On The Jellicoe Road Identity Essay

This novel, ‘On the Jellicoe road’, written by Melina Marchetta, is about a 17- year old girl called Taylor Markham, who is the leader of the boarders at the Jellicoe school. She was left at a 7-11 by her mother when she was eleven years old and has never known anything about her family except for the faint childhood memories she has of her mother. Taylor is under a lot of pressure catering to everyone’s’ needs in the boarding house as she’s not a people person, as well as trying to fight the territory wars against Chaz Santangelo and Jonah Griggs, someone she thought she would never see again. At the same time trying to figure out the mysterious stories of her past and how these are related to the strange boy in her dream. While this is all happening, Hannah, the closest person she has ever had to a mother, has disappeared. Taylor has to piece together the parts of her life with the help of her new friends from the townies and cadets in order to find the whereabouts of her mother, her own identity, and what actual happened on that tragic night many years ago.
This text showed me how important identity is to every individual person and that it is something that we just take for granted.
Identity is an important theme in, On the Jellicoe road, as Taylor had to change her identity many times when travelling with her mother and once she was older she had no idea of all the connections that were around her. It is not until the very end, where all the identities are revealed, that Taylor is able to put together the 5 character’s in Hannah’s manuscript to find out who Hannah, Jude, Fitz, Tate, and Webb really were. This made it difficult when she was growing up since she didn’t know she had so many people to rely
on. When Taylor speaks about the time spent with her mother in Sydney, she tells us about how she was given a different identity every time they moved. As only a small child, Taylor would fear that she was going to forget her own identity so she would lie in bed every night and repeat to herself, “My name is Taylor Markham.” This impacted me personally as it made me think about how much I take my own identity and family for granted. I’ve always known where I come from, who my family is, who I am, and I’ve always had somewhere to call home. Taylor Markham didn’t have any of this, only a few faint memories and knowledge of a connection somewhere between her mother and the closest person she’s ever had to a mother, Hannah. This text made me think about how different every person’s identity is and what actually makes up an identity. Taylor lives her whole life not knowing where she has come from or any of her relations but in some ways this is who she is and it creates the person she is today.
Every single person in the world has an identity, but not everyone has family so I think that it is not just the people around us contributing to our identity but the choices we make and the actions we take. An identity can be anything to do with an individual; the colour of their skin, hair, what they enjoy or are good at it, the choices they make, any detail no matter how big or small, makes up an identity. Everyone in the world is generally judged on their identity, depending on their race, the colour of their skin, what they wear or what they enjoy, someone will always disagree with you. Therefore this text has taught me how important it is to not try and be what everyone else wants you to be and just be who you want to be as that is your identity and no one and take that from you. Taylor never worried about what people thought of her and decided she was going to lead the boarding house and territory wars how she thought would be best, not worrying what the others thought of her. Not only is it important to not worry about people judging you on your identity but you must actually form relationships and trust people for your true identity to show. Once Taylor found people, besides Hannah, who actually cared for her and vice versa, she began to let down some of her walls and we got glimpses of her true identity under the cover of the hurt and betrayal she had felt for so long after being abandoned.
This would be an ideal novel for a year 12 student to read as the main characters are all around our age so are easy to relate to. We can learn from the messages given by the characters in this text about accepting our own identity for what it is or what we want it to be, not what others want it to be. This will help us immensely in the future as we will be able to base our own lives around what we want and what lifestyle is best suited for us rather than what others think is best for us. This will help us to follow our dreams and achieve our goals. The level of language used and ideas formed make us think and they challenge our brains to make connections at points so is a really good text to get a year 12 student thinking without being hugely challenging. It would be of interest to a variety of year 12 student as it involves action, mystery, and romance therefore interests a wide range of people.
Jess Nicholson