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Keating's high point for Aborigines
It came at a time when the nation was informed by the words and findings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Human Rights Commission inquiry into the removal of Aboriginal children from their family, country and cultures and the High Court ruling on the existence of native title as part of the common law inherited from England.
For Keating — the political heavy-hitter from Bankstown, protege of Jack Lang, collector of antique clocks and devotee of Mahler — Aboriginal affairs were not country well-travelled. The big picture and the world stage were the natural environment of a prime minister new to the job after almost a decade spent delivering economic reform for a nation confronted with a global reality.
This was no Hawke promising treaties as a spur-of-the-moment gesture, not a prime minister of platitudes and populist gesture. This was the cold political warrior of the harsh wit and rapier riposte. To the fools, he offered no succour.
What Keating exposed to Australians in Redfern Park as they prepared for Christmas was the elephant in the room that the nation had refused to acknowledge for two centuries. He placed before Australians the truths of our past and the sad reality of our contemporary society. He laid down the challenge for our future, as a nation united and at peace with its soul.
The man of clocks and Mahler pulled aside the dark curtains of our lounge rooms and asked us to look into the suburban street and consider the truth of our national denial.
Keating was not the first or only Australian to challenge our complacency and confront us with this reality of our national failure. Sir Ronald Wilson and others would add other chapters to the national book of denial. But Keating as prime minister was the leader prepared to place the truth before us in the symbolic heart of Aboriginal Australia, in Redfern, before a crowd of people who had been denied in the celebrations of the bicentenary half a decade earlier. Theirs was a community confronting some of the worst housing in the nation, struggling to deal with the social Legacy of two centuries at the front line of the colonial assault.
Listen to a recording of the event on that sunny December morning and you will be struck by the hum of an unsettled crowd. The chatter and the laughter of a crowd imbued with scepticism and distrust for yet another politician offering platitudes and reassurances of better times to come in this land of plenty and a fair go. But as the speech progressed, the honesty of the words of contrition permeated the sullenness of the crowd and they recognised the courage of what the leader of the country was saying.
The chatter dissipated, the hum of inattentiveness disappeared among those whose only other experience of such open reflection on the truth of our shared history had been the whispering and compassionate heart of Father Ted Kennedy at the nearby St Vincent's Catholic church. In admiration and thanks, they now began to ponder the import of what the prime minister was placing before the nation.
Not a great deal of media attention was given to what had been said that day in Redfern Park in South Sydney. The analysis and recognition of its import came later.
The legislation based on the 10-point plan that would ultimately hurt the opportunity of the High Court's Mabo decision had yet to be written. The report into the stolen generations was still to be written (and be ignored for a decade after). National pride in the young woman from Mackay at the 2000 Olympics was still to come. The shame of our government fighting every attempt by Aboriginal people to have their native title rights recognised and deriding those who sought compensation for the travesty of their childhoods stolen by the genocidal policies of benevolent removal was still before the nation.
One of the ironies of Keating's leadership in Redfern on that day was that his successor John Howard's hatred of and disdain for him — and Howard's determination to remove from the national consciousness all that Keating stood for — may have premised the next prime minister's refusal to lead the nation in a unifying act of acknowledgement and formal apology to indigenous peoples.
No politician since Keating has shown this level of national leadership for the common good. This adds to why the Redfern address is considered a great speech. It was not just for the press gallery, Aborigines and the conservative right, but to help the nation go forward in healing the sad and tragic relationship that still festers. Alas, Aborigines are back in the hands of the public servants and have no free voice in the determination of their future.
Patrick Dodson is chairman of the Lingiari Foundation.
Read Paul Keating's Redfern address at: www.keating.org.au
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