Great speeches from around the world

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We discuss the 1992 speech given by Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, in which he acknowledged the moral responsibility his government should bear for the horrors committed against Indigenous Australians, with our guest Dr Rebe Taylor from Tasmania University.

We also look at two female orators from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Eva Peron, also known as Evita, from right-wing Argentina and Dolores Ibárruri, who was a communist and anti-fascist fighter in the Spanish Civil War.

There are also two speeches from the USA, one which is remembered as one of the great presidential speeches of all time and another which help to change the view of AIDS in the country.

Contributors: Don Watson - who wrote Paul Keating's Redfern speech in 1992.

Dr Rebe Taylor - Australian historian from the University of Tasmania.

Archive of Eva Peron - former first lady of Argentina.

Mary Fisher - who addressed the Republican Party convention in 1992.

David Eisenhower and Stephen Hess - Dwight Eisenhower's grandson and former speechwriter.

Archive of Delores Ibárruri - former anti-fascist fighter in the Spanish Civil War.

(Photo: Paul Keating Credit: Pickett/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:10.6	the past brought to life by those who were there. This week, we're zooming in on some key
0:15.8	speeches and orators who've helped to shape the world with their words, including from 1940s Argentina, Eva Peron.
0:24.8	There was a woman who was dedicated to bring into the president the hopes of the people,
0:29.2	and this woman, the people lovingly call Evita, is nothing more than this, Evita.
0:35.7	Also, a speech in 1992, which helped change American attitudes towards AIDS.
0:41.9	Tonight, I represent an AIDS community whose members have been reluctantly drafted from every segment
0:49.3	of American society. And Eisenhower's speech on leaving the White House in 1961.
0:55.7	We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of
1:01.5	their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come.
1:08.2	Those great speeches coming later in the podcast. First, though, we're going to
1:12.7	Australia, where in December 1992, the then Prime Minister Paul Keating addressed a crowd in a Sydney
1:20.3	suburb called Redfern. What started as a low-key affair is remembered as one of the most powerful
1:26.8	speeches in Australian history.
1:29.5	Ben Henderson has been looking back at that address, alongside the man who wrote it.
1:34.2	It begins, I think, with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
1:42.9	We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
1:48.0	It was the first time an Australian Prime Minister took moral responsibility
1:53.0	for the horrors inflicted upon the country's indigenous people by white settlers.
1:57.0	We took the children from their mothers.
2:00.0	We practiced discrimination and exclusion.
2:05.4	The speech was remarkable. That is, for everyone except the man who wrote it.
	...

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