Faculty News

Author Neil Gaiman suggests that “fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”

On their own quest for the truth, our Year 7 students have embarked on a ‘career’ as professional travel writers. They have been tasked with the job of setting up a website and creating content aimed at a specific audience. Throughout their travel experience, they have been prompted to think critically about each destination, focusing on culture and the environment. Keeping with this theme, our Year 8 students have been honing their text response essay skills while studying The Giver. This text provides students with the opportunity to reflect on our own world and encourages them to investigate the complexities of the human experience. In Year 9, students have journeyed to fair Verona, where they have been immersed in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The world of the play acts as a microcosm of Elizabethan social and cultural mores, requiring students to draw upon these ideas when examining the characters and their relationships.

In the Senior School, there has been an overriding theme of texts that explore the difficulties of achieving justice woven through the curriculum. The Year 10 students have been studying the classic To Kill A Mockingbird, taking a deep dive into 1930s Southern America. Harper Lee reminds the reader that “in our courts all men are created equal” and yet “people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box”. Meanwhile, our Year 11 students, through their study of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, have been analysing the perils of capital punishment in 1959 middle America. Despite the heinous death of the Clutter family “in cold blood”, students are encouraged to question whether “judicial homicide” is an appropriate penalty rather than “pity… [and] mercy”. Finally, the Year 12 students are fast approaching their final assessment task for 2023, investigating the dangers of living in oppressive environments and questions of whether justice can be achieved via vengeance. Arthur Miller, using the Puritan theocracy of Salem in The Crucible and Rosalie Ham, through the rural Australian setting of Dungatar in The Dressmaker, highlight characters who remind us all that “the magistrate sits in your heart that judges you.” 

While the texts studied across the year levels may be diverse, the various key themes of justice, hope, honour, forgiveness and redemption are timeless. Whether they be Shakespearian, American or Australian all texts have great literary merit in exploring the human condition and universal longings across the centuries.  

Jed Harrington

English Coordinator (Years 7-9)