The Little Refugee

The Little Refugee – Multimedia Text
1. The Little Refugee is a multimedia text. This book is a great example of belonging due to the representation of Anh Do and his family moving from Vietnam to Australia and belonging into the Australian culture. I chose this article because of the several aspects of belonging represented in this text. These aspects include social belonging, cultural belonging and just the overall acceptance in a new country. Anh has many difficulties during his life in Australia but with his parent’s encouragement he succeeds and becomes the person he visualised to be.
2. Meaning was created on how Anh Do and his family fit into the Australian society after fleeing from their own country war-torn Vietnam in a small boat. But nothing - not murderous pirates, nor the imminent threat of death by hunger, disease or dehydration as they drifted for days could quench their desire to make a better life in a country where freedom existed. This cultural difficulty deprived Anh in a way where it affected his confidence and ability to maintain relationships in the real world. Anh did not find belonging into Australia when they had arrived due to cultural differences and as a result it socially showed rejection and denial. The biggest consequence suffered was that he was not able to fit in at school causing a downturn in academically because Anh had no hope.
3. the composer creates the meaning of belonging by a range of techniques. These techniques relate to the social, cultural, historical differences and the hardship of Anh interacting with people, places and a new world. These techniques are demonstrated by literacy and visual pictures. Emotive language has been used in this text to convey an emotion. This technique brings out what he feels about his circumstances. Anh states that he was terrified about the sky storm and the waves. Adjectives are used to describe and highlight the definition of how Anh felt and what he saw. An example used by Anh when describing his emotions were “sky turned black”, “angry storm” and “Giant waves”. The text structure is another way of simplifying the story by using simple sentences presented in short paragraphs, its structure shows a children’s story with drawn illustrations. These pictures have strong influence on readers by giving us empathy, compassion and understanding within the characters. These can be seen by close up facial expressions drawn to portray Anhs’ emotions as well as the other people on board. The effect of using first person in his literacy makes us feel as though we are a part of the story as an audience. He includes dialogue with his parents quoting what his mum had said and how he replies to her. The terms used in the book are, “I”, “she”, “my”, “them”, “his” and “our” as well as many more examples. Figurative language has also been used to describe not accepting as true but designed to present an idea. For example, Anh quotes “the fishermen jumped on board our boat”. Physically we understand the fishermen don’t truly jump on board but it helps us accept the idea.