In a watershed event in Australian history, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Wednesday apologised to the country’s 4.7 lakh-strong aborigines for the past injustices against them, saying he wanted to remove a “great stain from the nation’s soul”.

“We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on our fellow Australians,” Rudd said in Parliament.

The apology is being made “to remove a great stain on the soul of the nation,” he said.
There were emotional scenes in Parliament, where Rudd delivered his long-awaited apology, shown live nationwide.

Rudd turned and applauded the members of the Stolen Generations in the public gallery after delivering the emotional address to the House of Representatives, which rose as one to applaud the prime minister’s speech.
From 1910 till the 1970s, an estimated 100,000 mostly mixed-blood aboriginal children were forcefully taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that aborigines were dying out. They later came to be known as the Stolen Generation, and a government inquiry in 1997 found that most of them were deeply scarred by the experience.

“We the Parliament of Australia, respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation,” he said.

Aborigines numbered around a million when White settlers first started arriving in Australia, but only some 470,000 remain. They are the most impoverished minority and Rudd has made improving their lives his top priority.

The apology ended years of acrimonious debate and a decade of refusals by the previous conservative Howard government.