Taking up the challenge

More than 30 years ago, Australia's then-Labor prime minister Paul Keating was silently captivated as Māori warriors crept out of the drizzle over West Auckland's Hoani Waititi Marae to issue the challenge.

- Bernard Lagan

The potency of that May Saturday in 1993 lay less in the ceremony than the cast; the young bare-chested warrior party included muscled white bodies as it approached the Australian leader in a testimony to New Zealand's strides toward rapprochement with Māori.

Keating had barely six months earlier delivered one of the most memorable speeches in Australian history - becoming the first Australian prime minister to publicly acknowledge to Aboriginals that Europeans were responsible for many of the difficulties they continued to face. “We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol,” Keating had told the crowd in Sydney’s inner-city Redfern, once the centre of Aboriginal activism. His apology incensed the nation’s conservatives and ignited Australia’s long-running history wars over the place of the land’s first inhabitants in the nation’s story.

The Australian leader had been emboldened by the High Court of Australia's Mabo decision, delivered ahead of his Redfern speech, that overturned the concept of