The Redfern Park Speech, also known as the Redfern speech or Redfern address, was made on 10 December 1992 by the then Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, at Redfern Park in Redfern, New South Wales, an inner city suburb of Sydney. The speech dealt with the challenges faced by Indigenous Australians, both Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It is still remembered as one of the most powerful speeches in Australian history, both for its rhetorical eloquence and for its ground-breaking admission of the negative impact of white settlement in Australia on its Indigenous peoples, culture and society, in the first acknowledgement by the Australian Government of the dispossession of its First Peoples. It has been described as "a defining moment in the nation's reconciliation with its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people". The spirit and name of Keating's Redfern speech was invoked by the Redfern Statement, a policy statement from a large group of Indigenous bodies issued on 9 June 2016, shortly before the 2016 Australian federal election. Among other things, the Statement called for the creation of a new dedicated department to deliver programs for Indigenous advancement.
Background and description
The speech was delivered by Keating on 10 December 1992, just over a year into his term as Prime Minister of Australia, to a crowd of predominantly Indigenous people gathered at Redfern Park, in Redfern, Sydney. It was given to launch the International Year for the World's Indigenous People. Keating's choice of location was significant; Redfern had been the centre of Aboriginal culture and activism in Sydney for decades. The speech came only six months after the Australian High Court's historic Mabo decision, which had overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius, and recognised native title in Australiafor the first time. The speech reflected this shift in thinking, and used words reflecting partnership and reconciliation; ultimately it reflected a changing official interpretation of Australia's history. Keating was the first Australian prime minister to publicly acknowledge to Indigenous Australians that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: "It was we who did the dispossessing", he said. "We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol." He went on: "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 that these things could be done to us". The speech became known as the "Redfern speech", and is now regarded by many as one of the greatest Australian speeches. Don Watson, then Keating's principal speechwriter, later claimed authorship of the speech, although Keating has disputed this. Watson wrote about the creation of the speech in his 2002 memoir, .
