Changing Perspectives Speech HSC

Our attitudes, perceptions and perspectives of everything around us are perpetually changing with time and experiences. It is a natural process which we have little control over, and usually only recognise it with reflection and hindsight. The poem Feliks Skrzynecki by Peter Skrzynecki is an example of this.
As a young child, Skrzynecki was amazed by his father’s great strength and hyperbole’s are used to express his child-like perception and admiration of Feliks.

As Skrzynecki grows older, becoming a teenager, he gradually becomes more distant from his father. The metaphor in the last stanza "Watched me pegging my tents further and further south of Hadrian’s Wall" implies this because Skrzynecki is leaving his Northern culture behind and becoming more and more Australian.
Skrzynecki is writing the poem as a mature adult, reflecting on his perspective of his father when he was a child.

The tone of the poem tells the reader that Skrzynecki’s perspective has since cha...