Craft of Writing

This speech by Ava Corey (Year 12) was written as a practice Craft of Writing task in class:

My most sententious greetings to all the notable cowards, lily-livered boys, cream-faced loons, and poisonous bunch-back’d toads gathered in our great hall today. This may seem a hostile beginning, but fear not, for there is method to my madness. From Plato’s Republic to Shakespeare’s Globe to our modern world of celebrity and cruelty, momentum and mutilation, progress and punishment, historians and common folk alike have borne witness to the pervasive systems of prejudice and oppression put in place to ensure power remains in the hands of those who already hold it. The view from our cloud-capp’d towers can obfuscate our sense of the world below, and it can be all too easy to become complacent with the current machinations of society. But every so often, it becomes glaringly obvious to anyone who cares to look that our society is built on misogynistic, racist, capitalist values perpetuated by “democratic” governments who, pardon my French, don’t give a shit about anyone except their white male friends.

This is what Fort Street has done to me. I came to this school in Year 7 with no real grasp of the world — I didn’t even know what LGBT meant — and I’ve emerged a raging leftist. I’ve had to learn so, so much over the past six years about the ways that people move through a world that is designed to hold them back, and I’m sick of seeing incredible people suffer because of circumstances that are out of their control. Fort Street students are privileged. We can joke all we want about how we’d be pregnant or incarcerated if we went to Mount Druitt, but far too many people ignore the fact that it’s not individual failings we should mock, but the failures of the education system to provide equal access to education for everyone. Whether we like it or not, our school is an icon, symbolic of both the best and worst Sydney has to offer: excellent public education with a side salad of entrenched, largely ignored colonialism and racism.

The reason that I’m being so annoying about this is because I’m scared. I’m scared to leave this little bubble and face the real world in all its ugliness. But I’m clinging to the hope that our cohort, this bumbling group of messy, stupid, wonderful geniuses, can be the ones to make change. Maybe when we look back in years and decades to come, we’ll see that every single student is using their privilege to shape the world for the better. And that change starts with us! It starts with your individual decision to work on your sexism, classism, fatphobia, and any other prejudices that lead you to perpetuate injustice. I dream of a world where we don’t have to worry about impending global disaster, incompetent leaders, being raped and murdered, facing discrimination based on race, size, age, sex, or class, or never breaking out of the cycles of poverty and inequity that so many people are born into.

Fort Street students are goddamn incredible, because not only are we capable of becoming ruthless, powerful, immoral billionaire scum, but we also have the capacity to use our brains, hearts, and guts to fight for a better world. It doesn’t matter who you were when you started at Fort Street, and it doesn’t matter who you’ve been. This chapter of our lives is almost over, and we can begin the next one however we choose. If you take nothing else from this speech, remember this: your anger and frustration are powerful, and we have a platform that will amplify our voices, whatever we choose to say. We have the privilege of a world that is open to and waiting for us, and every single one of us has the power to change it for the better.

In true Fortian fashion, I’d like to conclude with a quote from our favourite Canadian feminist, Margaret Atwood: “A word after a word after a word is power.”

So what are you going to say?