On this day, in 1992, Paul Keating’s Redfern Park Speech marked the first time a prime minister acknowledged the dispossession, violence and prejudice perpetrated against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples:
“It begins, I think, with that 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 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.”