February 14, 2008
"Sorry" never sounded better!
Yesterday I witnessed history in the making. For the first time in history of Australia, the prime minister asked indigenous Australians (Aborigines) for forgiveness for the terrible injustice that they were put through by previous generations of white European Australians. He apologized the "stolen generation" - aboriginal kids that were taken away from their families to be raised "properly" by "civilized" European families or orphanages.
It was a simple speech, but the whole event (I was watching the speech with hundreds of others in the lecture theatre at the University) was very emotional. I don't belong to this culture and I know very little of the background for this. I do know though that Howard, the previous conservative PM, flatly refused to make this apology for years. It seems to be a simple and small thing to do, but it carries huge symbolic meaning and signifies changing times for Australia. Coming from outside of the country it is plain clear that Aboriginals were mistreated, yet it was such a major issue for people here and a huge step to have officials to actually acknowledge that. There were people with families, lots of people crying and standing ovation after the speech. I'm happy to be here while these great changes are taking place. Go Rudd government, go!
Meanwhile our luck turned to worse, we moved to our temporary accommodation and realised almost immediately that the place is crawling with cockroaches. We spent the whole day on Tuesday spraying, cleaning and killing cockroaches, but as the night fell, there were more and more of them coming out from all sorts of gaps. We complained and the owner was forthcoming, we can actually leave this place without loosing money. So we'll be moving yet again next Monday (to a place in Coogee) and once more after a week. Until we finally move into our long term accommodation on the 17 March... Argh... This settling in Australia takes forever!!!
Posted by gkligyte at February 14, 2008 11:02 PM