Talking to My Country by Stan Grant

Author:Stan Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other people’s views turned under habit and over time into something of a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.

As much as we look away we cannot truly ignore each other.

I remember former Prime Minister Paul Keating telling the truth about what happened in our country. It was in Redfern in Sydney – sometimes called the spiritual home of Aboriginal Australia – and I was there on stage with him. Thursday 10 December 1992 was International Human Rights Day, as Keating strode to the podium. Not too many years before I was delivering office mail and photocopying, now I was introducing the Prime Minister to speak to my people.

I had spent several years reporting on this bruising, eloquent, stylish political figure. I had always been fascinated by politics. My interest was sharpened in the tumultuous days of the early 1970s, watching the rise of militant black activists. Like many in Australia at the time, I can remember where I was when I heard the Whitlam government had been dismissed. I was sitting in a bus stop waiting to go home from school, overhearing the news on a radio. I went home and watched the ABC news that night as Gough delivered his immortal lines on the steps of Parliament House.

Now I was working here, watching up close as Keating helped transform this country’s economy – floating the dollar, opening up the financial system, creating more competition and productivity. He had steered us through – and sometimes directly into – troubled seas. The recession he told us we had to have, sent interest rates soaring, drove businesses to the wall and cost thousands of Australian jobs. Reform, however, was long overdue and the changes then built a platform for the decades of growth to follow.

Keating was a man of great ambition and he was in a hurry. I recall him striding the corridors of the Canberra Press Gallery, a posse of minders in tow. It is fair to say it was a sight that would inspire a collective gasp. Certainly to a young reporter like me, it could be intimidating. We began one interview with Keating leaning back and tempting me to ‘go on son, do your best’. He was a combative and often entertaining interviewee. He could be extraordinarily dismissive too. He would greet reporters waiting for his arrival outside the parliamentary doors on an icy winter’s morning with a backhanded wave and the words ‘disappear, disappear’. Eventually he had ropes erected to keep us even further away.

The man fated to become Prime Minister – a man who left school in his mid-teens and entered parliament in his twenties – eventually claimed the job, toppling his one-time friend and ally Bob Hawke. As Prime Minister, Keating raised his gaze from just the economy, he wanted to transform our notion of ourselves. He spoke of our need to embrace Asia, he championed the arts, he wanted to change the flag, remove the Queen and supplant Gallipoli with Kokoda.

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