This year marks 30 years since Paul Keating became Australia’s twenty-fourth prime minister. Keating’s time in the Lodge is often remembered for the eloquence of his ‘big picture’, a reconciled, republican Australia finding its security in, not from, Asia. Keating brought to the top job not only a record as the most reforming treasurer since the war, but a coherent view of Australian history that distinguished him from his predecessors in the job. His speechwriter as prime minister, Melbourne historian and author Don Watson, helped to craft many of Keating’s most famous public addresses, from the Redfern Speech of December 1992 to his moving eulogy for the Unknown Soldier on Remembrance Day 1993 and his landmark address on an Australian Republic to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1995. Watson’s account of his time working as Keating’s wordsmith was published in 2002 in the award-winning Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM.

In this interview, conducted while I was a postgraduate student in history at Sydney University, and as part of a research thesis looking at the intellectual history of Australian prime ministers, I sought Watson’s perspective on what drove Paul Keating’s view of Australia. The interview became something of a case study of what happens at that heady intersection where politics and history collide. Among other issues, Watson and I discussed how one off-the-cuff speech to the parliament in February 1992, in which Keating attacked his opponents as captive to an outdated Anglo past, not only re-energised the political fortunes of a sagging Labor Party but also spoke to deep-seated feelings about war and Australian nationhood. The interview also canvassed Keating’s view of the nation, the nature of political leadership and who has the right to tell the national story. My research was published in 2004 as The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image.