Shane Phillips was brought up in The Block when it was notorious. He and others in the community decided to take responsibility and turn things around. Nowadays they teach that responsibility by taking boxing classes at dawn every morning in the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence in Redfern.

Redfern gave birth to Australia’s first Aboriginal-run health, legal and children’s services in the 1970s. In 1972, The Block became a unique project in Aboriginal-run housing and the focal point for the reconciliation movement.

In the 1980s the manufacturing sector became increasingly automated, and Redfern changed. Once it was a “haven” and “modern sacred site” for Aboriginal families [2]. But “after decades of being ravaged by poverty and low employment, discrimination, drink, drugs and death, crime, heavy-handed policing, riots, antagonistic politicians and negative media coverage” had turned into “a kind of hell” for some of its residents.

On 10 December 1992, then-Prime Minister Paul Keating made his now historic speech in Redfern Park. For the first time he publicly acknowledged to Aboriginal people that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Aboriginal communities continued to face: “We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.”

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