Australian History/Reference
Book Details

Stirring Australian Speeches

The definitive collection, from Botany to Bali

Michael Cathcart and Kate Darian-Smith (eds)

A definitive collection of speeches and public addresses from Australian public life that vividly capture the essence of the moment, providing fresh glimpses into Australian society in the making.

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

“As a handbook to Australian history, then, told through the words of some of its leading actors, Cathcart and Darian-Smith give us a sound, comprehensive record of Australia’s social and political development.”
(Peter Fuller, Canberra Times, 9/4/05)

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.

About the Author

Michael Cathcart is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. He is best known as the presenter of the history series Rewind on ABC TV. He has also presented Arts Today and the Famous Radio National Quiz on ABC Radio National. Since then Michael has become well-known as a historian on ABCTV. He is the author of Defending the National Tuckshop, and prepared a critically acclaimed abridgement of Manning Clark's six-volume classic, A History of Australia (MUP). He is writing a history of water in Australia.

Kate Darian-Smith is the Director of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, where she also teaches in the History Department. She is the author and editor of several books on Australian social and cultural history, including On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939-1945 and Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia. She is now writing on the cultural place of agricultural shows within Australian city and country communities, and on Australian histories within the British imperial world.   

Book Preview

978-0-522-84681-2