Governors and Administrator; Prime Minister and Ms. Haydon; President of the Senate and Mr. Lambert; Speaker of the House of Representatives; High Commissioners and Ambassador; Leader of the Opposition and Mrs. Dutton; Honourable Members; Auntie Violet, on behalf of the Ngunnawal people and the Wiradjuri Echoes; Ladies and Gentlemen, I am enormously touched by those very kind welcomes and by your invitation, Prime Minister, to say a few words here in Parliament House, the national home of Australia's strong and vibrant democratic tradition.
Let me also say how deeply I appreciated this morning's moving 'Welcome to Country' ceremony, which offers me the opportunity to pay my respects to the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet, the Ngunnawal people and all First Nations peoples who have loved and cared for this continent for sixty-five thousand years.
In my many visits to Australia, I have witnessed the courage and hope that have guided the nation's long and sometimes difficult journey towards reconciliation.
Throughout my life, Australia's First Nations peoples have done me the great honour of sharing, so generously, their stories and cultures.
I can only say how much my own experience has been shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom.
Today, I am proud to follow in the footsteps of my late Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who spoke of the warmth she received from her first visit in 1954.
This was a feeling which, I know, she returned in equal measure.
My own first visit came in 1966, as Prime Minister, you mentioned, when I had, indeed, the life-shaping – and life-affirming – opportunity to continue part of my education in Victoria.
And, Ladies and Gentlemen, what an education it was!
I had thought that the school I had been attending in Scotland was remote and testing enough, but nothing had quite prepared me for the realities of the bush country around Mount Buller.
