Our identity as a nation cannot be separated from that of Aboriginal Australia.
In 1992, the United Nations International Year for the World's Indigenous People, I did not want to see out the year without saying something definitive about the general plight of Indigenous people around the world and most particularly of our own.
But in deciding to say something definitive I was determined to say something which transcended the kind of lip service which normally informed speeches of this kind. So, notwithstanding I was three months from a national election, I decided to lay waste to the ambiguity and humbug that had forever compromised this topic. I wanted to deal in truths, historical truths, ones that made clear above all else that it was we who did the dispossessing and that it was we who had taken the lands and brutalised the traditional way of life. 
I said at Redfern Park, 23 years ago today, that our starting point had to begin with an act of recognition.I said we could not sweep injustice aside and that by bringing the dispossessed out of the shadows, we were extending our own idea of social justice and social democracy. And that our failure to recognise our callous disregard of Aboriginal and Islander people and of the truth of their loss and circumstance had degraded us all.
I have said in other circumstances, that "there is in public life no more beautiful a characteristic than truth". That truth is, of its essence liberating, as it is possessed of no contrivance or conceit - that it provides the only genuine basis for progress and that the future can only be found in truth.
Nowhere was this sentiment more apt than in the vexed issue of Australian society coming to terms with its origins.
And I wanted, as prime minister, to lay out the truth unambiguously, once and for all. For once a prime minister had spoken the truth, the truth could never become unsaid - no matter how jarring and objectionable these views were likely to be to conservative Australia.
But significant as were the articulation of these truths and sentiment and especially in respect of prejudice, of themselves they could not deal in a material way with the dispossession and all that had flowed from it.
Indeed, at Redfern I said when we see improvement, we see a lift in dignity, confidence and happiness. And I instanced the Mabo judgment as one of the opportunities that presented itself as a building block in a more practical partnership towards justice and equity.
I made clear at Redfern that I saw Mabo as an historic opportunity - a potential turning point, one that could provide a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians.
The notion that Aboriginal and Islander people had a private property right to their own soil opened up what I thought was an entirely new and opportune pathway to land rights, one superior to land being conferred upon Indigenous people by the act of a parliament.
And so I set about enshrining these principles and modalities in a major piece of cultural and property law which is now known as the Native Title Act.
While the principles laid out in the High Court's Mabo No 2 decision could never deal with the original dispossession, for much of the land granted since 1788 had had the effect of extinguishing native title broadly across the east coast of the country, they did have the possibility of making good on the dispossession otherwise across vast tracts of the continent.
So while we could not make reparations, we could make amends. The notion of Aboriginality and all that that meant became central to native title.
Native title gives recognition to culture, customary tradition and nature - to the relationship between Aboriginal people and the landscape; the relationship to their songs and dances and to the birds and the animals - to their storytelling.
Is it any wonder then that this culture, the longest with a collective memory of any in continuous existence, with its originality and creativity, is now pointing the way for our own culture - an essentially European one but one under constant renovation not least at the incidence of indigenous inspiration.Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.
At its best, Aboriginal art has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent. Indeed, the more we interpret Australia through Aboriginal eyes, through the experience of their long and epic story, the more we allow ourselves to understand the land we share.
So I think there is a lesson in this: we may reach a point where Aboriginal art and culture become so integral and so central to Australian art and culture that each becomes indistinguishable from the other.
Whatever our identity today is or has become, it is an identity that cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. For their 50,000 years here has slaked the land with their resonances, their presence and their spirit. Our opportunity is to rejoice in their identity, and without attempting to appropriate or diminish it, fuse it with our own, making the whole richer.
Australia is positioned in the fastest growing, most dynamic part of the world. Indigenous cultures exist all around it. And in the largest countries on earth. Our 200-year occupancy of this vast continent, in terms of long history, sits at odds with the settled old societies near us and around us.
But this is not the case with our indigenes. They were never at odds with what surrounded them nor indeed with their own land. They are entirely at home with it.
But as it turned out, their home is now our home and the more we rejoice in their identity and their one-ness with the country, the more the country will become ours as we become nearer its spirituality and meaning. The more we view the country through the prism of Aboriginality, the more likely we are to get the angle right.
Paul Keating was prime minister from 1991 to 1996. This is an edited version of his address delivered in Sydney on   December 9, 2015, to mark the 23rd anniversary of his Redfern Park speech.