Reconciliation week

This is reconciliation week, and I have been to a couple of events to mark it this weekend. Yesterday I was on a ‘Yes’ stall at Warriparinga (where I took barely any pics) and today I went to the Blackwood Reconciliation Group walk, from Blackwood roundabout to the site of the old Colebrook Home, further down Shepherds Hill Road. This is a yearly event, put on by a very active community group, who have worked to acknowledge the children who were taken from their Aboriginal families from 1943 to 1972 and placed in Colebrook, sometimes for their whole childhoods, and sometimes not to see their mothers, their families, again. It was a lovely event. There were about 500 of us walking down in a long line on the footpath. It was wet and cold, the umbrellas up ahead leading the way. It fined up once we got to the Park, and there were speeches and singing and food and stalls and generally a good atmosphere for everyone. There were two speakers from the dwindling number of Colebrook kids still living. Uncle Graham McKenzie spoke first, about being taken from his mother 80 years ago this week (I think he said 29th May), when he still very young. He spent a year in Quorn and then until he was 16, at Colebrook in Blackwood. He spoke about his son and grandchildren, and of his hope for the future and encouraged a Yes vote in the referendum. Then a younger ‘Colebrook kid’, Raymond Finn one of the very last to live there, spoke – again very moving. There was a song sung by kids from Coromandel Primary School (fantastic). There were other speeches by local politicians. Another highlight was meeting one of my neighbours, David, who was there with his parents. His dad used to come up to Colebrook as a kid to play with the Aboriginal kids – brought by his parents. He has strong memories of many of those who lived here and he and his wife have a strong commitment to coming back and to making change. It was all very moving and powerful. It’s a painful history in so many ways, but it happened – and acknowledging the past is important if we are to move forward in an honest and real way. Bravo and thanks to all involved for their long commitment and for doing the work of healing. (Click on the pics to enlarge, which might make it easier to read the plaques.)