On December 10th, 1992, just one year after the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, the then Prime Minister, Paul Keating, made a landmark speech in Redfern Park, at an event marking the Australian launch of the International Year for the World's Indigenous People
"When speaking of the impact of European settlement on Australia's Indigenous peoples, he said:
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional wayof life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds."
For full text of the speech go to: www.apology.west.net.au/redfern.html