There was barely a hotel room or an airline ticket available in the days leading up to 13 February 2008, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made their way to Canberra for the National Apology to the Stolen Generations. Boarding an afternoon flight the day before, a state Labor minister who was also travelling handed me an early version of the Apology that he had just received from a federal colleague. He was curious about what the Koories on board the flight would make of it. Just reading it, I didn’t make much of it. It was not until the following nation-setting day, standing in the gallery of Parliament House only metres from then Prime Minister Mr Kevin Rudd, when I heard the Apology and in doing so witnessed an event that will be forever remembered in the oral history of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, that it had impact.

I was there for my father, Geoffrey John Rose – a child stolen at the age of six who never saw his mother again – and I wondered what my dad would have thought on this day. The words of the Apology were well crafted and eloquent, capturing the soul of a nation willing to make non-litigious amends to a people whose horrifying experiences were now being formally recognised. Many people gathered, whether on the lawns outside Parliament, in the House itself, or at the multitude of gatherings across the nation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people united in a symbolic outpouring of emotion.