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Paul Keating's Redfern Speech

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Laurel:
This is old news (1993), but I just found it. Can't help but wonder what it would take for a US President to make such a speech, let alone act on it.

http://www.antar.org.au/issues_and_campaigns/self-determination/paul_keating_redfern_speech

Highlights:

"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?"

[...]

"It begins, I think, with the 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 disasters. 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?

"As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us."

[....]

"t might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 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. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.

"Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.

"It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice."

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