MOUNT DRUITT, Australia — As a girl, Mari Melito Russell felt out of place. She was darker than the other children at school, she felt more comfortable in the forest than her suburban home, and she had vivid dreams of an Aboriginal woman beckoning her.

At age 24, she learned a shocking truth that helped explain her unease and set her on an agonizing search for an identity snatched away from her at birth.

Ms. Russell is among thousands of Australian Aborigines who were forcibly removed from their families under policies that lasted for decades until 1970, leaving deep scars on countless lives and the nation’s psyche.

Australia’s government said yesterday it would formally apologize to the so-called “stolen generations” as the first item of business of the new Parliament, on February 13.

Prime Minister Rudd, elected last November and whose pledge to apologize overturns a decade of refusals by his predecessor, has ruled out paying compensation. But he says he is determined to help all Aborigines achieve better health, education, and living standards.

Aborigines — 450,000 among Australia’s population of 21 million — are the country’s poorest ethnic group and are most likely to be jailed, unemployed, and illiterate. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than other Australians.

Between 1910 and 1970, some 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under laws that argued the race was doomed and that integrating the children was a humane alternative.

Aboriginal leaders generally welcomed yesterday’s pledge to issue a formal apology. For Ms. Russell, the apology is a positive step but will never replace what she and so many others lost.

“We missed out on our culture, our language, our history,” she said. “You can never get back those lost years, you just can’t.”

[Elsewhere, the Daily Telegraph reports that Australia hopes that nearly a dozen historic convict sites will win World Heritage status. The ruins include the former prisons of Port Arthur in Tasmania and Cockatoo Island in Sydney harbor.

“These convict sites are living memorials to one of the greatest penal experiments in world history — the forced migration, between 1787 and 1868, of 166,000 men, women, and children to a largely unknown land,” the heritage minister, Peter Garrett, said. The historic locations also include Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks, a sandstone building once used to house convicts, and Norfolk Island, an outpost in the South Pacific, which was reserved for the most recalcitrant prisoners.]