Student Number

2019

Trial HSC Examination

English Advanced
Paper 1 – Texts and Human Experiences
Stimulus Booklet for Section 1
and List of prescribed texts for Section II
Pages

• Text 1- Poem ………………………………….. 2

• Text 2 – Website ……………………………… 3 - 4
• Text 3 – Fiction Extract ………………………. 5

Se enter text
• List of prescribed texts ……………………… 6 - 7

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 This paper MUST NOT be removed from the examination room.

Section I

Text 1 - Poem

Keep This to Yourself

There are country roads now that are empty.

They’ll hold on to the light of the day
A bit longer, mindful some boy
May be heading home after a game.

Whoever he is, he’ll have to hurry.

This lovely moment won’t last long.
The road before him lies white
Here and there under the dark trees,

As if some mad girl in the neighbourhood

Had emptied her linen closet
And had been spreading her things
Over the soft late summer dust.

Charles Simic

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Text 2 – Website

Street Snapshot Craze

Our exhibition at the Museum of Sydney explores the heyday of this once popular but now
forgotten genre of photography.

Picture this: you and a friend are walking down a city footpath amid the lunchtime crowd. Suddenly a
smiling man in a suit and tie with camera in hand steps forward and offers you a card. It reads: Your
photograph has just been taken. You put it in your pocket or purse and continue on your way. The
encounter is over in an instant; the photographer has slipped back into the stream of passers‑by and set
his sights on his next mark. The following day, eager to see your picture, you hand over your card at a
photo kiosk and peer through a magnifying glass at your image on the proof sheet. Satisfied, you order a
copy, or maybe two – one for you and one for your friend.

Street photographers were a familiar part of central Sydney life from the 1930s to the late 1950s.
Armed with small portable cameras and positioned in key places around the city, they photographed
hundreds of pedestrians each day, foisting themselves into people’s paths to try to capture a sale.
Emerging at a time when personal cameras were rare, these inexpensive black-and-white
postcard-sized photos were hugely popular, and quickly became a lucrative business. At the height of

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the craze, in the mid-1930s, over 10,000 people in NSW were buying photos from street photography
companies every week.

Text 2 - continued

Probably few people in Sydney have escaped being ‘snapped’ by the street photographer. He
frequents the busy thoroughfares at all times of the day and has become as well known as the
policeman on beat duty … – The Argus (Melbourne), 29 April 1937

Unlike studio photography, where people formally ‘sit’ for their portrait, street photographers often
caught their subjects unaware, mid-stride as they went about their day. See yourself ‘as others see you’,
urged a card from one company. The public loved it – and as pedestrians and photographers became
more comfortable with each other, people increasingly posed for their ‘candid’ photos. As their
numbers swelled, street photographers came to be seen as a nuisance: people complained about
footpaths blocked by those posing, while others objected to being pestered in the streets and their
photograph taken without permission.

The snappers

Usually engaged by one of the many firms who developed and sold the prints – including Leicagraph Co,
– street photographers were provided with a camera and a day’s supply of film. One photographer
working outside a bank on George Street during the 1940s took 500 snaps each day.

Although companies advertised that negatives were kept ‘indefinitely’, very few original films survive –
most were discarded when firms went out of business. Remarkably, a roll of film shot in 1940 by Ted
Waight, has survived. A selection of these images offers a rare insight into how the photographers
worked and the public’s unpredictable response to them.

City of a million faces

Turn the pages of old photo albums or dig around in a shoebox of black-and-white family snaps and
you’re likely to come across at least one street photograph, the photographic firm’s name stamped on
the back. With the street photography phenomenon spanning several decades, the number of these
images could be in the millions – a vast private archive of people from all walks of life, and an incredible
record of Sydney.

A public call-out by Sydney Living Museums has brought to light a wonderful selection of these photos,
with over 1500 images contributed by people from far and wide, including many from SLM members.
Featured in the exhibition are over 250 digitised and enlarged images that collectively give a glimpse
into the everyday life of the city during the Depression, World War II and postwar years.

Thank you to our members and the public for the overwhelming response to our call-out for photos, which

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is now closed.

Adapted from: https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/street-snapshot-craze

Text 3 - Fiction extract

Boy Swallows Universe

The crack in Slim’s windscreen looks like a tall and armless stickman bowing to royalty. The
crack in Slim’s windscreen looks like Slim. His windscreen wipers have smeared a rainbow
of old dirt over to my passenger side. Slim says a good way for me to remember the small
details of my life is to associate moments and visions with things on my person or things in
my regular waking life that I see and smell and touch often. Body things, bedroom things,
kitchen things. This way I will have two reminders of any given detail for the price of one.

That’s how Slim beat Black Peter. That’s how Slim survived the hole. Everything had two
meanings, one for here, here being where the was then, cell D9, 2 Division, Boggo Road
Gaol, and another for there, that boundless and unlocked universe expanding in his head
and his heart. Nothing in the herebut four green concrete walls and darkness upon darkness
and his lone and stationary body. An angle iron and steel mesh bed welded to a wall. A
toothbrush and a pair of cloth prison slippers. But a cup of old milk slid through a cell door
slot by a silent screw took him there, to Ferny Grove in the 1930s, the lanky young farmhand
milking cows on the outskirts of Brisbane. A forearm scar became a portal to a boyhood
bike ride. A shoulder sunspot was a wormhole to the beaches of the Sunshine Coast. One
rub and he was gone. An escaped prisoner here in D9. Pretend free but never on the run,
which was as good as how he’d been before they threw him in the hole, real free but always
on the run.

He’d thumb the peaks and valleys of his knuckles and they would take him there, to the hills
of the Gold Coast hinterland, take him all the way to Springbrook Falls, and the cold steel
prison bed frame of cell D9 would become a water-worn limestone rock, and the prison
hole’s cold concrete floor beneath his bare feet summer-warm water to dip his toes into, and
he would touch his cracked lips and remember how it felt when something as soft and as
perfect as Irene’s lips reached his, how she took all his sins and all his pain away with her
quenching kiss, washed him clean like Springbrook Falls washed him clean with all that
white water bucketing on his head.

I’m more than a little concerned that Slim’s prison fantasies are becoming mine. Irene
resting on that wet and mossy emerald boulder, naked and blonde, giggling like Marilyn
Monroe, head back and loose and powerful, master of any man’s universe, keeper of
dreams, a vision there to stick round for here, to let the anytime blade of a smuggled shiv
wait another day.

‘I had an adult mind,’ Slim always says. That’s how he beat Black Peter, Boggo Road’s
underground isolation cell. They threw him in that medieval box for fourteen days during a
Queensland summer heatwave. They gave him half a loaf of bread to eat across two weeks.
They gave him four, maybe five cups of water.

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 - Trent Dalton

Section II

The prescribed texts for Section II are:

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 - Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
● Prose Fiction - Amanda Lohrey, Vertigo
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Favel Parrett, Past the Shallows

–– Rosemary Dobson, Rosemary Dobson Collected

The prescribed poems are:
● Poetry
​ * Young Girl at a Window
​ * Over the Hill
​ * Summer’s End
​ * The Conversation
​ * Cock Crow
​ * Amy Caroline
​ * Canberra Morning

- Kenneth Slessor, Selected Poems

The prescribed poems are:

​ * Wild Grapes
​ * Gulliver
​ * Out of Time
​ * Vesper-Song of the Reverend Samuel Marsden
​ * William Street
​ * Beach Burial

– Jane Harrison, Rainbow’s End, from Vivienne Cleven et al.,

Contemporary Indigenous Plays– Arthur Miller, The Crucible

● Drama – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

​ Section II continues on page 7

Section II prescribed texts (continued)

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 • Nonfiction – Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain

​ * Havoc: A Life in Accidents

​ * Betsy
​ * Twice on Sundays
​ * The Wait and the Flow
​ * In the Shadow of the Hospital
​ * The Demon Shark
​ * Barefoot in the Temple of Art

– Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, I am Malala

​
● Film ​ – Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot

● Media – Ivan O’Mahoney

* Go Back to Where You Came From

– Series 1: Episodes 1, 2 and 3

​ And
​
​ * The Response
​

– Lucy Walker, Waste Land

​ End of Section II
​

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