One of the highlights of my job is the bi-monthly visit to the Aboriginal township of Cherbourg, about two and a half hours north-west of the Sunshine Coast.

It’s a chance to get away from the computer for a day and connect briefly with a warm community, which has always made me welcome.

But it is a place with more than its fair share of challenges.

The happy smiles, the youthful exuberance of the innocent and the wrinkled story lines on the character-filled faces of the elders mask a painful truth.

Reminders of racist government policy stand in the simple architecture of boards and tin – in the style of the post offices and school houses still evident in nostalgic corners of the communities most of us are used to – but without the quaint connotations.

There’s the ration shed where a proud people who once plucked food from nature’s plenitude were doled out white man’s fare like prisoners.

There’s the children’s dormitories where displaced kids traded blankets of stars for rows of bunks and the dreamtime gave way to the nightmare of who might come tapping on the window pane.

Talk to the residents about what makes them happy and there’s no denying the universality of the emotion.

Family, friends, a good joke, going on holidays, fishing, swimming, relaxing with a book.

These are the things that delight us all – from leafy Buderim to beyond the Black Stump.

Talk about what makes them sad and you gain a greater understanding of the isolation that the indigenous people of these communities feel.

The destruction, too many funerals for those too young to die, and a sense of no escape.

I have ample time for reflection on the long drive home where the odd, inquisitive lizard pokes its head out of the roadside heat haze and the dams desperately need a drink.

How did it come to this? What is the answer?

These are the questions I keep asking myself.

By the time the first CD has played through in the comfortable airconditioned environs of the station wagon, I am usually resigned to the notion that if there was an answer we would have found it by now.

And by the time the countryside has morphed to a greener hue, I am usually thinking about other things altogether, like whether there would be enough light for the surf I had hoped for at Noosa on the way home.

I arrive at the National Park with what looks like an hour’s worth of sun still in the sky.

After a stretch, and a mend of the melted wax job, I am soon leaping from the rocks into the coolness of the ocean.

From the water I look back on a starkly beautiful headland.

Putting to one side the Japanese backpackers pointing excitedly at a pod of dolphins, I imagine the picture being not too different from how it would have appeared thousands of years ago, where the original custodians played out their idyllic lives before being pushed to the fringes of humanity.

The patriotic fervour of Australia Day – a commemoration of the beginning of the end of the utopian existence of the Aborigines – didn’t grip me last month and never really has.

Leave me out of that parade.

However, I have never felt prouder as an Australian than yesterday when as a nation we acknowledged our past wrong doings and said sorry.

“The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

“We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

“We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

“For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.”

The healing process will be a long and complex one that all of us should contribute to in order to generate substance from yesterday’s heartfelt words.

Hopefully, at last – at long, long last – we are on our way.