Rhetoric of Redress: Australian Political Speeches and Settler Citizens' Historical Consciousness

Abstract

This article traces the convergence of state redress and the educational construction of citizenship from the 1990s onwards in Australia. It examines how successive settler political leaders used the education of a historical consciousness—settler citizens’ relation to past, present and future—as a core strategy to seek resolution to the problematic national past. The article examines key political speeches that sought to mediate the settler nation's past in light of growing international and domestic pressures, including Keating's 1992 Redfern Park speech and Rudd's 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, and one of conservative backlash: Howard's 1996 Menzies Lecture. Rudd's subsequent national policy agenda of apology and an Australian Curriculum sought to inaugurate a new era in the settler nation's history. That program was embodied by the figure of the future citizen positioned to reckon with the nation's unjust past, a task inscribed in the inaugural national history curriculum.