Few speeches delivered by an Australian prime minister go down in history.
WARNING: This story contains the images and names of Indigenous people who have died.
Despite honing their debating skills at elite private schools and sandstone universities, few have possessed the rhetorical genius, not to mention the aid of a gifted speechwriter, to inspire us with their oratory — glib one-liners, gaffes and zingers aside.
Even fewer have managed, with their words alone, to create a vision for Australia's future that we all might share.
Paul Keating's Redfern speech, delivered to a sceptical if not hostile audience in the inner-Sydney suburb hailed "the black capital", on December 10, 1992, is a rare exception.
So extraordinary was Mr Keating's speech, Aboriginal kids from Redfern clamoured to get his autograph in the moments afterward.
The vision Mr Keating put forward in his speech was one that confronted the spectre of the nation's past, as he and his government wrestled with the High Court's ground-shaking Mabo decision.
The judgement, handed down six months before Mr Keating addressed the gathering in Redfern Park, overturned the fictional legal doctrine of terra nullius: that before 1788, the continent of Australia was "land belonging to no-one".
As he was drafting legislation to enact a system of native title in answer to the High Court decision, the way forward was predicated on what he called an "act of recognition".
In an extraordinary moment of truth telling, punctuated by heckles and then eventually applause, Mr Keating, on behalf of the nation state, went on to admit moral responsibility for a litany of crimes against Australia's Indigenous people.
An unexpected impact
As he dispensed the indisputable truth, Mr Keating barely looked up from his notes.
"It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life," he intoned in his grave, humourless way.
"We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion."
The jeers evaporated into cheers.
"It was our ignorance and our prejudice, and our failure to imagine these things being done to us."
The nation state was culpable for the dispossession, the massacres, the theft of children and the exercise of racism that had blighted the relationship with the First People since the tall ships hove in through the splintered heads of what is now Sydney Harbour.
Mr Keating's delivery was unhesitating, stumbling momentarily on the word "ignorance".
The philosophical core of his argument was the profound lack of empathy — "the failure to imagine these things being done to us" — that had characterised the coloniser's relationship with those it sought to dispossess.
Mr Keating knew that he was preaching to the choir in Redfern Park.
But he used the occasion — the launch of the International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples, coinciding with Human Rights Day — to make a broad appeal to the rest of Australia, the nominal "we" and "us".
Mr Keating's speechwriter, Don Watson, was shocked to see "great slabs" of the speech quoted in the newspapers the following day.
"I was surprised when the speech was delivered that it made such a splash," he recalled when I spoke to him in 2007.
"It must've been a slow news day ... It seemed to me that what he was saying was unexceptional.
"I thought, 'Oh, well, here's a good speech on an Aboriginal matter, and it'll go the way of all speeches on Aboriginal matters.'
"But it didn't."
'A black armband and white blindfold'
Heidi Norman, a historian from the University of Technology Sydney, says a convergence of seismic political events — and Labor's bid for re-election — demanded that Mr Keating make a statement that could calm the rising temperature of national debate.
"In the lead-up to December 1992, there was the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody," Professor Norman told ABC RN's AWAYE!
"The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) had just been formed, and the Mabo decision had just been handed down."
Meanwhile, Mr Keating faced an election he was predicted to lose.
"In a way, the Redfern speech was a necessary moment," Professor Norman said.
"Then what came after the speech was a real backlash … a fierce debate over Australian history that was characterised by a black armband and white blindfold."
The Redfern speech was a flashpoint that would inflame the history wars: an unedifying political struggle over the telling of the national story that would consume rather too much oxygen for the next few decades.
The late Sol Bellear was the deputy chair of ATSIC, the statutory elected representative body that would be dismantled by the Howard government in 2005.
He told me in 2007 that to his mind, the spirit and the hope of the Redfern speech was undiminished.
"This is not an emotional guilt trip," he said. "It's the truth and this country [has] got to stand up.
"Keating did that, [he] stood up and told the truth about the history of Australia."
It's fair to say that history was politicised, even weaponised, in the aftermath of the Redfern speech.
"We had this dichotomy of the prime minister who came in a few years later, John Howard, who really wanted to reinstate the sunny narratives about Australian history, and others who were looking for something that more resembled the truth," Professor Norman said.
But speechwriter Don Watson believes the Keating Labor incumbency, and by extension the Redfern speech, did something other than stoke the fires of the history wars.
By confronting the perceived existential threat of Mabo and seeking to integrate it by legislative means rather than ignore it, Mr Keating had to negotiate with established and emerging Indigenous leaders, who would not be put aside.
"The leaders who emerged on the Indigenous side in those negotiations were formidable figures by the time Mr Howard came to deal with them, and you couldn't condescend to them," Mr Watson told me on the 15th anniversary of the speech.
"I think that was one of the great achievements of the [Keating] government. Through taking Mabo on and inviting Indigenous Australia in to talk about it, a great deal was learned on both sides, which … says something for being brave in government."
Hope and disappointment
A magnet for blackfellas and the locus of Aboriginal political activism for generations, Redfern was indeed the place to contemplate the broken relationship between the nation state and the Indigenous body politic.
Now the suburb is so gentrified as to be unrecognisable, but 30 years ago it was hardly a common sight to see an Australian prime minister amid its rundown Victorian terrace houses and brutalist tower blocks. You couldn't even hail a taxi there.
Wiradjuri elder and Redfern community leader Jenny Munro headed up the Aboriginal Medical Service in 1992 and spoke immediately after Mr Keating.
She says that while the speech was uplifting momentarily, the change it promised wasn't delivered.
"I thought it'd be defining, but it was just another bucket of water in the ocean basically," she told AWAYE! presenter Rudi Bremer.
"[We] had hope again for the future … and that's the disappointment. They give hope, and take it away so quickly."
Three decades on, Ms Munro is completely unmoved by the Redfern speech and believes that any hope has long since evaporated.
She cites the failure of any Australian jurisdiction to fully implement the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, many of which were designed to curb high incarceration rates.
"[There's] the long climb down to despair every time," she says.
"Ask anyone today how many deaths in custody have there been since the Royal Commission — you'll find the numbers [have] tripled or quadrupled.
"That's because there was no action on seriously implementing all of the recommendations."
Larissa Behrendt, professor of law at the University of Technology Sydney and presenter of ABC RN's Speaking Out, was also there in Redfern Park on December 10, 1992.
An AACTA Award-nominated screenwriter and director with several documentary films under her belt, Professor Behrendt often reviews footage from the television news archive in the course of her filmmaking, including coverage of the Redfern speech.
"It's not the speech that's moving," she said.
"It's looking at the crowd, it's looking at the elders in there who are crying. I just get goosebumps thinking about it.
"[But] the speech is powerful in its own way. It serves as a really important moment when the conversation changed."
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