Paul Keating oral history

As Paul Keating tells it, it all began at the Hoyts Civic Theatre at Bankstown, NSW, in 1955. He was 11 years old and utterly transfixed – and for years later haunted – by Jedda, the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in lead roles.

"It was a very powerful film set in the Northern Territory and, in a way, it mirrored aspects of the stolen generations," he tells Kerry O'Brien in Keating, the 794-page narrated oral history of his life in politics. "It ended in tragedy for the two Aboriginal people and left me with a sense that this was their place and we were all interlopers."