David Stephens of Defending Country had this published yesterday on Independent Australia: 'Why Keating’s greatest speeches still matter after the Voice failed'.
The article quoted from then Prime Minister Keating's speeches at Redfern Park on 10 December 1992 and at the interment of the Unknown Australian Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on 11 November 1993. The article pointed out the relevance of those speeches to today's Australia, following the defeat of the Voice referendum and as we still struggle to come to terms with our Black and White history:
It begins, I think, with an act of recognition [Keating said at Redfern Park]. 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 and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
Shorthand: we, Whitefellas, pinched Blackfellas’ Country and then did our best to wipe Blackfellas from the face of Australia.
The Unknown Australian Soldier (TUAS) speech was ostensibly about uniformed service but some of Keating's words resonate across our 2025 landscape, as we try to come to grips with our most important war:
TUAS: We do not know this Australian's name and we never will. We will never know who this Australian was.
The Australian Wars: We know almost none of the names of the Indigenous men and women who died in Australia in the Australian Wars from 1788 to at least 1928. Tens of thousands of unknown Australians.
TUAS: We do know that he was... one of the 60,000 Australians who died on foreign soil [in World War I]. One of the 100,000 Australians who have died in wars this century.
The Australian Wars: Somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 Indigenous Australians and perhaps 3000 settlers, military and police, died in the Australian Wars. We do not know the exact number of Indigenous deaths because bodies were burned and buried, stories hushed up and records lost or destroyed.
Our Black and White history reveals stories of bravery and sacrifice, and what it means to be Australian. Heritage need not wear a uniform
Australia today still bears the scars that Keating described in 1993. Indigenous Australian warriors – and old men, women and children – died in horrendous but unknown numbers.
Wouldn’t it be great if our most famous shrine, the Australian War Memorial, gave equal weight to the deaths of men and women defending Australia in our overseas wars and the deaths in the Australian Wars — the wars fought on Country, for Country?
Picture credit: Keating official portrait 1993 (Wikipedia)
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