Faith Bandler Speech Analysis

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1. Faith Bandler, (born 27 September 1918) also known as Ida Lessing Faith Mussing is an Australian civil rights activist of South Sea Islander heritage. She is a campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders. Bandler is best known for her leadership in the campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal Australians During World War II, Bandler and her sister Kath served in the Australian Women's Land Army, working on fruit farms. Bandler and Indigenous workers received less pay than white workers, and after being discharged in 1945, she started to campaign for equal pay for Indigenous workers. After the war, Bandler moved to the Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. In 1952, she married Hans Bandler, a Jewish refugee…show more content…
An anecdotal reference to her role in FCAATSI vii. Acknowledgment of various historical aboriginal figures who were directly or indirectly associated with FCAATSI viii. A reference to the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act ix. A peroration to be pro-active in the quest for reconciliation The title of Faith Bandler’s speech makes a pun on the three Christian virtues of faith, Hope and Charity, and also a second punning reference to her own ‘Faith’ embedded in the title. Bandler acknowledges her audience in the exordium, and the Kairos, creating an appeal to Ethos through the personal anecdote of when she ‘was her once before’. The personal and anecdotal nature of the speech continues in subsequent paragraphs, as she discovers ‘a module in [her] thinking’. This ‘module’ conveys with it negative connotations of division, and refers to the notion of a schism, separation or disjunction that is set against the notion of unity and reconciliation (in the same way that your HSC is divided up into a tripartite structure of “modules”). The very next sentences uses ellipsis to connect the speech with the context of the speech, namely the Reconciliation Convention, since what ‘[i]t was getting in the way’ of was the unity of reconciliation that Bandler and the other delegates were hoping for. She uses amplification to expand on this idea, as she then alludes to three contextual
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