Analysis

An Analysis of Paul Keating's Redfern Speech

This is the first of four blogs focusing on four topics discussed in my tutorial classes in HT120 (Introduction to Australian History) at Christian Heritage College.

On the 10^th of December, 1992, Prime Minister Paul Keating delivered a speech in commemoration of the 1993 International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. The SBS news have described it as ‘one of the most unforgettable speeches in Australian history.’¹

 ¹Courtesy of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/paul-keating-s-redfern-speech-still-powerful-after-25-years

Australia’s past failures in the issue of sufficiently recognizing Indigenous culture in its own lands is made clear by the Prime Minister when he states that ‘we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed.’ I believe he immediately sets the stakes for the topic of his speech by claiming, ‘how well we know our history’, is defined by ‘the fact that, complex as our history is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia.’  

In fact, he equates deeply held Australian values with the cultural foundations of Indigenous culture: ‘we cannot give indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity – and our own humanity.’ He turns this issue on its head and asks all Australians how we would feel if we were dispossessed of land that we had held for fifty thousand years and ‘told that it had never been ours.’ The idea here is that white Australia didn’t dispossess ‘indigenous Australians’; they dispossessed people who were just as human as we were.

In short, according to Keating, in Australia’s constant and sometimes present failure to recognise indigenous culture, we as a nation have failed to not only live up to our creed by live up to being true Aussies. The Aussie identity is not formed only by whites, blacks, Asians, etc. It is made up of something much bigger that we all must be allowed to contribute to. It seems, in fact, Australia is just as much of an idea as it is a nation; this idea, as Keating states, needs to be expressed.

Paul Keating's Redfern Speech
https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf