the life expectancy is 20 years less than for all other Australians, where access to health and education is poor, where substance abuse and domestic violence have replaced traditional beliefs and rituals. We can't strip away the fabric of someone's culture and then complain when they 'dont behave like us'.

A Women's Circus performance in Melbourne about 15 years ago was called "The Soles of our Feet". It closed with the words of Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy:

"Your job is to remember, our job is to forgive".

My people (white Anglo people) have lived in Australia for up to 8 generations, the first arrivals farmed in country Victoria, and almost certainly had aboriginal staff. I won't ever know how they treated those staff, but I know that many people in those days held attitudes that we know today were wrong.

And I am sorry