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English 7-10

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Preliminary

HSC

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Library
resources

HSC English Resources
From the SDEHS Library: some suggestions for materials to help you with your area of study.

Cartoons & comic strips || Posters & illustrations || Film documentaries || Magazine articles || Reports || Songs || Poetry

Area of study: Change

Focus area: Changing perspectives

You need to collect texts that are relevant to your exploration of the concept of Change. The focus invites your reconsideration of events, people and ideas from different points of view. It's important to get as wide a variety of texts as possible, including visual and spoken texts.

We can help by providing materials such as:

videos
cartoons
paintings
photographs
magazine articles
spoken word cassettes
song lyrics and music CDs

Here are some suggestions:

Cartoons and comic strips: Arrest that cartoonist. Political cartoons, many from the 70s, which focus on issues such as apartheid.; When the chips are down, who cooks the fish? A humorous look at relationships between married couples.; Bonzer: Australian comics, 1900s - 1990s. Illustrates many typical Australian attitudes of earlier times, including fear of foreigners.; The Penguin Book of comics. Examples of comic strips from different countries and different periods.

Posters and illustrations: Underground art. This book of posters from the London Underground has many images that show people and ideas from various points of view.; The Dromkeen Book of Australian Children's illustrators. Children's books are a rich source of illustrations for your topic area. Those containing animals give the artist freedom to comment from another perspective.; Poster art in Australia. Early Australian posters are openly racist, later ones take up issues such as feminism and land rights.; The Modern American poster. Some of the early posters give a clever slant on relations between the sexes.

Film documentaries: P.S., I love you. (video, 50m.) Follows three students who spend a year at a school camp in rural Victoria. The themes that emerge - family relationships, friendships, changing perceptions of oneself - are close to the issues in Alibrandi, although played out in different ways.; Camilla's conversion: Camilla Cowley. (video, 30m.) After receiving a land claim against the property she owned in Queensland, Camilla took the unusual step of getting to know the Aboriginal people concerned. Her contacts with them caused her to change her ideas about land claims, and she was forced to reassess many things in her life.; Motherhood. (video, 45m) Four teenage mothers reflect on pregnancy and relationships, from the vantage point of having been through some life-changing experiences, including the death of a baby.

Magazine articles: The joy of being an Aussie Italian,
by Paolo Totaro. (3 pages) The author, who came to Australia in his twenties, looks back on how his original ideas of what the country was like were changed by his experiences of living here.; Australia calling. (5 pages with photos) The stories of four immigrants from war-torn Europe who came to the Greta Centre for new arrivals. They recall their initial disappointment at the rows of huts, which reminded them of concentration camps, but their memories are mainly happy.; Mild swan (4 pages with photo) Lily emigrated to Australia from China in 1951, and in this article she describes her experiences as a Chinese woman in white Australia during the 1950s and 1960s.; Breakdown: a story of mental illness by Joan Smith. (3 pages) Joan, a postgraduate student at a university, recounts her experiences when she has a mental breakdown. After a short period in a mental hospital she returns to work, only to discover that the attitude of her colleagues towards her has changed.; Return of the native, by Alan Attwood. (3 pages) Born in Scotland, but raised in Australia, Alan returned to Scotland to discover his past, but found that he didn't really belong there either.

Reports: The uncertain family, by K. McDonald. (3 pages) Examines how the structure of the Australian family has changed dramatically in the past fifty years.; Youth and ethnicity: the second generation. (5 pages) How children of migrants were expected to assimilate quickly into Australian ways. This was especially evident in schools and sometimes put these children into conflict situations. The report focuses on children from Italian backgrounds.

Songs: The Bushwacker's Australian song book. (Book) In "And the band played Waltzing Matilda", an old soldier reflects on the different contexts in which he has heard the song played. The office worker in "Clancy of the Overflow" reflects on Clancy's life in the open spaces of the outback. As he does so he wearies of the crowded noisy city where he lives and works.; Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band. (Music CD with lyrics in booklet) The singer of "When I'm sixty-four" imagines what his relationship will be with the person he loves when they are both old.; Our home, our land. (Music CD with lyrics in booklet) "Big Mountain, Wilpena Pound" The singer tells how he used to play around the foot of the mountain. Now he is grown up and living far away he remembers those days with a longing to be back.

Poetry: At the round earth's imagined corners. (Poetry anthology) "Originally" by Carol Duffy. The poet speaks of a child coming to a new country whose ideas of his homeland are changed by time and his experiences at school.; New Negro poets: USA. ( Poetry anthology) "The face of poverty" by Lucy Smith. A powerful poem in which the writer gives us images of poverty as seen through the media, and then changes perspective to look at her own life.

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