Stirring Australian Speeches: The definitive collection, from Botany to Bali

- Michael Cathcart and Kate Darian-Smith (eds)
(Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2004. )

Opinion
'We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. 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.' Paul Keating

About this Title
'The speakers represented in Stirring Australian Speeches are people who have had the courage and the conviction to speak out, over two centuries, on issues that matter: their ideas have stirred the nation.' Michael Cathcart and Kate Darian-Smith

Stirring Australian Speeches is the definitive collection of speeches and public addresses from Australian public life. Politicians, scientists, judges, explorers, artists, the famous and the infamous, comment on the great issues and figures of their day. The speakers range from Governor Arthur Phillip to Sir William Deane, Louisa Lawson to Germaine Greer, Peter Lalor to Pauline Hanson. The subjects stretch from white settlement to the Mabo decision, Eureka to Gallipoli, the banning of the Communist Party to the 2002 bombing in Bali, the art of Sheffield Shield cricket in the nineteenth century to the state of arts funding in recent times.

Edited by Michael Cathcart and Kate Darian-Smith, Stirring Australian Speeches is a standard reference for every Australian bookshelf. Discriminatingly chosen and carefully contextualised, the speeches in this collection are fully introduced, and complemented by a useful index.