The father of Australian speechwriting died last week.
Graham Freudenberg wrote for Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and many other Labor Party leaders. Eulogized on Twitter by a longtime colleague as a “labor historian, our greatest political speechwriter, a good friend, and a good, good man,” Freudenberg was the focus of a 2018 documentary,The Scribe.
In it, he says,“It’s a mistake to think that great speeches are just a series of great one-liners, just as it would be a mistake to think of Hamlet as a series of famous quotations,” he said. “A real gutsy speech has an argument, makes a case.”
Rest well, old scribe.