"Many Indigenous people remain affected by relatively recent experiences to which they were subjected because of their Aboriginality.
Australians who know the facts of the frontier may be unaware of what followed the defeat and dispossession of Aboriginal people over much of settled Australia. Survivors were subject to government policies that attempted variously to displace, convert, isolate and eventually assimilate them.
The remnants of Indigenous groups were rounded up and moved, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, to reserves or missions where they might be forbidden to speak their language or practise their culture. Laws were enacted to supervise or segregate relations between Aboriginals and other Australians.
Aboriginals workers were often excluded from industrial awards, and wages were held in trust by police or mission managers who gave out `pocket money' as they saw fit. The last of these Acts was not repealed until the 1970s.
In 1937 the Commonwealth and states agreed to aim for assimilation into the wider population of those Aboriginal people not of `full blood', with some form of continuing protection for the `semi-civilised' people of the north and centre. In 1951 this policy was extended to all Aboriginal people. The aim of assimilationist policies was that the Aboriginal `problem' would ultimately disappear - the people would lose their identity within the wider community, albeit through continuing restrictive laws and paternalistic administration.
The removal of Aboriginal children from their families, particularly in the peak period of 1910 to 1970, resulted in between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children being forcibly removed from their families and communities. No Aboriginal family has been left unaffected by this practice. The personal and communal desolation caused by the breakup of families, an effect transmitted across generations, was recorded at the 1996 hearings of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families and in the subsequent Bringing Them Home report of May 1997. The anniversary of this report's release is now commemorated each year as `Sorry Day'. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians have signed countless Sorry Books; and only the federal and Northern Territory governments of all Australian levels of government have not apologised for this`Stolen Generation'.
ATSIC was one of the key participants in a major workshop organised by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to explore ways of benchmarking the performance of governments in delivering services to Indigenous communities and to foster a culture of partnership between governments and Indigenous organisations. It is often forgotten that it is the responsibility of the states and territories - not ATSIC - to provide normal community services, such as health care, education and infrastructure development to their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizens.
The coexistence of rights is at the heart of reconciliation, along with respect for different values and acceptance that different sectors of the community can share resources with beneficial results... No Indigenous person will agree to the surrender of our rights as the fee for acceptance by the wider community, and noone truly committed to reconciliation would seek that transaction from us ... If reconciliation dies, it will be killed by those who declare it dead whenever things do not go their way. Gatjil Djerrkura, Chairman of ATSIC, in the Sydney Morning Herald, January 1997"

Source: www.atsic.gov.au [follow links to Issues]