Bigotry still shades hope

In constructing an analogy to Kevin Rudd’s Sorry address I am inexplicably drawn to Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech delivered at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 that continues to send shivers up my spine whenever I hear it played on archival news footage.

Other devotees of celebrated speeches might credit Paul Keating’s unforgettable Redfern Address delivered at Sydney’s Redfern Park on December 10, 1992 as deserving of the premier spot on Australia’s famous speech list for his articulation of the enormity of colonisation and its contemporary consequences on Indigenous Australians:

It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. 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?

Today however Rudd’s Sorry address gets my tick narrowly ahead of Keating’s choice words as the most noteworthy speech I’ve heard to date.

Rudd not only raised awareness of the plight of victims of the stolen generation era but in doing so set a sublime yet unambiguous precedence on how he - as Prime Minsiter - believes his parliamentary colleagues and in fact all Australians ought to engage with Indigenous Australians.

Sitting with other academics in a staff lounge at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba, thousands of kilometres from where the real action was taking place, I felt decidedly relaxed as I patiently waited for formal proceedings to unfold on our television set.

On commencement of the historic speech I felt an indescribable array of emotions consume me. I knew I was in a joyous mood as I relaxed in comfortable seating among familiar faces and felt relieved that such a public announcement was taking place in my lifetime but, try as I may, I just couldn’t control the tears that welled up in my eyes.

In hindsight I guess the moment that precipitated the tears for me was when the television lens spanned the public gallery and captured the myriad of emotions etched graphically on the faces of row upon row of elderly victims.

The elderly invited guests, some wearing cowboy hats complementing their rural attire, sat in dignified silence staring intently in the direction of the holder of the highest public office in the land.

Kevin Rudd’s eloquent and culturally sensitive words undoubtedly facilitated the lifting of the heavy emotional load from the frail shoulders of those beautiful, resilient, stolen generation victims.

I’m of the opinion, despite the conspicuous absence of a compensation package in the well scripted speech, that saying sorry by the nation’s leader will commence the healing journey for the victims.

In the Sorry address Rudd affirmed he wanted to ensure every Indigenous four-year-old was attending early childhood education and that he would halve the deficits in literacy and numeracy, employment outcomes and infant mortality rates between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations over the next decade.