Students travel to Cowra for public speaking competition

Originally published in The Nyngan Weekly

Two Nyngan students travelled to Cowra on Monday, June 20, to participate in the CWA Public Speaking competition.

The intergroup competition featured the first and second place winners from speaking competitions in the central western, oxley and far western CWA regions.

Hannah Partridge (year six) from Nyngan Public School and Jameson Bush (year seven) from Nyngan High School made the trip.

Hannah said that she thought she presented well during the competition and wrote a speech on the topic “time”.

Students were given three topics to choose from and Hannah felt she could relate the most to this one.

“I kind of thought that all of them could be interesting but then I thought time can just be any kind of perspective. It could be like time as in you’re going back in time or future of it could be like what mine was when it’s kind of saying time is endless but there’s never enough.

“I feel like that one was one of the most popular ones because of that reason. Some people said that stuff like time can be said in any way like dinner time, half time, lunchtime.”

Hannah chose the topic of time over the topics “the life of a $1 coin” and “have I seen you before?”. She said that time was a funny thing to understand and that there is both too much and not enough of it.

“I was basically saying how it’s strange and that it’s endless, but there’s never enough. So, when they live a little bit of the time and then it’s also about how there was time before the Big Bang,” said Hannah.

“I only did like a little bit of research. I had to search up the definition [of time] and that really worked for my speech because the definitions of it weird. So, I said the definition time is a bit strange and hard to understand and then I did research on like, how long time has, like been around and it’s been endless, there was like time before the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago.”

Hannah won her regional competition in Narromine earlier this year with a speech about ‘the greatest gift ever.’ “It’s all that sort of stuff and then I said to me the best gift ever is life. And then I said, have you ever seen someone just give birth to a child and see their huge smile often bursting with cries of happiness?

“And I said if you get an argument, you feel really upset with your friends or something. So it’s kind of saying all the bad stuff makes a good stuff even better,” she said.

Hannah has a talent for public speaking and is the captain of the school debate team. She said that the competition has lots of similarities to debate.

“You need to be a confident enough speaker to do debating and public speaking. You kind of need to be able to work with all the different topics, and you have to be able to think really quickly,” she said.

Hannah said her father thought it was the best rendition of her speech he’d heard and she was pleased with how well she overcame her nerves.

“I really thought that I was nervous and then I kind of went outside, practised lots, had a walk around and went inside to listen to people. Then I went up and I feel like it was better once I’d done it.”

Also competing from Nyngan was Jameson Bush, who chose the topic “unsung heroes”.

“I talked about the people throughout different like crisis and how they helped out different areas of what was happening,” he said.

Jameson had to speak for three minutes, and he said that his speech didn’t take him too long to write at home.

Jameson came first in his Narromine section and first again in Cowra. He said he’d liked to continue to compete in the CWA public speaking competition.

He said he was proud of himself for coming first and was pleased with how he performed. Jameson said he isn’t sure why he likes public speaking but that he enjoys it regardless.

Students who participated in the competitions wrote their own speeches outside of school hours in addition to their existing English and literacy classes.