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February 9, 2008
The hard drive on my Toshiba laptop has died, as has the old computer at the weekender in Victor Harbor. So I'm writing this post from the public library at Victor Harbor and not much that I'm writing is getting through. I've wasted an hour or so on posts that never went public for some reason. So this post has to be brief, as I am only allowed an hour community access by the library
So I will make do with a quote from Paul Keating's influential and important Redfern speech:
...the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. 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?
It is a good point is it not---we have failed to make the most basic human response? Have a read of the speech, when you have a moment.
It's a good speech and a long way from the current conservative obsession about blame, individual responsibility, and the black armband of history. Keating is about asking asking Australians to imagine what it would be like to be suffer from the events he describes.
His speech writer is kind. He attributes these events to our ignorance and our prejudice. It's the old Enlightenment story; one that ignores the workings of power.
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Gary,
Yes. For me it is exactly what Keating said.