Reconciliation 20 years on - The Redfern Speech

It is Reconciliation Week in Australia.  It is also 20 years since (then) Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating made what has been voted the third most significant speech* of all time; The Redfern Speech. 

(*According to a poll of Australians - who voted Martin Luther Kings 'I have a Dream' speech and the Sermon on the Mount as second and first!).

Mr Keating was the first Australian politician to publicly acknowledge the following :


'... 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.'


Powerful stuff, but it took 16 years until another Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to Australia's Indigenous people.   

Last night I went to a seminar. The topic was the significance of the Redfern speech 20 years on.

The speakers were Mick Dodson (Australia's first social justice commissioner - among other more recent roles), Kerry Arabena (who holds a professorial position dealing with Koorie, in particular female Koorie, health) and Bryan Keon-Cohen (a junior counsel for the plaintiff during the Mabo litigation).  

Because of the time limit and format of the seminar, the real issues were glossed over.  
However, the feeling was mutual between all:

• What was started with great hope stuttered for a period due to lack of political support.  
• Awareness in the public has improved but; as Mick Dodson so rightly pointed out 'we've been copping this crap for a long time and it is time it stopped'. 
• There are some powerful new leaders coming through, that aren't carrying the 'baggage that their elders have'. 
• Mabo was a reflection of the power of one.
• That Koorie native title still has a long way to go.

As a white anglosaxon I was sheltered from much by my privilege of birth.  Both my parents were immigrants from Europe who found a place in a new country.  I was protected by the opportunities they provided for me.  

When I was growing up I was unaware that there were serious ongoing social problems within Australia's indigenous population, which to this day still have not been adequately addressed. Because of my privilege I can't possibly hope to understand this.   But I want to try and learn.

However, I am not surprised that Australia's indigenous population lack trust because of the way they were treated in the past. 

As one comment last night so succinctly stated ...

 'Australia is the best place on Earth? Not if your black its not'.