ENGLISH Faculty

Year 7 are currently studying the Aboriginal play Honey Spot by Jack Davis, exploring ideas around prejudice, resolving conflict and how to accept others for who they are. They will be preparing an essay in class for their assessment task early in Term 3.

Year 8 have completed a close study on Tim Burton’s films and have recently completed an in-class essay assessment task on the unit. They have just begun a close study of Debra Oswald’s play Stories in the Dark, exploring how storytelling can be a therapeutic tool for understanding and surviving traumatic life events such as war. It is a heartwarming story of two teenagers discovering friendship and exploring their values while stuck together in the middle of a civil war in their country.

Year 9 are studying a poetry unit focused on the topic of ‘The Adolescent Journey’, analysing the poems Tula (Books are Door-Shaped) by Margarita Engle, Deer Hit by Jon Loomis and the song Caught in the Crowd by Kate Miller-Heidke. They are preparing an essay throughout the unit that they will be assessed on in their Yearly Examination at the start of Term 4.

Year 10 have also been studying a poetry unit, with an essay assessment task in Week 10, writing an essay on an unseen question after preparing a practice essay in class. Each class has studied a variety of poems from a list of poems focusing on topics of identity, war and conflict and love and relationships.

The HSC Standard students have been busily working on the Common Module unit and Module A: Language, Identity and Culture. For each module, they have written an essay and in the Common Module they also prepared a visual presentation on the themes represented in their prescribed text: Billy Elliot directed by Stephen Daldry. They are currently studying Module C: The Craft of Writing, analysing and writing their own imaginative, discursive and persuasive texts.

HSC Advanced students have also completed their Common Module and Module C: The Craft of Writing, with a multimodal assessment task for the Common Module on their prescribed text The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Their Craft of Writing assessment task included a choice of imaginative, discursive or persuasive extended response along with a reflection on their own extended response. They are now currently studying Module A: Textual Conversations, doing a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-seed.

HSC Extension 1 students have completed study of two of their prescribed texts: Lang’s Metropolis and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Students have completed their first assessment task which consisted of an imaginative text and a reflection statement outlining specific authorial choices they made in their creative composition. They are currently undertaking study of their first related text and preparing for their second assessment which is a critical essay exploring the representation of upheaval across the texts studied so far.

HSC Extension 2 students are making steady progress on their Major Works with all students having selected the text type they will compose for their final submission. They have completed their first assessment task which was a Viva Voce in which they pitched their initial concept and presented their research into their chosen text type and texts that had inspired and influenced their creative choices. Currently, students are conducting a systematic analysis of textual elements they plan to incorporate in their final creative compositions which will be presented in a literature review due at the end of Term 2.

Please see below two thought-provoking and heartfelt poems composed by Cailyn Morrow in Year 9 and Enory Mehedy’s Year 12 Extension 1 imaginative writing and reflection.

What is it? by Cailyn Morrow

Cold, the day was

bellowing, whooshing wind

blowing, slamming door-hinge

The air bitter

Clear but not better

like a soundproof wall

The silence rang

beyond my range

there’s something strange

What is it?

motionless people

Shivers from toes to dimple

the strange grew and grew

the cold, horrible wind blew

the ground unsteady

body feeling heavy

What is it?

Couldn’t feel anything anymore

nothing left to look for.

Lost by Cailyn Morrow

As I was up in the hitch

I looked down toward the huge ditch

felt power every step

As I looked down upon my map

Questioning my every step

Closer and closer to the very edge

Hanging onto my dear breath

Wishing to meet with the very end

Need a drink from my bottle

but it’s not worth the trouble

Clink, clink goes the drink

but everything could be gone

in a blink

terror under my feet

the pace of my heartbeat

Can’t keep up with anything

Wondering which way to go

Which way is home?

Lost

Must wait for a clue

but what if it’s all gone

looked up into the blue

followed my heart the way it said to

home so far away

but nothing was worse than

this terrible wait

nothing was as bad as

this day.

Home at last

Had a drink from my favourite glass

Gulp

The adventure today

helped me find my way

Home

My place.

Enora Mehedy

Infectious: a Short Story

The first thing it gave me was a name.

Names implied distinction, and distinction implied imbalance. A single individual stopping in line; a worker entering the wrong tunnel; a ration lost from selfishness. A worker separated from its function would endanger the efficiency of the colony and risk its very survival.

The soldiers understood this. The foragers understood this. Even the newly hatched larvae understood this, though they possessed neither language nor sight.

And yet a sensation, unlike any pheromone, carrying neither tunnel transfer nor labour assignment, seemed to repeat.

Sunni.

It was an anomaly in the making.

[Excerpt from episode 12 of Beyond the Surface: Nature’s Greatest Civilisations]

Narrator:

Beneath the surface of the forest floor, an intricate civilisation operates without pause. The colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus, the carpenter ant, functions as a singular unit, each individual fulfilling a role precisely assigned by biology and chemical instruction.

Within this system, order is not taught. It is inherited.

And deviance will be eradicated.

I kept my head low, following the single file of Forager C Workers trekking back into the colony. Damp soil clung onto the tips of my legs, dragging resistance into each step, until approaching the colony felt like marching to my death. The seeds gripped in my mandibles threatened to spill. My own legs threatened to give out.

Countless hours of scavenging for resources had left me dazed and tired, causing my mandibles to twitch irritatedly.

Behind me, C19’s antennae made repeated contact with the back of my abdomen – irregular, unfocused signals disrupting the rhythm of the line. Other workers followed closely behind him, their movements sharp and forceful, pheromonal correction pulses rippling with irritation through the formation.

The line lurched forward.

Suddenly, a signal passed through the line, undecipherable. Soil loosened beneath my legs, and I stumbled, losing hold of a seed. I watched as it rolled away towards another formation, catching the attention of a Forager D worker. We both registered it for what it was – a resource wasted.

But the line in front of me continued to move, and taking action to correct my error would only result in further delay for the Foragers behind me. So, with the singular seed lost to the rubble, and the frustrated signals of other antennae lingering in my awareness, I tightened my grip around the remaining resources I’d gathered and marched forwards to resynchronise.

I’d created a setback, one that I could not let happen again.

And yet, my mandible threatened to quiver once more. There it was, a sensation persisting beneath the hard plates of my shell, not painful nor directive, but an unclassified instruction, unfamiliar to the Forager C Mission assigned to me during the larvae phase.

Did C17 and C19 register the same deviation? Had our mission been recalibrated, or was this an error in my own processing?

I possessed no response. Only the order of continuation into the colony ahead, uninterrupted and certain. Shadows lengthened across the soil, shrubbery casting the suggestion of night onto the vast earth in incremental stages. I motioned forward.

Narrator:

Countless species of fungi thrive in this environment, reproducing by releasing spores into the surrounding air. It is likely that this carpenter ant has come into contact with one such spore.

The Ophiocordyceps unilateralis initiates a progressive infection lasting approximately one week. The first phase of the process is evident now in the worker ant’s twitching. Observe its movement – delayed and jolted. It is almost as if he’s torn between what to obey; the pheromonal directives assigned to him by biology, or the control of the evolving cordyceps straying him away from natural order. We are witnessing the first stage of infection: invasion of the host’s muscular systems. From here, the organism will gradually override the worker’s motor function, until he can no longer work and contribute to the collective.

A parasitic fungus has infiltrated the colony.

Three more calculated cycles of forage labour passed before the deviation became impossible to ignore.

With each passing interval, my abdomen grew increasingly weighted, each leg stiffened in movement. Tasks I had performed since my earliest days as a Forager C worker now required conscious correction, motions once instinctive becoming delayed, slow, inconvenient. The only respite came while foraging deeper through the woods, where sunlight bathed the forest floor and warmth gathered beneath the leaves. There, the rigidity beneath my shell seemed to ease.

The muddle of pheromonal directives, which cascaded through the Forager C line at the beginning of each interval of extraction, had become unbearable. And Sunni. That name. That designation. Or was it an order? An error?

Sunni seemed to resonate increasingly by the day, deeper than C18 ever had. I could feel myself becoming a deviant of sorts, and yet it made no sense to resist.

Search. Dig. Return. Repeat. The cycle persisted with mechanical certainty for the rest of the colony, but for the first time, I found myself questioning not the efficiency of the labour, but its continuation. My role, much like the role of C17, and C19, and C20, and C21, was to search for food and resources by day, and deposit my collections to the Sorters by night. This was the purpose of our births.

The survival of our colony was dependent on the contribution of each worker to carry out the orders of the queen which we had been given as larvae. My value was contingent on each seed, grain and crumb.

But in spite of this, as what began as fractional delays stretched into entire intervals of unproductivity on my part, no alarm seemed to follow.

I began to realise that the colony would move without pause, without reflection, and without the need for justification.

The line would simply continue without me.

Narrator:

By the fourth day, the worker ant no longer possesses the physical capabilities to synchronise with the colony’s movement. Its limbs are fighting against the control of the cordyceps, and it is losing. Notably, Ophiocordyceps does not directly compromise the host’s ventral nerve cord or brain. Instead, the fungus embeds itself throughout its muscular structure, gradually gaining control over its movements while processing systems remain largely intact.

The worker still recognises the colony’s directives; it simply can no longer follow them without resistance.

Through pheromonal exchange and physical contact, the other ants quickly identify behavioural irregularities in the infected worker. They know something is not right. They know they must preserve and protect their collective by isolating the infection.

For this worker ant no longer simply inconveniences the efficiency and order of the colony. It now poses a threat to the continuity of the colony itself.

I could feel their attention shifted towards me, not as recognition of my fatigue, but as classification. I was an irregularity. A failure. An outsider.

I no longer functioned within the structure of the line. Not a cog in the sequence of the Forager C unit. Not C18 as assigned. No, that role no longer settled correctly within me.

Sunni persisted instead.

It carried comfort, not instruction. A feeling of belonging which outweighed the disposable role I played within the colony. It was something larger than the cyclical and calculated nature of a Forager C worker, toiling away in sequenced intervals of extraction, return and renewal, carried out without deviation, all in service of survival, of collective, of the Queen.

I required sunlight. The stiffness which has accumulated in my limbs demanded release, not through mediocre rest cycles, but through exposure to the upper world, where heat collected in unrecognisable patterns across the soil, and roots twisted upwards towards warmth and solace.

Resistance no longer felt optional. I was no longer C18, born to forage for seeds.

Narrator:

The cordyceps compels the worker into the forest. The ant’s legs carry it upward into the canopy of a tree, where warmth and humidity converge in optimal conditions – somewhere sunlit, somewhere sunny.

When the ant reaches its position upon a lead warmed by fractured light, the parasite directs the final behavioural directive. The worker clamps its mandibles onto the leaf vein in a death bite, anchoring itself in place.

Now the cordyceps is finally able to complete its developmental cycle within the host. A long reproductive stalk emerges from the ant’s head, extending outward. Over the following weeks, it elongates further, developing spore sacs embedded within its surface.

From these, ascospores are released into the air.

They drift through the forest atmosphere, until they come into contact with another unknowing carpenter ant.

And where they settle, another worker is disrupted from its cycle of order.

Reflection:

My imaginative piece, Infectious, explores the tension between individual consciousness and collectivist social structures. Through the narrative of a carpenter ant gradually succumbing to cordyceps fungus, upheaval within this text manifests not only as physical disruption, but as the emergence of selfhood within an authoritarian system. In doing so, I intended to reflect contemporary anxieties surrounding identity and societal expectation, while critiquing both the dangers of rigid authoritarianism and the destabilising consequences of individual deviation.

To communicate this thesis, I employed a range of technical and storytelling features, such as a hybrid narrative structure, mechanical diction, recurring symbolic motifs and evolving characterisation. My text alternates between nature documentary-like script excerpts and the worker ant’s first-person narration. The narrator’s excerpts adopt a clinical and detached tone, evident in lines such as, “The colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus… functions as a singular unit.” The characterisation of the narrator through this emotionless register positions the colony’s prioritisation of efficiency over individuality as natural and inevitable, and mirrors contemporary society’s conformist nature and modern fears surrounding a loss of humanity. Furthermore, the foreboding connotation in statements such as, “the organism will gradually override the worker’s motor function, until he can no longer work and contribute to the collective,” ground readers in the realistic consequences of parasitic fungus, reinforcing the threat that deviation poses to social order. Contrastingly, the ant’s perspective gradually becomes more introspective and emotionally aware as the infection progresses. Its narration evolves from collectivist and mechanical language, such as, “an unclassified instruction, unfamiliar to the Forager C Mission,” to a more destabilised and reflective consciousness: “I found myself questioning not the efficiency of the labour, but its continuation.” The fragmented narrative structure was effective in constructing two separate ideological perspectives: the condemnation of individuality as an infectious threat to social harmony, and its potential as a liberating force against authoritarian systems. This challenges readers to reconsider whether the need for survival constitutes an existence without questioning.

The motif of the name “Sunni” plays an integral role in juxtaposing the ant’s assigned identity, “Forager C18”, against the emergence of individuality. The name functions simultaneously as a marker of personhood for the worker ant and a symbol of disruption within the colony’s rigid social structure, as asserted in the opening line, “Names implied distinction, and distinction implied imbalance.” Through this motif, I sought to challenge readers to question whether deviation from collective expectation should be perceived as corruption, or the necessary foundations of autonomy. Additionally, the motif of “Sunni” subtly parallels the fungus’ need for “sunny” conditions in order to reproduce. Sensory imagery associated with sunlight and warmth, such as the description, “respite came… where sunlight bathed the forest floor and warmth gathered beneath the leaves,” functions not only to reflect the parasite’s attraction towards more favourable reproduction conditions, but also to symbolise liberation from oppression. This imagery is deliberately contrasted against the dark subterranean colony and its “cycle… of mechanical certainty,” positioning sunlight as symbolic of freedom, introspection and individual consciousness beyond the rigid collectivist system of the colony.

Ultimately, my authorial choices allowed me to construct upheaval as both destructive and transformative. While the cordyceps physically destroys the ant, it also grants it autonomy and an identity beyond its assigned function. Through shifts in narration, distinct characterisation and symbolic imagery, Infectious interrogates the tension between personal autonomy and the preservation of collective harmony.