Ceremony Offers Hope To Aborigines

Aborigines held an historic ceremony in Australia's national Parliament on Tuesday that many hoped would mark a new era of race relations in the country.

With faces painted white and with a digeridoo - an ancient wind instrument - blowing a deep drone in the background, Aborigines of the Ngunnawal tribe called on spirits to welcome newcomers to Parliament in a ceremony held in a hall of the national legislature.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd accepted a traditional gift of welcome from Ngannawal elder Matilda House.

By holding the ceremony, the government gave symbolic recognition for the first time in 107 years of federal government that the land on which Australia's capital was built was once owned by Aborigines, and was taken away without compensation by European settlers.

Many Aborigines have high hopes that the new prime minister will usher in a new era of race relations this week when he apologizes on Wednesday to thousands of Aborigines who were taken from their families as children under now discredited policies.

"I hope this will be a new start - a new way," said Mike Williams, 55, an Aborigine from the southern Pitjantjatjarra desert area who rode a bus to Canberra to witness this week's ceremonies.

Williams and his companions pitched a tent on a grass-covered mall near Parliament, where dozens of others have made a similar pilgrimage. The ramshackle sprawl of tents, sheds and cooking fires on the manicured lawns has been a center for land rights protests since 1972.

Rudd has invited more than 100 Aboriginal leaders to attend Wednesday's apology speech, and other dignitaries from business leaders to former prime ministers were also due to attend. A giant television screen was being set up outside Parliament House so people who could not fit into the legislature could watch the proceedings.

A big screen was also going up in Sydney so people could watch the national live broadcast of Rudd's speech. Smaller, more private events were planned across the country.

From 1910 until 1970, some 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws that argued the race was doomed and the children were better off being integrated.

A government-funded inquiry 10 years ago found the policies caused extreme trauma to those affected, and many suffered long-term psychological effects stemming from their loss of family and culture. It recommended a formal apology to those taken, along with compensation.

Aborigines lived mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyles for thousands of years before English colonial settlers landed in Sydney in 1788.

Today, Aborigines number about 450,000 among Australia's population of 21 million and are the country's poorest ethnic group and are most likely to be jailed, unemployed and illiterate. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than other Australians.

Rudd, elected last November, has promised to make an apology - overturning the staunch opposition to the idea of his predecessor John Howard - but has ruled out paying money to those harmed by the policies.

Instead, he has vowed that his government will improve the health, education and other social conditions of Aborigines in general.

Maurie Japarta-Ryan was another Aborigine who trekked to Canberra to witness the government's apology.

"Having a black mother and a white father was my only crime as a 3-year-old," he said at the Tent Embassy. A welfare officer took him from his mother at a remote northern Outback cattle ranch as a toddler in 1952.

He was taken to an island orphanage and did not see his mother for 21 years. He never again saw his father, a white farmer barred by law from living with Japarta-Ryan's mother.

"The apology is very big thing," he said. "This country has been living in denial of its history for 200 years. It has denied that the stolen generations ever existed."