Six Second Summary
Stimulus Booklet:
Text One (Painting) - Impressionism Paradox (John Morrow):
Text Two (Poem) - The Secret (Denise Leverton):
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line.They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Text Three (Non-fiction) - Cabbage Tree's Untold Stories (Jeff Licence)
The road to Cabbage Tree Island snakes up through cane fields hidden amongst the floodplain of the Richmond River, a few kilometres inland from Wardell and Ballina on the NSW North Coast.
There are no road signs or obvious markers on the way in. Yet, in the past few months, I have learned that this place, its people and their Untold stories are deeply connected to the big histories, good and bad, of the NSW North Coast community.
Driving over the narrow one lane bridge that connects it to the mainland, there are few landmarks to give clues to its fascinating history or the stories we were about to share with the nation.
Cabbage Tree Island was a former Aboriginal station, a self-sufficient farming community which is still home to many of the original families who have lived there for generations.
The Cabbage Tree Island community were collaborating with ABC North Coast to celebrate the people and their achievements and tell the very hard stories of this fascinating community.
Untold was a first for us — a vision of event radio where ABC NSW North Coast takes the whole radio station out to places and communities we don’t often get to and records the important untold stories across the region.
As the North Coast ABC Open Producer, it was my role to make some initial connections and gather stories from the community in the months leading up to our special Untold event.
It was the beginning of several months of inspiring work and story gathering that would culminate in a breakfast and a live broadcast from the school in late October 2014. It started with a day at Cabbage Tree Island Public School.
The students had written beautiful stories about important members of their family who they consider Unsung Heroes. Together, we recorded and published their stories as part of the ABC Open Unsung project.
This ABC Open workshop was one of several with members of the Cabbage Tree and the broader Ballina Indigenous community.
In a collaboration between Byron Bay Community Centre, Yarrabee Aboriginal Community Aged Care and ABC Open, we recorded some powerful and thought-provoking interviews with elders speaking about Reconciliation and their early life growing up on Cabbage Tree Island. From this experience, I had the opportunity to mentor the elders in how to make a photo slideshow of their journey to Moree.
At the Ballina NAIDOC day celebrations, the ABC Open stall became a place to explore and celebrate the Bundjalung language with Rick Cook, a keeper and teacher of the local language.
Marcus Ferguson and the boys from the Jali Land Council Indigenous Protected Area, situated close to Cabbage Tree Island, also shared their stories. They showed me the incredible regeneration and cultural work they are doing to preserve the land and their cultural history and I was able to show them how to set up a camera and sound to conduct a simple interview for our Life’s Big Questions project.
On the day of our Untold event, I recorded Indigenous artist Digby Moran speaking about his childhood on the island and his donation of a painting to the Cabbage Tree Island school. I also spoke with Glen Cook and Sandra Bolt about there memories of the school as seen through some old school photographs.
The experiences and the stories that have come from these workshops have shone a new light on a diverse, challenged and culturally rich place.
Meanwhile, my ABC Open colleague Catherine Marciniak was integral in making the Untold project work. As well as her behind the scenes efforts, Catherine worked with Lois Cook and family in a special collaboration to create a very moving story called Babe in the reeds: a story of massacre and resilience.
The ABC North Coast’s cross-media reporter Margaret Burin made a video that tells one of the biggest Untold stories about Cabbage tree island.
As far back as the 1880s, it was a self-sufficient farming community. Margaret’s story documents the current community’s response to a 1963 Four Corners report about how the Cabbage Tree Island community tried to repeat this dream of self- sufficiency in the 1960s. It is a fascinating story.
Finally, on a clear windy Tuesday, with the help of the indefatigable Cabbage Tree Principal Dyonne Anderson, the ABC North Coast programs team of Justine Frazier, Joanne Shoebridge, Margaret Burin, Elloise Farrow-Smith and Graeme Stuart all came together on the front steps of the Primary School on Cabbage Tree Island.
Weeks of organising paid off as the whole North Coast Community were treated to an array of interviews, music and stories about the people and history of the island.
Children, community members and elders were there, with some special guests returning to the island for the first time in many years.
The feeling in the crowd and the feedback from the community in sharing these Untold stories has been incredibly positive and it was a real privilege to be part of it all. I’m very grateful to the many wonderful people from the Ballina and Cabbage Tree Indigenous communities who were so open and sharing with their time, generosity, honesty and stories.
One of the highlights of the day for me was when the school choir, made up of about 18 Indigenous children sang a song they had written in the Bundalung language.
There weren’t many dry eyes left in the schoolyard after they’d finished.
The beauty of all of this is that these stories are preserved in digital form on the ABC Open and ABC North Coast websites for all to listen, see and share.
So please feel free to Woolar. That’s Bundjalung for Share.
Text four (prose fiction) - Excerpt from The Invention of Solitude (Paul Auster)
Reality was a Chinese box, an infinite series of containers within containers.
There was a cable television in his grandfather’s apartment, with more channels that A. had ever known existed. Whenever he turned it on, there seemed to be a baseball game in progress. Not only was he able to follow the Yankees and Mets of New York, but the Red Sox of Boston, the Phillies of Philadelphia, and the Braves of Atlanta. Not to speak of the little bonuses occasionally provided during the afternoon: the games from the Japanese major leagues, for example (and his fascination with the constant beating of the drums during the course of the game), or, even more strangely, the Little League championships from Long Island. To immerse himself in these games was to fill his mind striving to enter a place of pure form. Despite the agitation on the field, baseball offered itself to him as an image of that which does not move, and therefore a place where his mind could be at rest, secure in its refuge against the mutabilities of the world.
He had spent his entire childhood playing it. From the first muddy days in early March to the last frozen afternoons of late October. He had played well, with an almost obsessive devotion. Not only had it given him a feeling for his own possibilities, convinced him that he was not entirely hopeless in the eyes of others, but it had been the thing that drew him out from the solitary enclosures of his early childhood. It had initiated him into the world of the other, but at the same time it was something he could also keep within himself. Baseball was a terrain rich in potential for revery. He fantasized about it continually, projecting himself into a New York Giants uniform and trotting out to his position at third base in the Polo Grounds, with the crowd cheering wildly at the mention of his name over the loudspeakers. Day after day, he would come home from school and throw a tennis ball against the steps of his house, pretending that each gesture was a part of the World Series game unfolding in his head. It always came down to two outs in the bottom of the ninth, a man on base, the Giants trailing by one. He was always the batter, and he always hit the game winning homerun.
As he sat through those long summer days in his grandfather’s apartment, he began to see that the power of baseball was for him the power of memory. Memory in both senses of the word: as a catalyst for remembering his own life and as an artificial structure for ordering the historical past. 1960, for example, was the year Kennedy was elected president; it was also the year of A’s Bar Mitzvah, the year he supposedly reached manhood. But the first image that springs to his mind when 1960 is mentioned is Bill Mazeroski’s homerun that beat the Yankees in the World Series. He can still see the ball soaring over the Forbes Field fence–that high, dark barrier, so densely cluttered with white numbers–and by recalling the sensations of that moment, that abrupt and stunning instant of pleasure, he is able to re-enter his own past, to stand in a world that would otherwise be lost to him.
Inevitably, A.’s memories of baseball were connected with his memories of his grandfather. It was his grandfather who had taken him to his first game, had talked to him about the old players, had shown him that baseball was as much about talk as it was about watching. As a little boy, A. would be dropped off at the office on Fifty-seventh Street, play around with the typewriters and adding machines until his grandfather was ready to leave, and then walk out with him for a leisurely stroll down Broadway. The ritual always included a few rounds of Pokerino in one of the amusement arcades, a quick lunch, and then the 5 subway–to one of the city ball parks. Now, with his grandfather disappearing into death, they continued to talk about baseball. It was the one subject they could still come to as equals. Each time he visited the hospital, A. would buy a copy of the New York Post, and then sit by the old man’s bed, reading to him about the games of the day before. It was his last contact with the outside world, and his eyes closed. Anything else would have been too much.
Towards the very end, with a voice that could barely produce a sound, his grandfather told him that he had begun to remember his life. He had been dredging up the days of his Toronto boyhood, reliving events that had taken place as far back as eighty years ago: defending his younger brother against a gang of bullies, delivering bread on Friday afternoon to the Jewish families in the neighbourhood, all the trivial, long forgotten things that now, coming back to him as he lay immobilized in bed, took on the importance of spiritual illuminations. “Lying here gives me a chance to remember,” he told A., as if this were a new power he had discovered in himself. A. could sense the pleasure it gave him. Little by little, it had begun to dominate the fear that had been in his grandfather’s face these past weeks. Memory was the only thing keeping him alive, and it was as though he wanted to hold off death for as long as possible in order to go on remembering.
He knew, and yet he would not say he knew. Until the final week, he continued to talk about returning to his apartment, and not once was the word “death” mentioned. Even on the last day, he waited until the last possible moment to say good-bye. A. was leaving, walking through the door after a visit, when his grandfather called him back. Again, A. stood beside the bed. The old man took hold of his hand and squeezed as hard as he could. Then: a long, long moment. At last, A. bent down and kissed his grandfather’s face. Neither one of them said a word.
Questions:
Text One - Painting (3 marks)
How does the text use visual techniques to represent the paradoxes of the human experience?
Text Two - Poem (3 marks)
How does the poem represent the role of literature in the search for meaning?
Text Three - Non-fiction (4 marks)
How does the text use language techniques to represent the importance of community to the human experience?
Text Four - Prose Fiction (4 marks)
How does the text represent the influence of memories on human qualities and emotions?
Texts One, Two, Three and Four (6 marks)
“It is through stories that we truly grow to understand the human experience.”
To what extent does this statement reflect your understanding of TWO of the given texts?
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