Tom+D+(3)

Good Afternoon everybody, my name is Tom Dixon and I’m here today to apologise for the Maralinga incident in the 1950’s. As the younger generation is growing up, we sometimes forget about Australia’s history. I’m here today to apologise to the Aboriginals who suffered those terrible explosions. We have done some research on this and have discovered how tragic this event was. The Australian Government had no right to invade on your land, we feel your pain. We deeply regret for the explosions to go ahead and we apologise for the 50 years it took to find out the truth. We sympathise the families of people who died or were scarred for life during the horrible incident. We and the British put your lives at risk and it killed people, we had no right to do that to you. We now realise what we did and those diseases were things nobody should ever have to go through. On be-half of Australia we are sorry. We promise that this will never happen again because this country also belongs to you, unfortunately we can’t bring back the lives that were lost but the Government has offered one million dollars to the Aboriginals who lived in Maralinga and the families of whom we are apologising to today. We apologise for not respecting you or thinking about the homes and family you had at the time. We apologise for the grief that we caused you and all the sadness that was caused. We never intended to hurt you and we also promised you and all Australia that no damage would be done; we also had no right to trespass on the land that belonged to you and the land you owned. We should never have done it, on be-half of all Australian’s and the British, we say sorry.
 * __ Maralinga Speech  __**