Alternatively, non-Aboriginal Australians are not necessarily the only addressees of the text. Keating might have wanted to address indigenous Australians as well, in an indirect way. Again, presentation of himself as a member of the non-Aboriginal Australians group enables Keating to be in an alternative position to apologise for the past “discrimination” and “exclusive behaviour”. This alternative position is advantageous. It reserves room for Keating to also assimilate himself into the indigenous Australians group, and elevate their group history, traditions and contributions to the creation of the nation. As in:
“…Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contribution. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia.”
These elevations immediately “disarm” the indigenous Australians group members and ultimately sway them in favour of support for Keating’s future policies.
Keating manages to use appropriately designed metaphors in his speech to maintain an interest of his audience and to convey important meanings at specific point in the text. Metaphors and other tropes are very frequently used in political discourse. In a metaphor the writer achieves an access of meaning, very strongly linked to the thing being metaphorised because the thing is not represented in the text, only its metaphor. A Metaphor needs to be carefully and appropriately assigned in order for readers to be able to see a connection between it and what is hidden behind it. However, the connection must not be too close or the metaphor will have no power. The following is a good example of an appropriate metaphor used in Redfern speech (shown in boldface):
“If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in another. And another. If we raise the standard of health by 20 percent one year, it will be raised more the next. If we open one door others will follow.”
The hidden meanings in the above-shown metaphorical phrase are to educate and to convince non-Aboriginal Australians to be more open-minded, to accept indigenous people, to accept their culture, to value their contributions in the creation of the nation and to respect their national identity as Australian. The metaphor offers transference and compares the various hidden meanings to the simple everyday action of “opening a door”, saying to the readers that the effort of accepting indigenous people, accepting their culture, etc, is as easy as opening a door. Additionally, base on the connotations of “door”, the metaphor has its extra meanings. Here, the connotations of door include separation and security. A shut on the door means that non-Aboriginal Australians have been protecting themselves against indigenous people, treating indigenous people like “thieves” and “criminals”. In this sense, now opening the door is seen to be an action that signifies non-Aboriginal Australians’ recognition of the past prejudice, and an action of quitting discrimination and exclusion on indigenous Australians.
Keating’s choice of using “open the door” as a metaphor is successful because this action is so common and familiar to everyone. It is also successful in a way that Keating has locates the metaphor in a final part of a parisosis or a list of three: “Improving living conditions”, “raising the health standard” and finally “opening the door”. This allows readers to perform quick interpretations from the metaphor since the first two items in the list provide clues on what the metaphor will be about.
One of the more interesting rhetorical devices Keating uses in Redfern speech is the anaphora technique. Throughout his Redfern speech, Keating frequently uses repetitive words and phrases in successive sentences. The following passage is the most lengthened anaphoric example in his Redfern speech:
“Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and die in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed. Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.”
Keating uses “imagine if” as the sentence heading at the beginning of each of the six successive utterances. By breaking up the lengthy contents under the sentence heading “imagine if…” into six individual sentences has its effect to maintain and to keep up audience’s attention. This breaking-up technique is especially necessary when the text is a speech and when there are a relatively large number of audiences. If sentences are too complex and lengthy, audiences will have a difficult time in digesting them. If the audiences lose track of what the speaker is saying, they will pay less and less attention to the speech and thus, the speech will be meaningless. In Keating’s example, anaphora functions to break up lengthy utterance to help audiences follow the speech.
Moreover, by repeating the sentence heading “imagine if…” six times in a row, Keating arouses and reinforces the need for empathy among non-Aboriginal Australians. Speech contents that follow each “imagine if…” are all suppositions of undesirable situations applying on non-Aboriginal Australians, which are similar to the reality of what indigenous Australians have been suffering. Repetition of using “imagine if…” as the sentence heading not only offer a pleasing and attractive acoustic effect to entertain the audiences, but also, leave the audiences with good memory and deep impression of the two words (“imagine if”) that are associated with those undesirable suppositions. Because of intensive repetition, even after the Redfern speech is over, audiences should easily recall the two words – imagine if. In this way, whenever audiences recall these two words soon or after, they empathise about the indigenous Australians and they carry out concrete actions in helping them. This is how Keating uses anaphoric technique to scheme specific parts of his speech in order to perform multiple functions, as discussed.
To conclude, the three rhetorical strategies I have discussed so far are seen to have important contributions to the success of Keating’s speech. As discussed earlier, the appropriate and delicate presentation of the addresser and the addressees has set up the framework for the success of Redfern speech. And it is the effective use of metaphors and rhetorical schemes at specific points of the speech that helps carrying out the success. In the arena of politics, all successful texts or speeches are rhetorical. There are two questions arises in here: Are people persuaded by the actual policies promoted by politicians? Or are people persuaded by the delicate rhetoric employed by them? In classical rhetoric, the tropes and schemes fall under the canon of style. These stylistic features certainly do add spice to writing and speaking. And they are commonly thought to be persuasive because they dress up otherwise mundane language; the idea being that we are persuaded by the imagery and artistry because we find it entertaining. There is much more to tropes and schemes than surface considerations. Indeed, politicians and pundits use these language forms to create specific social and political effects by playing on our emotions. The three strategies I have examined in the Redfern speech are good examples.
Reference:
Thwaites, Tony, Lloyd Davis, Warwick Mules. Tools for Cultural Studies. South Yarra: Macmillan, 1994.
Liebes-Plesner, Tamar. “Rhetoric in the service of justice: The sociolinguistic construction of stereotypes in an Israeli rape trial.” Text 4 Vol.4, no. 1-3. 1984: pp.173-192.
Paine, Robert. “The Political Uses of Metaphor and Metonym: An Exploratory Statement.” Politically speaking : cross-cultural studies of rhetoric. Chap. 10, 1981: pp.187-200
Keating, Paul. “Australian Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People.” Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech. 10 December, 1992. <> (8 November, 2002)
Silva Rhetorica. “Anaphora.” Silva Rhetoricae. 16 July, 2002. <http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm> (8 November, 2002)
