STUDENT NO.: …..……..………..………….………………….

English Standard
2020 HSC Trial Examination
Paper 1 – Texts and Human Experiences
Stimulus Booklet

Section I
• Text 1 – Picture book extract
• Text 2 – Poem
• Text 3 – Feature article
• Text 4 – Fiction extract

Section II
• List of prescribed text
Section I

Text 1 – Picture book extract

GARY CREW AND SHAUN TAN

Extract from Memorial
2
Text 2 – Poem

The Old Familiar Faces

I have had playmates, I have had companions,

In my days of childhood, in my joyful school – days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,

Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies, 1
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;

Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her –
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;

Like an ingrate,2 I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood.

Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,

Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces –

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

CHARLES LAMB

1
cronies – close friends or companions (informal)
2
ingrate – an ungrateful person

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Text 3 – Feature article

Your life, your story

medicSA’s managing editor Heather Millar also works as a
volunteer with palliative care patients to record their memoirs. Here
she explores the benefits of telling your life story.

It was shortly before my father died that I recorded his memoirs and made them
into a book. Difficult though the process was, it ignited something in me. I went
on to volunteer in the Biography Program at Calvary’s Mary Potter Hospice,
recording the stories of people in palliative care. 1

I have witnessed firsthand the value people get from reviewing their life in this
way. I have seen them light up as they relate their stories. It seems to be a
process of making sense of one’s life – was it a good one? Did I do it well? Did
I live it fully? Was it something, in the end? Recording their story and having it
written down leaves behind evidence that they existed and that perhaps their life
was meaningful in some way.

My father jotted his stories down in spidery handwriting on the back of a pile of
used envelopes. It was a towering stack by the time we got around recording
them. Having lived on his own for the last years of his life after my mother died,
this act of recording his memories gave him a reason to get up in the morning - a
sense of purpose.

Purpose has in fact been found to be a defining feature in mental health.

Researchers from the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Centre in Chicago tracked
1000 people over seven years, with the average age of around 80. They found
that people who had a high level of purpose were more than twice as likely to
remain free from Alzheimer’s, had 30% less cognitive decline and half the
mortality rate. They also found a strong sense of purpose created more
satisfaction and happiness, better physical functioning, and better sleep.

But why wait until people are palliative? Perhaps this kind of life examination
through the process of self-reflection can add value throughout our lives?

There are certainly health benefits – albeit anecdotal – according to biographers

who work in the area. Paul English is a videographer of life stories, and
president of Life Stories Australia, a professional association of personal
historians.

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palliative care – care for those with little to no chance of recovery, and are expected to die
4
 “Telling your story can help validate your life, career and achievements,” says
Paul. “Not only can it be tremendously cathartic and help to lift mood, but also
serve as a wonderful way of connecting the generations, acting as a sort of
conversation starter between grandparent and grandchild.

“Even documenting a person’s career as they come to retirement can be

tremendously worthwhile and provide a transition into the next stage of their
life. We’ve done life story videos for people as young as 50 and 60 and all the
way into their 90’s.”

When people pass away, so often their stories die with them. The older I have
become, the more I want to know about my grandparents and great-grandparents
and how they lived.

In another study, a team of psychologists from Emory University in Atlanta,

USA, measured children’s resilience and found that those who knew the most
about their family history were best able to handle stress, had a stronger sense of
control over their lives and higher self-esteem. The reason: these children had a
stronger sense of ‘intergenerational self’ – i.e., they understood that they
belonged to something bigger than themselves.

HEATHER MILLAR
Extract from Your life, your story

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Text 4 – Fiction extract

La Spezia 1 came, and the mincing sea.

France brought Mediterranean ports and hotel rooms with a view of dank light
wells where night arrived at half-past three. On the wall, turquoise roses as large as
frisbees bloomed on baleful trellises 2. Sometimes there was carpet there instead –
the same brown moquette 3 that exerted a squelching suction underfoot.

The richly pink walls that in Rome had summoned berries now looked to Laura like
boiled beetroot. It was just as well that along with a change of jeans and the sturdy
merino jumpers of home, her backpack held a small library, even if the feeble
wattage she encountered everywhere was opposed to books. A shuttered villa
flanked by cypress candles might have been only hostile if it hadn’t called up the
brittle modern heroines, bravely rouged, of domed Katherine Mansfield. Laura
could only envy their predicaments, the nerves that caused them to suffer and
bound them to webs of human intrigue, as she grasped a paperback with woolly
paws in a marble park. In every direction, leafless perspectives delivered lectures
on fearful symmetry. The trees had been hacked about by someone who preferred
statues. Trees and statues alike stood frozen in the wind that has set off in Russia
and rushed straight down the Rhone Valley. Why did people come to the south of
France for winter? Laura lifted her eyes to the hills and found them blue with cold.

Well muffled, she walked about the steep streets behind the seafront as the long
evening descended, waiting for the hour when she might decently dine. Windows
opening on to the street allowed her to catch the crash of cutlery or game-show
laughter. She came to a square and looked up at the balconies, each with its
crocheted iron. Here are there, where a lamp had been lit in the room behind, a
tense chair showed or a mirror in a golden frame. But no one opened the glass doors
and stepped out among the empty window boxes to say, ‘But who are you,
mademoiselle 4? You simply must come up and join us!’

In a sinister boulevard lined with bars and ugly shops, lonely North Africans hissed.
Stranded in jackets, dreadfully checked, over shiny-kneed trousers, they lacked
consequence. They might have been characters plucked from a story of family and
politics and consigned to a footnote – even the jut of their cheekbones was
mournful. At the going down of the sun they were observed gazing south from sea-
view parks, restrained by balustrades from darkening water.

MICHELLE DE KRETSER
Extract adapted from Questions of Travel

1
La Spezia – Italian port city
2
trellis – wooden on metal framework which supports fruit trees or other plants
3
moquette – thick fabric
4
mademoiselle – French for ‘Miss’

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Section II

The prescribed texts for Section II are:

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

Poetry
• Dobson, Rosemary, Rosemary Dobson Collected: ‘Young Girl at a Window’, ‘Over the Hill’,
‘Summer’s End’, ‘The Conversation’, ‘Cock Crow’, ‘Amy Caroline’, ‘Canberra Morning’,
• Slessor, Kenneth, Selected Poems: ‘Wild Grapes’, ‘Gulliver’, ‘Out of Time’, ‘Vesper-Song
of the Reverend Samuel Marsden’, ‘William Street’, ‘Beach Burial’

Drama
• Harrison, Jane, Rainbow’s End
• Miller, Arthur, The Crucible

Shakespearean Drama
• Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice

Nonfiction
• Winton, Tim, 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’
• Yousafzai, Malala & Lamb, Christina, I am Malala

Film
• Daldry, Stephen, Billy Elliot

Media
• O’Mahoney, Ivan, Go Back to Where You Came From – Series 1, Episodes 1, 2 and 3
and The Response
• Walker, Lucy, Waste Land

End of examination

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