Landmark Aboriginal ceremony opens Australian Parliament

AUSTRALIA: Australia's parliament opened with an historic Aboriginal ceremony Tuesday as new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd prepared to make a landmark apology to the minority's "Stolen Generations."

But Aboriginal protesters rallying just down the hill from parliament house said there was still a long way to go to redress the injustices committed during 220 years of while settlement in Australia.

In parliament, an elder of the Ngambri tribe, traditional owners of the land on which the legislature stands, led a traditional "welcome to country" ceremony there for the first time in the nation's history.

Draped in a possum-fur cape, Matilda House-Williams told the gathered dignitaries that when the old parliament building was opened in Canberra 80 years ago a lone, barefoot Aboriginal man was driven away by police.

"I stand here before you in this same great institution of ceremonial dress, barefoot, honoured and welcome," she said, paying respect to ancestral spirits as indigenous musicians played didgeridoos.

The ceremony was part of a shift towards Aboriginal reconciliation ushered in by Rudd's centre-left government, including an apology to be given Wednesday to the "Stolen Generations" of Aborigines forcibly taken from their families. Mainly mixed-race Aboriginal children were removed in a bid to assimilate them into white society, with tens of thousands placed in institutions or brought up by white families between 1910 and 1970.

"Today we begin with one small step to set right the wrongs of the past," Rudd said at the welcoming ceremony, which he said would become a new parliamentary tradition. Down the hill, about 1,000 Aborigines from around Australia had converged for the rally and the apology, some of them travelling 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles) in buses from isolated Outback communities.

Tuesday, AFP