Australian nation Speech Essay Example for Free

Australian nation Speech EssayLadies and gentlemenI am very pleased to be here nowadays at the launch of Australias celebration of the 1993 International category of the Worlds Indigenous lot.It leave alone be a year of great significance for Australia.It comes at a metre when we get to affiliated ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we lead always failed.Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we devour succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend probability and c atomic number 18, dignity and hope to the original people of Australia the Aboriginal and Torres straits Island people. This is a fundamental test of our well-disposed goals and our national will our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a archetypical rate cordial democracy, that we are what we should be truly the land of the fair go and the better chance.There is no practically basic test of how seriously we m ean these things. It is a test of our self-knowledge.Of how well we know the land we experience in. How well we know our history. How well we recognize the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia.How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know or so Australia. Redfern is a good give to contemplate these things.Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers landed, in too many ways it tells us that their misfortune to bring much more(prenominal) than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia continues to be our failure. More I think than most(prenominal) Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal Australians affects us all.In Redfern it might be tempting to think that the reality Aboriginal Australians face is somehow contained here, and that the rest of us areinsulated from it. But of course, while all the dilemmas may exist here, they are far from contained. We know the uni form dilemmas and more are faced all over Australia. That is mayhap the point of this Year of the Worlds Indigenous People to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, andthat we cannot give indigenous Australians up without gift up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity and our own humanity. nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than it is in Australia.We simply cannot sweep iniquity aside. evening if our own conscience allowed us to, I am sure, that in due course, the world and the people of our role would not.There should be no mistake about this our success in resolving these issues will have a significant bearing on our standing in the world.However intractable the problems seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach tooshie for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragge d down.That seems to me not only morally indefensible, simply bad history. We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us.Didnt Australia provide probability and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia?Isnt it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and unmistakably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians the people to whom the most injustice has been done.And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.It begins, I think, with that act of actualisation.Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of look. We brought the diseases. The alcohol.We committed the murders.We took the children fr om their mothers.We practised discrimination and exclusion.It was our ignorance and our prejudice.And our failure to bet 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? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us. If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year.The Report of the olympian Com burgeon forth into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with devastating clarity that the past livelys on in inequality, racialism and injustice. 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.For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with guilt. Down the years, thither has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need.G uilt is not a very constructive emotion.I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.All of us.Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done the practical things.There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.The Councils mission is to forge a advanced partnership built on justice and justice and an appreciation of the hereditary pattern of Australias indigenous people. In the abstract those terms are essenceless.We have to give meaning to justice and equity and, as I have expressseveral times this year, we will only give them meaning when we commit ourselves to achieving concrete results.If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in another. And another.If we get along the standard of health by twenty per cent one year, it will be raised more the next.If we open one door others will follow.When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, mo re rejoicing we will know we are going to win.We need these practical building blocks of change.The Mabo Judgement should be seen as one of these.By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice.It will be much easier to work from that basis than has ever been the theatrical role in the past.For that reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of hysteria and hostility of the past few months.Mabo is an historic decision we can make it an historic acidulateing point, the basis of a new relationship amid indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians. The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of mixer justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to take on indigenous Australians. There is everything to gain.Even the unhappy past speaks for this.Where Aborig inal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contributions.Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia. They are there in the wars.In sport to an exceptional degree.In literature and art and music.In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and ofourselves. They have shaped our identity.They are there in the Australian legend.We should never forget they have helped build this nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership.As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for cardinal thousand years and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless.Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, s uffered and died in the self-abnegation of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight.Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in ease and war and were then ignored in history books.Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspire 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. It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice.I say that for two reasonsI say it because I believe that the great things about Australian social democracy reflect a fundamental belief in justice.And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our capacity over the years to go on extending the realms of participation, opportunity and care. Just as Australians living in the relatively narrow and insular Australia of the 1960s imagine d a culturally diverse, worldly and open Australia, and in a generation turned the idea into reality, so we can turn the goals of reconciliation into reality.There are very good signs that the process has begun.The creation of the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself. The makeup of the ATSIC the Aboriginal and Torres Strait IslanderCommission is also evidence.The Council is the product of imagination and good will.ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and selfmanagement. The vision has already become the reality of almost 800 elected Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners find priorities and developing their own programs.All over Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are taking charge of their own lives.And assistance with the problems which chronically beset them is at last being made available in ways developed by the communities themselves. If these things offer hope, so does the fact that this generation of Aust ralians is better informed about Aboriginal culture and achievement, and about the injustice that has been done, than any generation before.We are reservoir to more more often than not appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.We are beginning to learn what the indigenous people have known for many thousands of years how to live with our physical environment. Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their epic story. I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous Australians and how much we have lost by living so apart.I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the Aboriginal view. It cant be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now a marvellous reality and a great reason for hope.There is one thing today we cannot imagine.We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through fifty thousand years or more, throughcataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of disposession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation.We cannot imagine that.We cannot imagine that we will fail.And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we wont. I am confident that we will succeed in this decade. convey you