December the 10th is Human Rights Day, and 20 years since former Prime Minister Paul Keating delivered a landmark speech at the Sydney suburb of Redfern, acknowledging the wrongs done to Australia's Indigenous people.
Events are being held across much of the nation to mark the anniversary, but what progress has been made in those two decades?
As Karen Ashford reports, many feel Mr Keating's vision for indigenous recognition is yet to be realised.
"The starting point might be to recognise that the problems starts with us, the non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice, and our failure to imagine that these things could be done to us." (Keating, 10/12/1992)
They were words that resonated around Australia and around the world - an oration critically acclaimed as Australia's version of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" civil rights speech.
Jacqueline Phillips, the director of Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTAR), says people remember where they were when they heard Paul Keating's words, and still talk about the speech's importance.
"I think it was a real moment of truth-telling for Australia about naming the realities of our past in all of their starkness and all of the pain, and taking some responsibility as non-Indigenous Australians for that past and then looking to a shared future which we could imagine together on a footing of equality and respect, so I really think it was a very historic and significant moment."
But the man who shared the stage with the Prime Minister on that momentous day believes the opportunity to turn words into action has been squandered.
Sol Bellear says instead of advancement, Indigenous rights have gone backwards.
"I think we've let people down. For the next 5 years we were actually making ground, we were actually getting things done. Then of course we had the election of the Howard government and for the next 15 years right up to today that's just put things back. I mean even under the Prime Ministership of Rudd and the present Prime Minister, they've just picked up and run with the tired old 1950s stuff of the Howard government."
ANTAR's Jacqueline Phillips acknowledges the politics of the early 2000s, and says in particular, changes to Native Title Rights did detract from progress.
"It must be said that we lost our way as a nation sometime after that speech in the late 90s and early 2000s with changes to native title rights and laws and really quite vicious debates around a whole range of issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities."
Leading Indigenous child care advocate Muriel Bamblett believes racism is impeding progress.
"I think the issue of racism in Australia is very much alive. Aboriginal people still aren't regarded as being a part of the social fabric of this country and having a history. This is Aboriginal land, people want us to move on, but you can't move the country on unless it really recognises that Aboriginal people have a strong foothold and a strong footprint in this country."
And Paul Keating's message?
"The message should be that there's nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians. In fact as all of us I think here know, there's everything to gain."
It's a sentiment that set the foundation for Australia's current movement towards constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizens.
The Constitution of 1901 removed what Indigenous rights then existed and made no acknowledgement of Australia's original inhabitants.
There is now bipartisan political support to rectify that.
An expert panel has drafted an amendment, and a group called You, Me, Unity has been established to promote public awareness.
To pass, a referendum must be approved by a two-thirds majority of Australians nationally, as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states.
As a result, only eight of 44 questions put by referendum have succeeded.
Concerns that the current effort might falter have prompted a slowdown: instead of a referendum at the next federal election, an Act of recognition will instead go before Parliament in February, in the hope of building public awareness for a referendum at a later time.
You, Me Unity's deputy director Tanya Hosch says the delay may be disappointing to some, but it's important to ensure the process has the best chance of success.
"I mean the worst thing that could happen is you rush this and end up with a proposition that doesn't have the support of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or other Australians. I mean it's really critical that the model development is worked through very, very carefully, and while many of us would like to see this constitutional change happen sooner rather than later, I think that the lessons learned from the 1967 referendum is that it takes time."
But Sol Bellear doesn't think constitutional recognition will be the breakthrough that indigenous people are hoping for - just as he doesn't think the 1967 referendum ended discrimination against indigenous people.
"It's going to take more. The 1967 referendum never worked. People put a lot of time and effort into that and a lot of promises were made, but the only time they used that was to do something down in Tasmania against the logging. So the constitutional recognition really is not going to do anything. What we have to have is national Aboriginal land rights, and then we'll sit down and talk about a treaty, and then we'll sit down and talk about recognition then. But anyone who thinks that constitutional recognition is going to benefit Aboriginal people, they're deluding themselves."
Muriel Bamblett says she wants a breakthrough to ensure the children of tomorrow aren't still carrying the burdens of yesterday.
But she's not sure how that will happen and as she celebrates the Keating speech, the challenge of achieving real change will be playing on her mind.
"Most people in other countries would say Aboriginal people aren't aggressive enough. Most other countries use legal systems to pursue rights, Aboriginal people quite often we don't use legal systems to pursue our inherent rights within this country. Are we not aggressive enough? Do we not march? do we not, and then if we are aggressive we're too aggressive, we're too, you know, so it's very much a difficult position that Aboriginal people are placed in every day."
"We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here for 50,000 years or more, through cataclysmic changes to climate and the environment and who then survived two centuries of dispossession and abuse will then be denied their place in the modern Australian nations. We cannot imagine that. We cannot imagine that we will fail. And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won't fail. I'm confident that we will succeed in this decade. Thank you very much for listening to me." (Keating, 10/12/1992)
