saying sorry..., page-55

For all of those of you who are opposing the apology, please answer one thing. Would you prefer to have been born aboriginal or caucasian.

I would guess that you all said caucasian. I would too because I could not live with the overt and covert discrimination that aboriginal people live with every second of their life. Nor could I live in an environment where my likelyhood of unemployment was 4 or 5 times higher than the general population. (And even when aboriginal people get jobs they are usually menial less well paid jobs that are not permenant and usually offer little prospect of advancement.)

Though I am not racist and spent a great deal of my life trying to advance the cause of aboriginal people I never the less feel that as a nation we have a lot to be sorry for in regards to the way we treated aborigines in the past. I personaly am not responsible but believe that we as a nation are.

Consider for example a friend of mine. She is an elderly leader in the Great Southern of WA. She had very little schooling because when she was a child the state government policy was that aboriginal children were excluded from school if one white parent objected to aborigines at the school. At times she was excluded.

Her father was employed on one of the farms which was on land taken from the local Nungar tribe. He and the other aboriginal workers on the farm were fed in the chook yard. The white workers ate on the verander and the grazier's family in the house.

Is it any wonder that aboriginal people want an apology for these sorts of injustices. What will it hurt us if our government says sorry for those injustices and then puts in place programs to help aboriginal people move on.