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Speeches

This unit has been prepared by Pauline M. Byrne, M.A. Dip. Ed.

The text of the speeches to be studied for 2001–2003 HSC are available at the Board of Studies

web site.

Information about the speeches

Nonfiction, Media or Multimedia: Speeches

Students who choose to study the speeches explore the ways ideas are articulated in the prescribed texts. They explore the distinctive qualities of each of the speeches and the ways different audiences shape meaning. Students reflect on the values implied in different responses and in rhetoric itself.

The speeches selected for study are the following:

Socrates, 'No evil can happen', 399 BC
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 'Among us you can dwell no longer', 63 BC
Abraham Lincoln, 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people', 1863
Emma Goldman, 'The political criminal of today must needs be a saint of the new age', 1917
Martin Luther King, 'I have a dream', 1963
Denise Levertov, 'Statement for a Television Program', 1972
Margaret Atwood, 'Spotty-Handed Villainesses', 1994
Vaclav Havel, 'A Contaminated Moral Environment', 1990
Paul Keating, 'Funeral Service of the Unknown Soldier', 1993
Noel Pearson, 'An Australian history for us all', 1996
Aung San Suu Kyi, 'Keynote Address at the Beijing World Conference on Women', 1995
Mary McAleese, 'Defense of Freedom Speech', 1998

Please note:

The speeches in this unit have been arranged not in chronological order, but the way I would teach them, to facilitate comparisons with speeches which have much in common, e.g. Lincoln and Keating both speaking to memorialise war dead; Goldman and Socrates addressing trial juries and proclaiming their fundamental beliefs.