“WHAT WE WERE DOING DEGRADED US ALL”
PRIME MINISTER PAUL KEATING REDFERN PARK, 19921
These powerful words from Australia’s then Prime Minister officially invalidated the heroic image of Australian settlement and focused attention on the need for cultural repair. Four years earlier, Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary of Settlement celebrations produced the first shockwaves of an ‘unsettled’ Australia. Indigenous Australians at the time proclaimed their version of Australia Day as Invasion Day and mourned two hundred years of European settlement with a gift of two-hundred hollow log coffins to the National Gallery of Australia. Paul Keating’s Redfern address of 1992 sanctioned this wave of protest and reframed the colonisation of Indigenous people in the past as the immediate responsibility of ‘us all’ today. This speech made the history of Australian settlement an emotional issue, and personalised it. It struck at the heart of what it means to say, ‘I am Australian’. In the past two decades this wave of protest has continued to spread through Indigenous artistic expression, but for non-Indigenous artists the task of reconfiguring Australian history still struggles to take shape. A history of injustice to Indigenous Australians needs to be woven into the fabric of who we are today as a nation; but how does art salvage some integrity for national identity from the psychological ruins of Australia’s settler nationalism?
Keating’s method of personalising Australian history had an impact. In a 2007 survey conducted by ABC Radio National, audiences rated Keating’s Redfern Park address as the third most unforgettable speech after Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ and the Bible’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’.2 For Australians it outranked Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight them on the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The weight of history, 2009. Mixed media (paint, spray enamel, fabric, frames, copper and patina) on ply, 122 x 166cm. Courtesy the artist.
We’ll all be rooned, 2004. Oil on canvas, 122 x 122cm. Courtesy the artist.
