Twenty-three years after he confronted Australians with the truth of Indigenous dispossession, Paul Keating has delivered another profound message on reconciliation, this time in more nuanced language.
In 1992, the then prime minister said the starting point in tackling disadvantage was to recognise that the problem began with "us non-Aboriginal Australians". 
"We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol," he declared in the Redfern Park speech.
"We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice - and our failure to imagine these things being done to us."
Now, in an address at the Museum of Sydney to mark the 23rd anniversary of that speech, Mr Keating said the more non-Indigenous Australians came to see the country through the eyes of its first people, the better off the whole country will be.
"The more we rejoice in their identity - and their oneness with the country - the more the country will become ours as we become nearer its spirituality and form," he said on Wednesday evening.
The most tangible sign of progress, Mr Keating suggested, would be "when we reach the point where Aboriginal art and culture become so integral and so central to Australian art and culture that each becomes indistinguishable from the other".
"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 consistent renovation by Indigenous inspiration," he said.
"Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.
"In terms of art, at its best, Aboriginal art still carries sacred messages through its symbols and materials, yet manages to hold its secrets while speaking to a broader audience. More than that, it has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent."
Rather than re-enter the debate on constitutional recognition and his support for a compact, or treaty, Mr Keating explored a bigger proposition - that Australia's potential will not be realised until the question of identity is settled.
"Whatever our identity today is or has become, it is an identity that cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia," he said. "For their 50,000 years here has slaked the land with their resonances, their presence and their spirit."
Mr Keating noted that Australia is positioned in the fastest growing, most dynamic part of the world, surrounded by Indigenous cultures.
"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," he said.
"They were never at odds with what surrounded them, nor indeed with their own land."