Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us –that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It’s Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address, of course: 10 sentences and 272 words, that became the most famous cemetery dedication since Pericles. But it’s more than that, it was a call for a common, transcendant national purpose in the face of violent rupture and desolation. Sound familiar? Of course! Australia 2007. We may lack several thousand corpses on a civil war battlefield, but there are as many things that divide as unite us. What if one leader — Kevin? John? — could rise to deliver a speech that both defined the Australian moment and projected the nation into a new unified destiny? Could they? Would they?

That’s your challenge: write a Downunder Gettysburg, do it in 272 words and send it in to boss@crikey.com.au. The winner will be performed —  if that’s the word —  by former NSW premier and orator supreme Bob Carr on Radio National’s Late Night Live. Your reward? Knowing that you have steadied your nation’s course and helped it to a new purpose for an infant century.