Paul Keating Redfern Speech

The enduring value of a speech lies in the speaker’s ability to ardently connect with the

audience, while also challenging their deeply held social norms to compel the audience to gain

the desired response on the issues ongoing in the time period. Paul Keating’s Redfern address,

orated on 10 th December, 1992 at Redfern Park dealt with the challenges faced by Indigenous

Australia. The speech endorsed the beginning of the ‘International Year of World’s Indigenous

People.’ Keating successfully manoeuvers rhetoric, in order to highlight the commonality of all

Australians in a need to understand the effects of dispossession in order to progress as a nation. This

notion is extended further through his magnification of the necessity for reconciliation.

Through his

effective use of Aristotle’s 3 modes of persuasion, being Ethos, Pathos and Logos, Keating he

appeals to audience to generate resolution by not just blame but through the aspects of our own

humanity.

Paul Keating amplifies the way in which all Australians are commonly bonded in a need to

understand the horrors of the injustices of Indigenous people in order to harmoniously exist within a

contemporary Australian identity.

In his 1992 ‘Redfern Speech’, Keating portrayed Australia’s

intricate ‘contemporary identity’ as something that ‘cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia’

and, thus, evokes responders to align with the perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders

on their oppression This is demonstrated through the use of inclusive and anaphoric language,

“Imagine if our feet 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.” Through the use of hypothetic, inclusive language in

“Imagine if our”, Keating coerces responders into understanding the continual effect of

dispossession on Aboriginals by evoking and emotive response from the audience who can question

such effects in relation to their own lives. This notion is accentuated through the combination of

tense, increasing modality and truncated sentence, “Guilt is not a very constructive emotion. I

think

what we need to do is open our hearts. All of us.” Here Keating’s appeal to pathos is through the use

of emotive language in “guilt” and “open our hearts” and diatyposis, compels the responders to align

and understand the need to appreciate the plight of the Aboriginal people in order to allow for a

complete understanding of the Australian identity.

This coalescing and unifying characteristic of

Keating’s speech reinforced the responsibility on ‘us’ to recognise the legacy of Aboriginal

dispossession, re-evaluate our national identity and incorporate Aboriginal Australians as valued

members.

Throughout his speech, Keating magnifies the necessity for reconciliation over the troubled past of

Aboriginal and Colonial history in Australia. In an attempt to do so, Keating collectivises himself

with the audience in order to allow them to acknowledge their role in the plight of the Aboriginals

through their direct link as descendants of colonialism. He suggests that by the dismissal and

ignorance of the Aboriginals by the present white community, we are becoming as liable to the issue

as the first European settlers, which were the cause of the issue in the first place. By doing this,

Keating suggests to the audience the need to reconcile in order to move forward as a nation. Keating

casts this idea in his words, “…we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands… we

committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination

and

expulsion. …our ignorance and prejudice.” Through his use of imperative collective personal

pronouns in “we”, Keating projects the need for reconciliation unto the audience by collectively

sharing the responsibility of the wrong deeds which he suggests have been committed by the entirety

of non-Aboriginal society, further accentuating the beckoning call for reconciliation. By

cumulatively listing the misdeeds, ‘the murders’, ‘the children from their mothers’, he emphasizes

the negative effects of such actions and the impact they have had on the Indigenous community, in

turn, magnifying the necessity for reconciliation. Keating develops upon this idea through the way in

which he suggests that contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians have played an active role in the

oppression of the Aboriginal past, so too can they catalyse reconciliation. This is observed through

Keating’s use of repetition and metaphor; “If we improve the living condition in one town, they will

improve another. And other. If we open one door others will follow.” The repetition of the phrase ‘If

we’ combined with the metaphor of ‘opening doors’ in the successive repetition to suggest that many

opportunities will follow if a mere one is initiated. This justifies his idea that contemporary

Australians are able to catalyse reconciliation due to their active role in the oppression that is

aforementioned. Therefore, in doing so, Keating is able to ascertain the communion of the Australian

identity with the Aboriginal oppression of the past.

Conclusion:

In essence, through his appeal to the audience and engagement with the notions of Aristotle 3 modes

of rhetoric, Keating is able to project the notion that without the acceptance of the past injustices of

Aboriginals, there is an inability to progress as a nation. Keating calls upon the empathetic response

from the audience in order to highlight the idea that all Australians are linked in a common history

and there is a need to understand this history in order to reconcile. Through the various use of

rhetoric technique and coherent structure, the textual integrity is enhanced and allows for responders

to align with Keating’s projection of the role of contemporary Australians in the understanding of

our history.