January 26 is the first Invasion Day (Australia Day) since the federal Labor government made the official apology recognising the wrongs suffered by the Stolen Generations - the Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and lands.
The inequality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in life expectancy, child mortality and quality of life was also acknowledged in that apology. However, the promised changes it contained have not materialised. In fact, living conditions for some Aboriginal people have grown worse.
On January 26, 2008, with the newly elected Labor government's promised apology close at hand, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said: "Australia Day is a time to celebrate our nation's past achievements and it's a time to embrace our nation's future. We should be deeply proud of our country. Proud of Aboriginal culture, which represents the oldest continuing culture in human history."
Those comments, made on a date that marks the arrival in 1788 of European settlers and the beginning of 220 ugly years of Aboriginal dispossession, were ironic. It is why many people who oppose the racism that continues to be suffered by Australia's Indigenous population prefer the term "Invasion Day" for this most celebrated of national public holidays.
The government apology to the Stolen Generations had been demanded by the Aboriginal rights movement since 1997.
In 1995-96, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission conducted the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sir Ronald Wilson and Aboriginal activist Mick Dodson co-chaired the inquiry, with the assistance of co-commissioners in all states.
The inquiry provided many Indigenous people with a long-withheld opportunity to tell their harrowing life stories. It produced, in 1997, the Bringing Them Home report. In that report, which contained 54 recommendations, Social Justice Commissioner Dodson said that any response "was fundamentally flawed without an expression of real regret that would be evidenced by a national apology".
The demand for a national apology was denied outright by then-prime minister John Howard. Howard tried to deny the extensive injustices suffered by Aboriginal people and to cloak Aboriginal related policy issues in the language of "history wars" in which any acknowledgement of past wrongs was dismissed as a "black armband" view of history.
The now generally condemned removal of Aboriginal children from their families, carried out by governments over many decades, was a tactic adopted only after a much longer period of attempted genocide in the form of dispossession, segregation and assimilation.
The first historically significant act of British colonisation was the widespread dispossession of Australia's Aboriginal people of their land and customs. The doctrine of terra nullius - meaning an empty land without a sovereign power - served as the legal justification for this process.
This claim, that the land belonged to no one - that is, the European concept of ownership was not in force before white occupation - rendered Aboriginal people non-existent and without rights. It also allowed large parts of the country to be declared crown land, with any resistance to this claim rendered an act of rebellion.
Over the next century, with the help of the colonial laws, Aboriginal people were forced off their land by white settlers and became economically and socially marginalised. Any resistance to this process was met with brutal repression and punishment, including horrific massacres. This violence was not merely sanctioned but often mandated by the state.
During the "protector" years, Aboriginal people were subjected to severe humiliation and demoralisation. Documents such as a General Certificate of Exemption - which stated that, once they agreed to "live like a white man", an Aboriginal person could "leave the mission or reservation on which they live" and "walk freely through town without being arrested" - were commonplace.
The first Commonwealth parliament in 1901 adopted the "racial determinism" of the European colonialists. The belief in white racial superiority led to the adoption of the White Australia policy and the practice of segregation and exclusion. Aboriginal people suffered the calculated neglect that was the intention of that policy, having their human rights denied through a systemically discriminatory legal system.
It was in this policy framework that thousands of Aboriginal children were removed from their homes and taken to government reserves, Christian missions or the homes of whites, many to be made servants and menial workers. The aim was "cultural absorption", which was soon to become assimilation.
Despite the hopes of colonial authorities that Australia's Indigenous population would "just die out" over time, Aboriginal people retained the strength of culture to defeat these attempts at annihilation. Alongside the history of appalling racism by the European settlers and successive governments is a history of courageous struggle and survival of Aboriginal people.
In 1938, 150 years after colonisation began, Aboriginal people in NSW marked January 26 with a "Day of Mourning and Protest" that addressed the loss of Aboriginal land and demanded full citizen rights and equality. That meeting, which attracted about 1000 Aboriginal men and women, was a major step forward in the self-organisation of Aboriginal people to advance the struggle against racial discrimination and oppression.
According to the National Indigenous Times, Aboriginal leader Bill Ferguson said at the time: "We expose the humbug of your claim to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation. We do not ask for charity ... we do not ask for your protection. No thanks! We have had 150 years of that. We ask only for justice."
In 1946, "The Blackfellas Eureka" saw Aboriginal workers strike against pastoralists in the Pilbara in Western Australia. By May 5, workers on 20 of the 22 stations in the Pilbara were on strike.
Following this historic action, wages were introduced for Aboriginal workers in the Kimberley and the Northern Territory.
Other Aboriginal workers used strike action to draw attention to their poor working conditions and non-existent wages. There were numerous strikes in the Victoria Downs region between 1946 and 1951, and the Northern Territory Administration and Department of Native Affairs suffered strike action between December 1950 and January 1951.
Many white workers and trade unions were forced to acknowledge the need to fight the racism that existed not only in the pastoral industry but in the labour movement as well. Aboriginal people were organising with a confidence and determination gained from the victories that their collective power had achieved and they were seeking solidarity.
The Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (later including Torres Strait Islanders to become the FCAATSI) is an example of this, and in 1963 the Australian Council of Trade Unions finally passed a policy opposing all discrimination against Aboriginal workers.
Many strong grassroots campaigns followed, in part inspired by the global democratic and civil rights movements, including the anti-segregation campaigns in the United States and the successes of the independence movements in Africa and Asia. During the 1960s, young Aboriginal activists led an increasingly radical movement demanding equal rights, with its heart in the campaign for land rights.
Charles Perkins and other Indigenous activists opened the eyes of many with the Australian "Freedom Rides" in 1964-65. A bus tour through western NSW resulted in unprecedented media attention that exposed Aboriginal segregation and convinced many young people, in particular, to join the struggle for Indigenous rights.
The 1967 referendum changed the constitution to count Aboriginal people in the national census and enable the federal government to override state laws in relation to Aboriginal people. The referendum campaign drew Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people into a united battle for significant change which aimed to eradicate racial discrimination from all laws and create national land rights legislation.
The Gurindji people in the Northern Territory conducted an industrial dispute that became Australia's first successful land claim. In 1966, led by Vincent Lingiari, 200 people walked off the Wave Hill cattle station owned by British company Vesteys and made headlines across the country.
By 1967 the dispute had become a land claim. The Gurindji moved to their dreaming place at Wattie Creek and petitioned the Governor-General: "Our people lived here from time immemorial and our culture, myths, dreaming and sacred places have been evolved in this land ... We feel that morally the land is ours and should be returned to us."
Lingiari, known as Kadijeri (Clever Man), declared: "The issue on which we are protesting is neither purely economic nor political but moral ... on August 22, 1966 the Gurindji tribe decided to cease to live like dogs." On August 16, 1975, then prime minister Gough Whitlam handed over the deeds to Wattie Creek and symbolically poured earth into Lingiari's hands.
The first Aboriginal Tent Embassy - an umbrella flying the Aboriginal flag - was established outside Parliament House in Canberra on Invasion Day 1972. While the Tent Embassy, one of the most powerful symbols of the land rights campaign, has been forcibly dismantled and re-erected many times, the passage five years later of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act - the first legislation to allow land claims to be heard - marked the success of the campaign.
Terra nullius was finally abolished in 1992 when Queensland Aboriginal man Eddie Mabo proved in the High Court that traditional ownership of the land predated white settlement.
That court ruling gave great hope to many. However, despite the fact that the removal of Aboriginal people from their land underlies so much of the disadvantage still plaguing them, Aboriginal land rights remain tenuous, with many claims unresolved.
The marginalisation and discrimination still suffered by Aboriginal people in Australia in the 21st century is a measure of the persistence of systemic racism in Australian society. Disadvantage in access to health care, education, housing, income and employment contributes to and is compounded by a disproportionate rate of imprisonment in police lock-ups and gaols.
In the mid-1980s, a spate of Aboriginal deaths in custody occurred across Australia. These included the murder in 1983 of John Pat, a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy kicked to death by off-duty police, and the hanging of Lloyd Boney in Brewarrina police lock-up in early August, 1987. A cell inspection by Boney's relatives and friends found "no evidence that self-hanging was physically possible", adding force to the campaign for a thorough investigation into Aboriginal deaths in custody that several families of victims had been running for years.
The ongoing protests against the growing number of Aboriginal deaths in custody eventually forced then prime minister Bob Hawke to establish, in August 1987, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
The royal commission, chaired by Patrick Dodson, presented its report in 1991. It did not substantiate allegations of murder but did find significant culpability in the mistreatment, powerlessness and constant betrayal of Aboriginal people across the country. Many of the report's 99 recommendations have yet to be implemented and Aboriginal deaths in custody continue at a horrendous rate.
The campaign finally achieved a leap forward when Sergeant Constable Chris Hurley was charged with bashing to death young Palm Islander Cameron Doomadgee (Mulrunji) in 2004. However, in a travesty of justice, Hurley was acquitted by an all-white jury. Nevertheless, his trial and the controversy surrounding it threw the public spotlight back onto the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody.
To end all such deaths, and achieve justice and equality for Australia's Indigenous people, will take much more than a formal apology, which did not even recognise the centrality of land rights to Indigenous people's empowerment.
Serious change is needed. This necessarily includes compensation to the Stolen Generations and full payment of the millions of dollars of Aboriginal wages stolen under the racist "protector" system.
More fundamentally, equality and justice requires full Aboriginal control over Aboriginal affairs - which means an end to the federal government's paternalistic Northern Territory intervention, a treaty and real land rights, and affirmative action to close the gap in economic and social equality.