Composers utilise their texts as vehicles to portray and represent their personal perspectives based on experiences and personal insight. In these texts, Paul Keating’s speech ‘Redfern Park Address’ (1992) and the poem and Kevin Gilbert’s ‘Consultation’, each composer along with their respective text provide such profound perspectives and manufacture their representation of the Australian Aboriginal experience, in particular concepts revolving the hardships experienced by the Australian Indigenous and the necessity for equality and change.
The representation manufactured by Keating’s ‘Redfern Park Address’ and Gilbert’s ‘Consultation’ orbits the hardships experienced by the Australian Indigenous population for an extended period of time. Paul Keating’s speech was an extremely iconic event in Australia’s history and was effective to an extent to convey Keating’s main message; to recognise past injustices against the Australian Indigenous population and to promote the necessity to attain equality and justice. In Keating’s ‘Redfern Park Address’, Keating utilises anaphora with the words ‘imagine if’. Keating is inviting his audience and responders to take an emotional journey and to empathise. One of Keating’s main challenges was to create empathy. By utilising anaphora plus the pathos, Keating is inviting his audience to place their feet into the shoes of the Aboriginals and attempt to experience the hardships they had experienced. Moreover, Gilbert’s ‘Consultation’ was a poem driven by a sarcastic and aggressive tone. Gilbert’s poem constructs a representation that expresses the ill treatment and lack of significance experienced by the Aboriginals. ‘Blacks gamblin’, Playin’ pups” “Life aint too bad here” “No fireplaces, no running water.” Through these quotes, it is evident that Gilbert’s ‘Consultation’ is full of sarcasm. He is attempt to indirectly express his