“We Are Going” a poem written by the famous Oodgeroo Noonuccal is in its own way a masterpiece for communication to the present world about the impact of modernisation on the Indigenous people of Australia. If anything, Oodgeroo expresses the reality of the fading of the Aboriginals and expresses the sadness and pain that follows. The constant use of the word “We” in this poem creates the sense that Oodgeroo is not at all speaking for herself. She is speaking for the entire Indigenous population.…
The poem begins with the narrator telling herself, “A few more steps, old feet.” (line 1). The old feet she refers to are the ancestor’s feet, that appear to be old and worn out from the rigorous journey they take. The speaker then goes on to say, “In pale tea I’ll see / me with her, tasting wild grapes” (lines 4-5). This shows her reminder of her ancestors in nature. The pale tea is the symbol of the clean, clear simplicity of nature and when the speaker simplifies herself, to the bare nothingness of nature it reveals to her, her ancestors. Then in the following lines, “at dawn, tasting dew / on tender leaves, another year.” (lines 6-7). The dawn represents a new day, a new start where she can again acknowledge her heritage. After, the speaker says, “her hands still guiding me, / at sunset grinding seeds” (lines 11-12). These hands guiding the speaker, are her ancestors leading her through their stories and nature around…
In The China Coin by Allan Baillie, Leah gains new insights about her sense of belonging during her time in China. This is revealed effectively through the composer’s use of narrative voice, flashback and descriptive language.…
In part two, Chang investigates white supremacy and the forced allotment onto the indigenous people. The author informs the reader about the politics behind the allotment that eventually caused racial issues among the people. This part of the book emphasizes the significant connection between land and identity during this time for White…
The origin of a story may come from a plethora of triggers in life such as a notebook, memory, or even pure intuition. In Kingston’s novel, The Woman Warrior, she primarily uses her memory to recall the legend of Fa Mu Lan, a Chinese girl who took her father’s place in battle illegally (21). Kingston uses this familiar Chinese story that leaves a “direct personal impression” on her and links it to her own imagination (Lanning and Macauley 3). This fabricates the origin of a story that gives the reader insight on how Kingston feels about Chinese society.…
Gender equality has long been an issue all over the world. Though the issue is not that nasty in current society, problems still exist. Woman status rises a lot to a much higher-level compared to before. Feminism develops and spreads out at a rapid rate and more and more women now a day express their thoughts of being independent. Christina Larsen and Leila Ahmed both talk about the changing of women status in modern society, but in two different countries. In her essay “The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Ladies”, Larsen points out that Chinese women now have a higher social status than compare to the past. Ahmed, in her essay “Reinventing the Veil”, also mentions that Muslin women now advocate their independent status and have much more…
The poem is set out in regular six-line stanzas, alternating longer and shorter iambic lines, and an abcbdb rhyme scheme. The choice of this simple and traditional form is reassuring and helps to make the content accessible. In my opinion it is suggesting that you can make a foreign city and culture familiar, and allows time to reflect on the disturbing content and imagery. Each stanza also includes a main event of the poets journey…
Bruce Dawe’s poem, migrants, portrays a long quest from the perspective of a migrant group. This group is acknowledged as ‘they’ were met with indifferences from the local people. ‘They’ react to this treatment with confusion and surprise which is evident in the line ‘indifference surprised them’. This creates a sense of ambiguity and lack of identity. The text portrays a physical journey between continents. This is evident ‘in the fourth week the sea dropped away and they were there…’ which contains features of imagery, pronouns and ellipsis. The imagery used appeals to an audiences visual senses and creates an atmosphere while the ellipsis gives the sense of ambiguity and evokes attentiveness in the audience. Pronouns evoked in the poem allows the theme to be easily accessed by the audience by suggesting the migrants have a lack of identity as a result of leading their homeland and travelling for a long period.…
In Gary Crew’s Strange Objects and Peter Weir’s film ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, the effect of civilisation on the natural world is explored. Both texts display this by using the context of Australia, over time, to expose how nature will prevail over humanity. In the novel, the conflicting European culture and spiritual essence of the ancient land is portrayed in two life frames: 1623 and 1988. Dutch settlement, of Jan Pelgrom and Wouter Loos, on Aboriginal land exhibits the theme of the nature domination by portraying them as foreign influence to the Aboriginal people and their spiritual connections to the land. The action of Steven Messenger stealing an Aboriginal historical artefact, the ring, which, results in developing psychosis mirror the power of nature seen in the historical context of 1623. Based on the same context of Aboriginal Australian land, but in a different time period of 1975, ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, the disappearance of the girls who climb the rock are suggested to be closely linked to the spiritual powers of the land and nature. This is shown by Peter Weir using various film techniques to create a mystical and unknown aura relating to the indigenous land. These examples from the novel and film share the same idea of how nature seems to be challenged when humanity strikes.…
The point of view focuses on the grandmother. The story begins by talking about her background. It is arranged in chronological order. First, the narrator¡¦s granddaughter is introduced and then her family background. The narrator describes herself as ¡§fierce¡¨. Everyone is afraid of her. Her daughter is somewhat like her mom at least she is also ¡§fierce¡¨ because she is a bank vice president, but her granddaughter is wild, not like her daughter or herself. In the grandmother¡¦s opinion, if her granddaughter Sophie does not act like other Chinese girls, she is wild. In other words, the narrator seems to think people coming from a different culture are weird. After that, the narrator talked about her son-in-law. She thought she did not understand him because he could neither find a job nor look after Sophie. Grandmother said,¡¨Plain boiled food, plain boiled thinking. Even his name is plain boiled: John¡¨ (206). At this point, she somewhat despised her son-in-law, John. He is a white person who can speak English. There is no way he can not find a job. Besides, the grandmother always felt the culture gap. ¡§In China, we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty. We talk about whether life is bitter or not bitter. In America, all day long, people talk about creative¡¨ (208). She did not understand why the ex-babysitter let Sophie get naked and run around. Creativity did not mean anything to her. There was no such a word in Chinese. In addition, she told her daughter ¡§We do…
In my first text “Rainbows End” by Jane Harrison it supports and reveals connections made with people, places, groups, communities and the larger world. This will become evident throughout the language, and symbols used in the play. Rainbows End is fiction but Harrison tried to capture the indigenous experience that was set in the…
Ultimately, TROGE aims to challenge “...the implicit teleology and destructive constructions of progress in Western epistemologies” and remind viewers that the European perspective is not the only truth (Lingard, 2014). By layering Western concepts (geometric shapes and architectural depictions) upon the Australian landscape, Bennett reflects how European ideas have been forced upon Indigenous heritage. Furthermore, he relates to the Western perspective as an illusion, just like how Western art often sees the illusion of three-dimensional space made by the perspective lines (ngv, n/a). This illusion is heightened by the landscape and sky being painted in a style reflective of European Romantic art, where dramatically realistic portrayals of beauty and emotion are presented (ngv, n/a). Bennett disrupts this illusion metaphorically and physically by adding disparate diagrams, symbols and images (e.g. black footprints representing indigenous presence on the land), showing that many different mediums and forms, or perspectives, coexist. The impact European culture has had on indigenous people is showcased by each figure depicted: for example, in Requiem, the solemn face belongs to Trugannini (c.1812 - 1876), a Tasmanian Palawa woman, who is thought to be ‘the last…
The poem “I am Australian” relates to the concept of belonging to and national identity. Repetition of 'I Am Australian' reinforces this, imagery of the environment and creates a link between the nation and the self, and thus the person is intimately connected to the country. The Poem is about celebrating diversity in Australia, between the people and the land.…
The most important element is how the shape of the human is faded and is being constricted. The lack of colour in the artwork shows the depression and loneliness of Aboriginal Australians who were separated.…
In the novel, Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian the significant themes like ‘loss of self’, ‘division and integration of self’, ‘timelessness’, and ‘transcendence’ are recurrent in Xingjian’s writing. Xingjian brings these themes to life by the unique network of images, metaphors, and symbols which float throughout the text taking clear precedence over language. Xingjian expounds these images, knitting them into different patterns, putting those patterns into several clusters and then holding those clusters up in an intricate net. One such image cluster, abundantly found in his writing, deals with sexual liaisons. To explain these sexual instances, Xingjian takes aid of images rather than words. Words are descriptive and belong to the language where as the images belong to the reader. Running parallel to these sexual or psycho-sexual images, are the over powering waves of ‘energy’ with their respective crests and troughs. It is through these high and lows of energy that Xingjian illustrates how creativity emerges. Therefore, he clearly lifts his text up, reeling it away from the clasp of language, strong hold of words and dropping it slowly into the hands of the reader where the images, swirling with life, help evoke the reader’s senses. The reader the, becomes a willing partner in this expedition where his task is to decipher the image patterns, and their fluctuating energies.…