It is rare that at a concert featuring a new work audience members feel that they are taking part in a historic moment, but that was very much the case when Melbourne-born composer and conductor Christopher Bowen premiered The Redfern Oratorio in front of the man who inspired it.

The Redfern Oratorio. Photo supplied

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s 16-minute address at Redfern Park in 1992 to launch the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People was voted by ABC listeners as the third greatest speech after Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” and Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.

Its message of imagining and admitting the wrongs committed against First Nations people, reconciling and working to a shared new future resonated with Bowen and his librettist wife Pamela Traynor so much that they approached Keating in 2015 to see if he would agree to the oratorio project.

Then Bowen’s friend, ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams, offered to commission it.

Now, seven years on – after a warm Welcome to Gadigal land by Elder Uncle Ray Davison and with a stage packed...