December 10.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Paul Keating’s speech
Excerpts from a speech delivered by Prime Minister Paul Keating in Redfern Park, Sydney, on 10 December 1992, ostensibly to mark the Year for the World's Indigenous People.
[I am very pleased to be here today at the launch of Australia's celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World's Indigenous People.] This will be a year of great significance for Australia. It comes at a time when we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed. Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the Indigenous people of Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.
This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will: our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be - truly the land of the fair go and the better chance. There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things. It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history...
More I think than most Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal Australians affects us all...Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being 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?...
We need...practical building blocks of change. The Mabo Judgement should be seen as one of these. By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice...
[Aboriginal people] are there in the Australian legend. We should never forget - they have helped build this nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership.
...it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for fifty thousand years - and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.
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.
Acknowledgment: Paul Keating ‘It begins, I think, with that act of recognition’ Speech at Redfern Park, 10 December 1992, cited by Sally Warhaft, Well May We Say – The Speeches that made Australia, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004, pp. 351-355