The purpose of PJ Keating's speech as Prime minister of Australia in 1992 was to encourage Aboriginal People and their supporters to have confidence in a future that would allow them to participate in Australian life to the same extent as other Australians.
Keating begins his speech with the conceit that we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test, which so far we have always failed. Keating continues by using the motif of "the test" in a direct manner using economical language. To develop his theme of failure to care fore indigenous Australians he suggests that this needs to be addressed and explains idiomatically that by doing so we will truly be the land of the fair go.
Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brook's lecture "a home in fiction" reflects upon the pleasures of fiction and its importance in our lives. She uses her experience as a foreign correspondent to explain how she graduated from being a journalist unto her role of fiction writes
The tone is reflected as she begins her speech with a personal anecdote about math's lecture that she attended. She was immediately transfixed on the terror of the lecture describing it 'like poetry". She then embellishes the idea with a series of metaphors describing her responses to the math's lecture as 'a sudden brief shaft of light". This suggests the revelation she felt when she caught a glimpse of the beauty of mathematics where ' every object sang to her with its own particular music. 'This lyrical prose allows her audience to share a pivotal moment, when mathematics assumed a greater purpose in her life.
Brooks knows that she lacks the expertise to respond to the world and reflects that metaphorically, she swims 'in a sea of words' and his is how she 'pushes into the full truth of the world. She describes her writing in the extended metaphor of 'the woodshed' and that her experience as a journalist had 'given her some 'durable tools'. She continues by referring to writing as a craft where ' words