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    8 views18 pages

    BC-2009-Boomer Dreaming - Part 2

    Uploaded by

    German
    Consolidating Register and Genre

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
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    of 18
    Boomer dreaming 269 Finally, just half an hour after the waves hit, the water was cleared of bobbing heeds and waving arms, and it was time to take stock: 250 people had necded the lifesavers to pull them out, of| whom 210 were OK once back on land Thicty-five needed mouth to mouth to be restored to consciousness, while five people perised. “To summarise then, FitzSimons foregrounds appreciation over judgement and affect, and makes liberal use of force to dramatise events, So the text Is about the kind of day it was, not in the first instance about how people reacted emotionally or how well or badly they behaved. The point of the story thus seems to involve the historical significance ofthe day ~ its value as a piece of history. And this stance is foregrounded in trite phrasing ‘verging on lexicalisation as far as history making is concerned. ‘And so there they lie, happily sweltering in the summer sun on Australia ‘most famous beach, just 65 they have for so many generations past ‘Ab, but those 35,000 Sydneysiders who were lying in those very spots on he_afternoon of February 6, 1928 surely felt equally at peace The day was, in the vernacular of the time, a stinker, [At theee otlock thete was stil not the slightest clu that this afternoon would forever_be known as ‘Black Sunday’ in the annals of Sydney Inthe Jong snd glorious history, tis stil stands as the finest hour ofthe ‘Australian lferaving movement. For Even the connectives (And so... Ah but... For.) seem to flag a long term clegise view, particularly FitzSimons' sigh of resignation (Ah) as he moves from his intermodal present to the past tense of his tale. [At this point let's move inter-modally, and consider the way in which the two images position us in relation to the alignments just considered ‘As noted above there are two pictures, positioned as Given to the left of the verbiage (New), FitzSimons’ portrait above the landscape is Ideal with the beach photo below as Real. The beach landscape is itself polarised into Ideal (sky) and Real (land and sea), and FiteSimons is positioned to the right ofthe top image in New position. In short then horizontally speaking wwe have the familiar beach and columnist as Given and the story as news: vertically FitzSimons is an oracular Ideat to the landscape's Real, and the sky i Ideal in relation tothe people on the beach as Real. These information values are outlined in Figure 12.3, [As far as representational meaning is concerned the FitzSimons portrait is analytic. He is bald, with a fall beard, closely trimmed, and an open 270 Text Type and Texture Ga——+ N Pau kicker FitzSimons pate sky ; text ona Beach proto R R besch —— Figure 12.3 Information values ~ [desl vs. Real, Given vs. New necked shirt; there is no citcumstantiation, If we needed reminding, the portrait confirms that this is im fact the Peter FiteSimons, a well known sports journalist and pay TV commentator, who played rugby for Australia In his sporting prime TThe beach landscape conversely has litle attribution, since individual participants are barely distinguishable; but there is rich circumstantiation for the sky (with feathery clouds), the sea (smal surf and a few bathers), the beach (with many sunbathers) and the buildings on the border between land and sky. The orientation of the people and blankets on the beach along with the north of the beach and suburbs compose release vectors (ower left to upper right);'these are counter-balanced by hold vectors (lower right to upper let) construed by the sea and feathery clouds in the sky. From a narrative perspective, the vectors thus oppose man and nature, more specifically people's urge to get into the water contained by the sea incursion into the curving sand. Interpersonally,FitzSimons’ portrait isa close shot (head and shoulders), font on, level with the viewer and involving eye contact and a smile ~ rendering him a trusty friend. The landscape on the other hand is a long, shot, from an oblique angle, positioning viewers well above the beach and involving no eye contact or affect — a very distancing effect. | Boomer dreaming 271 Blue colour cohesion resonstes across the landscape sky and the portrait, (loud saturated blue in the landscape, more muted in the portrait. Intermodatly the blue ofthe portrait is picked up typographically by Peter FitzSimons’ name in the Kicker, and the green of the sea is similarly replayed on the word in in the placeintime title of the column on the portrait. The general ambient effect is 2 cool Ideal in relation to the lightness of the sand on the beach (the Real} Imagically speaking then the overall effect is cool, calm and distanced, with FiteSimons himself as a warm engaging guide. This foregrounds the ‘order restored over the calamity described, and reinforces the historically distanced stance FitzSimons constructs for us in the verbal text through appraisal resources. The order construed by the images can also be read as

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