Aborigines have long been fringe-dwellers of Australian society, but will take center stage when Parliament resumes with a historic ceremony to acknowledge the nation's capital is built on their land. The government also plans to apologize for past injustices.
An Aboriginal elder, Matilda House, will welcome lawmakers on Feb. 12 to Parliament House and surrounding land that was inhabited by her Ngunnawal tribe before British settlers came in the 19th century.
"I think it's just a marvelous thing," House said Thursday of the inclusion of traditional owners for the first time in Parliament's 107-year history.
House, who was born in an Outback Aboriginal reserve and spent her adolescence in a harsh Sydney reform school, has revealed little about plans for the welcome ceremony.
She has suggested a low-key affair and said there will be no ceremonial dancing.
The ceremony underscores the new government's ambition to end mainstream Australia's neglect of Aborigines, who are the nation's poorest minority group and die an average of 17 years younger than other Australians.
"This welcome will carry national significance in symbolizing a future of respect and partnership with indigenous people," Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said in a statement.
The Ngunnawal have no official title over the national capital, Canberra, or its surroundings. Europeans cleared the land without a treaty with the indigenous inhabitants, and the city was founded in 1913.
The first act of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new government will be to ask Parliament on Feb. 13 to pass a motion apologizing for past policies of taking mostly mixed-race children from Aboriginal mothers to try to make them grow up like white Australians.
The government plans to fly 70 of these people, members of the so-called "stolen generations" _ some of whom live in dilapidated Outback camps or on the outskirts of cities _ to witness the event in Canberra, said Barbara Livesey, chief executive of Reconciliation Australia. The agency is tasked with bringing black and white Australians together.
A national inquiry into the past assimilation policies found in 1997 that many children taken from their families suffered long-term psychological effects stemming from the loss of family and culture, and recommended that Parliament apologize.
Former Prime Minister John Howard had long refused to do so, arguing his government should not be held responsible for the policies of formal officials.
Megan Davis, an Aboriginal lawyer and director of the University of New South Wales' Indigenous Legal Center, described the indigenous focus of the first week of Parliament as "a good start" after the Howard era, when so-called symbolic reconciliation had been dismissed.
"The apology in itself is a hugely historic moment in the history of this country," Davis said.
Rudd has asked for bipartisan support for the apology, but opposition lawmakers appear divided over the issue.
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who led Howard's conservative coalition until election defeat in 1983, warned lawmakers from his Liberal Party that most Australians now support an apology.
"If they are not prepared to support the apology, they're painting themselves into a corner," Fraser told Nine Network television. "That sort of attitude is one of the reasons why the last election was lost."
Opposition Sen. Barnaby Joyce dismissed the apology as "confusing, empty and rhetorical."
Rudd's center-left Labor Party swept to power in elections last November, after almost 12 years in opposition, with a promise to apologize to the stolen generations.
He has, however, ruled out indigenous leaders' demands to pay compensation.
Aborigines account for about 450,000 of the country's 21 million people. They are the Australians most likely to be jailed, unemployed or illiterate.
From 1910 until the 1970s, about 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that Aborigines were a doomed race, and that saving the children was a humane alternative.
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