Keating’s message still carries weight, 30 years on

As the then Prime Minister, Paul Keating, began his speech to launch the 1993 Year for the World’s Indigenous Peoples, the crowd was still busy chatting.

Another politician, another speech.

Mr Keating’s words floated above the conversations of the crowd.

He continued, coming to the following sentences.

“And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problems start with us, the non-Aboriginal Australians,” he said.

“It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.”

As the words came, there was a stilling of the crowd.

The words no one had spoken before.

“Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing,” Mr Keating said.

“We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.

“We brought the diseases. The alcohol.

“We committed the murders.”

Hearing those words, the crowd responded.

The first time any Australian politician had publicly acknowledged to First Nations Australians that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face.

“We took the children from their mothers,” he continued.

“We practised discrimination and exclusion.

“It was our ignorance and our prejudice.

“And our failure to imagine these things could be done to us.

“With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.

“We failed to ask — how would I feel if this were done to me?

“As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.”

It was the first step in truth-telling.

Thirty years on, we have an opportunity to reflect on these words.

Mr Keating went on to say:

“… it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for 50,000 years — and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours,” he said.

“Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless.

“Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight.

“Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books.

“Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice.

“Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.

“Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.

“It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice we can imagine its opposite.”

Thirty years on the words still hold their power.

It was a speech about fairness and generosity of spirit.

About justice and equity.

So now, 30 years on, where are we at?

Why are we still having the same conversations?

What has changed?

The Australian people have been offered a generous invitation in the form of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

An invitation to walk together in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

This invitation comes with a modest request — for a Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Australian Constitution.

The Voice would advise the Australian Parliament and government on matters relating to the social, spiritual and economic well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The Australian people will soon be asked to vote in a referendum to constitutionally recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through a First Nations Voice.

Australians are not being asked to vote on a specific Voice model.

Rather, the Voice will be determined by Parliament with the input of the community and the Voice itself, and will evolve and change over time.

We are at an exciting time in Australia’s history, a historical moment.

A moment when we can change the narrative about our country, to speak truthfully about our history.

A time of recognition, of nation-building.

Perhaps as we reflect on the Redfern speech, we should ask ourselves: How will our future generations see us? How will the rest of the world see us? How will we see ourselves?

What a time in history.

How many generations have an opportunity to be part of something much bigger than themselves?

To be part of nation-building, to create lasting change?

So now is the time to prepare, to grasp this opportunity with both hands.

Find out more by listening to the Redfern Speech at https://antar.org.au/resources/redfern-speech-30-years-on/ and read the Uluru Statement for the Heart and find out more about the Voice at https://ulurustatement.org/

Read Thomas Mayor’s book Finding the Heart of the Nation. Look for it in your local library.