Analysis Of Redfern Speech

Impassioned orators provoke a strengthen desire for peaceful resolution to a situation that has previously aroused hostility. Two prominent Australians who achieved this are Noel Pearson’s speech ‘An Australian history for all of us’ and Paul Keating’s ‘Redfern Speech’. Both speeches portray the lack of national identity through the unjust treatment of the history of Aboriginal Australians. They also provoke a profound desire to resolve injustice due to one’s realisation of the amounting necessity for change to achieve a more harmonious and socially just society. This is to unite and unify the audience therefore encompassing a better future.

Australia’s national identity has for a long time arguably been based on a white Australia. Therefore Keating’s arrival at Redfern adds textual integrity to his speech as it is an area where there are many Indigenous Australians. Keating’s Redfern Speech also acknowledges the presence and injustices amongst Indigenous and Aboriginal

He does this through the use of descriptive language when he reflects back to the treatment of the Non Aboriginals to the Aboriginals. “In the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders” Keating explains past views of history as ‘prejudice and ignorance’ he also further mentions what those past views lead to a ‘fractured identity’, this highlights the immorality faced by Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. Keating does this to shift the audience’s perspective of a British centred history and transforms the audience’s way of thinking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people so that a true national unity can