Aborigines organized breakfast barbecues in the outback, giant TV screens went up in state capitals and schools allowed students to watch the telecast of Australia's apology Wednesday for policies that degraded its indigenous people.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, left, speaks with aboriginal elder Matilda House of the Ngunnawal tribe at a ceremony that opened the new session of Parliament Tuesday.
(Mark Graham/Associated Press)

In a historic parliamentary vote that supporters said would open a new chapter in race relations, lawmakers unanimously adopted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's motion on behalf of all Australians.

"We apologize for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians," Rudd said in Parliament, reading from the motion.

Aborigines lived mostly as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before British colonial settlers landed at what is now Sydney in 1788.

Today, there are about 450,000 Aborigines in Australia's population of 21 million. They remain the country's poorest and most disadvantaged group, and Rudd has said improving their lives is one of his government's top priorities.

As part of that campaign, Aborigines were invited for the first time to give a traditional welcome Tuesday at the official opening of the Parliament session — symbolic recognition that the land on which the capital was built was taken from Aborigines without compensation.

The apology is directed at tens of thousands of Aborigines who were forcibly taken from their families as children under now abandoned assimilation policies.

"To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry," the apology motion says.

"And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry."

The apology ends years of divisive debate and a decade of refusals by the conservative government that lost November's elections.

Canada apologized to First Nations in 1998

It places Australia among a handful of nations that have offered official apologies to oppressed minorities, including Canada's 1998 apology to its native peoples, South Africa's 1992 expression of regret for apartheid and the U.S. Congress' 1988 law apologizing to Japanese-Americans for their internment during the Second World War.

The reading of Australia's apology and the parliamentary vote were broadcast nationally.

Giant television screens were erected outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia's capital, for hundreds of people who could not fit inside to witness the apology. Screens were also set up in parks and other public places in Sydney and other state capitals.

In a speech urging lawmakers to support the motion, Rudd also offered an apology on behalf of the government.

"As prime minister of Australia, I am sorry," he said. "On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry.… I offer you this apology without qualification."

Rudd received a standing ovation from lawmakers and from scores of Aborigines and other dignitaries who were invited to Parliament to witness the event. Many wiped away tears as Rudd spoke.