He said while it was a great day for Aboriginal people, it was just a start on the road to reconciliation.

“I flew down especially for it,” he said.

“It’s a start. What they’ve got to do now is continue programs such as the Bringing Them Home project.”

For the past year, Mr Page has worked as part of the project in Mount Isa. It is a nationwide program designed to reunite families who have been separated as part of the stolen generation. Mr Page investigates the histories and movements of stolen children from up to 100 years ago and works to track down their lost families to provide some closure to long family mysteries.

“We’re trying to connect families that were separated as part of government policies in the day,” he said.

“We just recently reconnected a man who was separated from his family 75 years ago. He was taken from his mother when he was 20 months old in 1933. He didn’t even know what part of Australia he was from. Now he feels that he knows himself better but he’s disappointed that he never saw his mother. He found his mother’s grave in Oodnadatta in South Australia. It was the first time he’d come into any form of contact with her since they were separated.”

Mr Page said he thought of his work as the first step on the road to healing and improving the well-being of the Aboriginal people.

“We’re frontrunners at the coalface, tracking people down,” he said.

“We’re not going to make a connection with everyone. Some of the waters have been muddied too much but we’ll keep trying and trying. Most times because it happened so long ago, it has had a snowball effect on their lives. Even if it happened 50 or 100 years ago, it affects the next generations of their families. When people have been disenfranchised and dispossessed for so long, particularly when they’ve been taken from their families and institutionalised, it takes a lot of healing.”

Mr Page said he believed the work of the Bringing Them Home project would allow the Aboriginal people to move forward into the future with confidence.

“We can develop and improve their self-esteem then we’ll see the change come through,” he said.

“We’ve got to heal first then we can start to provide different educational programs for them to improve their lives. It might take another 50 years before they’re accepted, they’re employable and they have an economic base. It’s a slow process because you’re dealing with people’s internal suffering. It’s a massive job.”