Reconciliation Week 2022: Stolen Generation survivor Peter Jetta shares message of forgiveness to Bunbury

A Stolen Generation survivor shared a message of forgiveness as the City of Bunbury kicked off Reconciliation Week 2022 with its Reconciliation Walk. The City held the annual walk on Thursday, with almost 3000 people coming together to walk side by side, learn the shared history, culture, and achievements of Australia, and explore how the country can achieve reconciliation. In what was comfortably the event’s biggest year yet, 2941 people walked from Koombana Bay’s Wardandi Boodja sculpture, around the inlet and finished at the Graham Bricknell Memorial Music Shell. After the walk, Stole Generation survivor Peter Jetta — the father of former AFL star Lewis Jetta — shared his story with the mass of people, and encouraged all Australians to come together and work towards reconciliation. “I have seen a lot of change in my life, I was taken away at five or six, put in an institution, foster homes,” Mr Jetta told the crowd. “Most of our Aboriginal people were abused, molested, a lot of terrible things happened to them. “When we talk about reconciliation, it is a coming together, we have to learn from the past, and move to the future.” Among those in attendance at the event were local school children, City of Bunbury councillors and staff, police and Aboriginal elders from the area. Mr Jetta told the crowd Australia was “one of the luckiest countries in the world”, but still had a way to go towards healing. “I was taken away, me and my family were abused, belted, flogged, and I have learned to forgive,” Mr Jetta said. “It is one of the hardest things to do, to forgive people and to say sorry, and reconciliation is a part of the process we have to go through. “If our nation is not doing the right thing to anybody, we stand up and be counted, and say ‘no, we don’t want that to happen to our people’.” Mr Jetta said he was delighted to see people attend the walk and be willing to make a change this Reconciliation Week. “Unfortunately for me and some of my family, we didn’t have a good life,” he said. “Whether it be in the government, the police force, in the schools, the universities, we have to make that change. “In my time, you would never have this many people walking for reconciliation, we didn’t believe in it, but we can do it today.”