The best 8 minutes of video we’ve seen in a long time

Stan Grant, a widely recognised and celebrated indigenous journalist made a speech this week that is curling toes, making people stop, and quite frankly has to be watched on this Australia Day.  We featured it a few days ago, but it has caused so many shockwaves and so much discussion this week that we’re featuring it again for those of you who missed it.

It’s heated, passionate, confronting and summarises many of the mistakes that have been made in indigenous Australia over centuries from the perspective of one indigenous man.  He’s calling our country to understand and to realise the battle the generations of the indigenous here have had to fight and he is doing so with eloquence.

He says the Australian Dream is rooted in racism.  And he says he has succeeded in spite of the Australian Dream.  He say “we’re better than this” and he urges our country to be the extraordinary country we could be.

Last year, when Adam Goodes was booed on the football field Stan Grant wrote a controversial column for The Guardian that opened up with honesty how he felt about how Goodes was cut down.

“…this is how Australia makes us feel. Estranged in the land of our ancestors, marooned by the tides of history on the fringes of one of the richest and demonstrably most peaceful, secure and cohesive nations on earth.”

“To Adam’s ears, the ears of so many Indigenous people, these boos are a howl of humiliation. A howl that echoes across two centuries of invasion, dispossession and suffering. Others can parse their words and look for other explanations, but we see race and only race. How can we see anything else when race is what we have clung to even as it has been used as a reason to reject us,” his article wrote.  And it received 102,000 shares, so it is not without rapturous impact.

But his speech, which is not long, just 8 short minutes and says a lot to our nation.  As over 60s you might even remember more of the terrible circumstances he reflects on.

He was speaking at The Ethics Centre IQ2 debate, a much larger event.

He finishes with “Australians – Let us ALL rejoice”.  Do you think we can be the country Stan Grant wants us to be?

Give this speech a share if you think it is worth talking about!