I thought that public oration was a dying art. That was until I got up early to listen to President Obama’s inauguration address. Part 1 and part 2 are available on YouTube. I felt it was a great speech and one worthy of going into the history books. There’s a lot of commentry about it online already so I won’t spew forth anymore here.
Instead, I would like to put down a few links to some other great historical speeches. Whilst Australia isn’t as large and “presidential” as the USA is, we do have quite a good set of fantastic speeches in our history. I might spend some time compiling a list of my own (if one doesn’t already exist).
John Curtin - Australian Prime Minister 1941
In the meantime, here are a few with excerpts:
John Curtin, Coral Sea Battle, 8 May 1942
Full transcript
I ask the people of Australia, having regard to the grave consequences implicit in this engagement, to make a sober and realistic estimate of their duty to the nation.
As I speak, those who are participating in the engagement are conforming to the sternest discipline and are subjecting themselves with all that they have – it may be for many of them the `last full measure of their devotion’ – to accomplish the increased safety and security of this territory.
In the face of an example of that description, I feel that it is not asking too much that every citizen who to-day is being defended by these gallant men in that engagement, should regard himself as engaged in the second line
of service to Australia.
This is to-day the front line; it needs the maximum support of every man and woman in the Commonwealth. With all the responsibility which I feel, which the Government feels, and which, I am sure, the Parliament as a whole shares, I put it to any man whom my words may reach, however they may reach him, that he owes it to those men, and to the future of the country, not to be stinting in what he will do now for Australia.
Men are fighting for Australia to-day. Those who are not fighting have no excuse for not working.
Gough Whitlam – May God Save the Queen (Dismissal Speech), 11 November 1975
Full transcript
Well may we say ‘God Save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General.
The proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General’s official secretary was countersigned ‘Malcolm Fraser’ who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s cur.
They won’t silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for the next few weeks.
The Governor-General’s proclamation was signed after he already made an appointment to meet the Speaker at a quarter to five. The House of Representatives had requested the Speaker to give the Governor-General its decision that Mr Fraser did not have the confidence of the House and that the Governor-General should call me to form the Government. . .
Maintain your rage and enthusiasm through the campaign for the election.
Paul Keating – Redfern Speech, 10 December 1992
Full transcript | Partial video
We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn’t Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn’t it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians – the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
…..
Even the unhappy past speaks for this. Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contributions. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia. They are there in the ways. In sport ot an extraordinary degree. In literature and art and mustic.
In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity. They are there in the Australian legend. We should never forget – they helped build this nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership.
Paul Keating, Eulogy for the Unknown Australian Soldier, 11 November 1993
Full transcript
But, in honouring our war dead, as we always have and as we do today, we declare that this is not true. For out of the war came a lesson which transcended the horror and tragedy and the inexcusable folly. It was a lesson about ordinary people – and the lesson was that they were not ordinary. On all sides they were the heroes of that war; not the generals and the politicians but the soldiers and sailors and nurses – those who taught us to endure hardship, to show courage, to be bold as well as resilient, to believe in ourselves, to stick together.
The Unknown Australian Soldier whom we are interring today was one of those who, by his deeds, proved that real nobility and grandeur belongs, not to empires and nations, but to the people on whom they, in the last resort, always depend.
That is surely at the heart of the ANZAC story, the Australian legend which emerged from the war. It is a legend not of sweeping military victories so much as triumphs against the odds, of courage and ingenuity in adversity. It is a legend of free and independent spirits whose discipline derived less from military formalities and customs than from the bonds of mateship and the demands of necessity. It is a democratic tradition, the tradition in which Australians have gone to war ever since.
This Unknown Australian is not interred here to glorify war over peace; or to assert a soldier’s character above a civilian’s; or one race or one nation or one religion above another; or men above women; or the war in which he fought and died above any other war; or one generation above any that has been or will come later.
The Unknown Soldier honours the memory of all those men and women who laid down their lives for Australia. His tomb is a reminder of what we have lost in war and what we have gained.
