Selected for Best Australian Political Writing 2009

LIKE ALL GREAT speeches, the Tenterfield Oration delivered on October 24, 1889 – the most significant speech in Australian history – was a call to action, a call to the Australian people to achieve by peace what the Americans had achieved by war. The time had come, Sir Henry Parkes said, for ‘an uprising in this fair land of a goodly fabric of free government’ with ‘all great national questions of magnitude affecting the welfare of the colonies’ disposed of by ‘a distinct executive and a distinct parliamentary power’.