David Athan 12LJ

Year 12 Literature 2014 – Creative SAC

Reflective Commentary

My creative writing piece was inspired by Cate Kennedy’s Cold Snap from the collection of The Best
Australian Short Stories. It details the inner struggle of the protagonist and narrator, Jimmy, as his sense of
identity is challenged when the newcomer to the town – the unnamed ‘lady’ – establishes her place in the
town and attempts to impose her patronising and exploitative values on the village that Jimmy calls home. The
recurring concern explored in my short story is how we are affected by changes to our surroundings and
modes of being in relation to our role models and mentors. For the narrator, Jimmy who is a child and who in
my eyes is also characterised by some sort of mental handicap; changes to his environment are monumental
and confusing. When confronted by the foreign and unknown, the “blinking lights” at the “store,” Jimmy’s
reaction is physical as well as mental: his head “ache[s]” and he realises his disinclination to return to the
games store, compounded by his dad’s command, “Don’t go there,” and the “huffing” which connotes
disapproval. Just as Billy from Cold Snap sees his dad’s displeasure at the “atrocious waste of power” at the
“lady’s place”, “kicking the paling” because he sees his dad do so, what we see in Jimmy’s reaction is a
mirror or the authority figure in his life; when he sees his dad “huffing”, he tries as well, even if he does so
with a degree of detachment and incomprehensibility due to his mental state. In being confronted with the
change to their mode of life, both father figures react in disdain at this perceived intrusion; their attitudes are
passed down to their sons. For Billy, upon hearing that the people up the road are “loonies” from his dad, he
goes on to take this view on-board, even repeating to himself towards the end of the narrative “She was a
loony.” For Jimmy, his dad’s disapproval of the lady at the games store – evidenced in his unwillingness to
“wave back” – becomes manifest in Jimmy’s own personal disapproval of the lady as he similarly “didn’t”
wave back, expressing strong distaste in the internal monologue of his thoughts as he contradicts her
statements in his mind during her conversation with him.

It is in conversation that a key feature of Kennedy’s writing is evident in the internal voice of her narrator. As
befitting a child’s voice, Billy’s engaging narration is one that is minimalist in nature – he is predisposed to
making obvious and blatant descriptive comments on what he sees: “She had hair the colour of a fox”, “Her
eyes went all crinkly and happy again” and “She laughed like someone in a movie.” Kennedy does not express
Billy’s thoughts through direct statements such as ‘I feel’ or ‘I think’, rather, we as readers must infer the
narrator’s feelings through his comparisons to concrete things. Emotions and opinions are not directly stated,
rather, it is implied through Kennedy’s careful choice of similes. Thus when Billy states “Her eyes looked a
bit like Mr Bailey’s dog’s eyes inside the netting,” we can infer his dislike of the lady as this comparison
intimates the dogs’ feasting on rabbits as a metaphor for the lady’s greed and avarice for material gain.
Likewise, Jimmy’s voice similarly captures this childlike naivety in his comparisons to things he understands;
for him most pertinently, his obsession with building model planes. Thus in his mind, Jimmy is predisposed to
comparisons to some element of his hobby: “a car that was red…like…the nose cones of propeller caps” and
“huffing noises…like…my airbrush.” Furthermore, in Jimmy’s description of the lady as “tall and thin like a
pine tree but with less green,” we sense his disapproval as he draws on a natural metaphor to categorize her in
his mind, realizing eventually that she is unnatural in some way; she is “less green,” perhaps less genuine and
lacking the solidarity that Jimmy seeks with his black and white view of the world. The narratorial voice is
further developed towards this concept of naïve incomprehensibility in Jimmy’s inability to understand
idiomatic expressions. Just like Billy’s reply – “I didn’t have a cat” – in response to the idiom “has the cat got
your tongue?”, Jimmy reverts to a memory – “My dad used to have horses when he was small” in an attempt
to process the expression, “Hold your horses.” The result is a voice that is approachable and deeply engaging,
drawing the reader in to sympathise with Jimmy’s condition and introverted personality that has him
preferring the refuge of his “workshop” rather than interacting with his peers. Such a voice most pertinently
commands the attention of a young adult to teenage readership as this engaging naivety is appealing and
disarming to the reader. However, this voice does not restrict the readership merely to this target audience,
rather, older readers will find this story equally engaging as the themes of father-son bonding, together with
the intricacies of mental disability and parenting will appeal to more mature readers.

Structurally, I aimed to emulate the writing conventions that Kennedy uses throughout Cold Snap including
the overall shape of the narrative, together with punctuation and syntax. My short story is divided up into
large paragraphs in a similar manner to Cold Snap, separated by asterisks and within the large paragraphs,
indented at new moments and voices. Additionally, the tenses used within my short story are drawn from Cold
 David Athan 12LJ
Year 12 Literature 2014 – Creative SAC

Snap most notably in the opening of the narrative which begins in the present simple tense to create an
immediacy which is highly engaging and enables an easy establishment of the reader-character rapport. For
the rest of the narrative, the past simple tense is employed both for actual actions and also for the narrator’s
internal thoughts. The opening is also fundamentally similar in its execution; there is a lack of early extensive
character exposition or development of setting in a manner Steinbeck might employ. Instead, like Kennedy,
my narrator is thrust directly into the action of the short story. Character development, background
information and setting are introduced in a natural fashion throughout by means of the thoughts and memories
that are triggered by the narrator’s actions; this style of exposition is seen in Jimmy’s memory of his diseased
mother as being a “health nut” as triggered by seeing the “alcove…where the microwave used to be.” In
addition the overall gesture of the narrative is similar in the opening of the short story introducing the central
tension – in both short stories, the intrusion of the newcomer – the tension then building over the course of the
story in the repeated aberrations to Jimmy’s ordered way of life and then being resolved an act that eliminates
the lady and her threat to the village in the narrator’s eyes.

Through the tension between city life and village life, I attempted to illuminate Kennedy’s exploration of the
clash of viewpoints between older ways of life and the new and burgeoning realisation of materialism and
technology. Present throughout Cold Snap is the struggle Billy’s dad – as well as Billy himself – have in
relation to the development of “house” on top of the “hill”, together with the materialist attitudes of the city
people come to live in the village; people who “waste…power” and who live without a care for the
environment. We can appreciate the father’s anger at their actions as he brands the lady a “bloody wacker” for
her destruction of the natural environment, together with Billy’s angst and sense of helplessness at the
“biggest trees” that are “cut” and left to die slowly. In my short story, I aimed to draw upon similar tensions
but in a subtler manner. Jimmy – like Billy who is focussed on trapping rabbits – is obsessed with his hobby
of building model planes. However, jarring against this hobby is the attraction of technology in video games
that the lady who establishes the E.B. Games store offers. We can see this most explicitly as the kids at school
begin playing games on their various gaming devices purchased from this new shop. Billy understandably is
frustrated and challenged deeply when this new pastime clashes with the peace and quiet of his domain in the
library; he can no longer engage his own pursuits. Furthermore, the tension between Billy’s father’s
traditionalistic profession as a shoemaker and the woman’s fancy ideas of “Myers” and shopping “complexes”
from the city is evident in her somewhat reductive reply in response to the knowledge of Billy’s father’s job:
“How smashing!” Ultimately, in the dark ending of Cold Snap where through Billy’s prompting, the woman’s
greed has a hand in bringing about her death at the hands of nature itself, Kennedy suggests that it is nature
that will eventually regain the upper hand; if we are greedy and self-focussed, we can bring about our own
downfall. Likewise, in my creative short story, we see a similar concept in her own culpability in her death.
While clearly both narrators are responsible to a great extent – Billy through his manipulation and deception –
and Jimmy, through his setting up of a deadly trap, what is suggested is that destruction is brought about by
our own hand when we do not seek to co-exist in a new environment and instead seek to exploit and to
patronizingly take ownership. For Jimmy, his tolerance of the woman reaches its breaking point in the store
when he sees Mr Roberts in a state he cannot fully understand but that unsettles him to the point that what he
sees in Roberts reminds him of the suffering possum from the pine grove. In his mind, Jimmy connects the
lady and Roberts; Roberts becomes the defenseless “possum” and the lady becomes the threat, the “fox” that
can wreak havoc and that needs to be eliminated. However, Jimmy certainly understands the meaning of the
lady’s visit to Mr Roberts; for him the realization that the lady is after the model shop for building space, tips
him over the edge. Together with Mr Robert’s reaction to the news, we can understand the clear-cut need for a
solution that removes the lady from the village as manifest in Jimmy’s mind.

The ending is an amalgamation of hopefulness and discomfort as it is in Kennedy’s short story. The lady is no
longer a threat to Jimmy, the games store is gone, and life can go on as normal in Jimmy’s mind: the “Avro”
awaits his construction. Yet the ending is complicated by our realisation of the dubious moral implications of
Jimmy’s act – similar to our reaction to Billy’s manipulation in Cold Snap. We can see the Jimmy’s mental
condition in the detachment of his response to the events he puts into action; he can only see the woman as the
“introduced species” that needs removal for peace and order to be re-instated. However, what is common to
both short stories is our seeming inability to condemn the narrator; over the course of the story we are drawn
in to sympathize and engage with his voice. Thus when the brutal end is carried out, we are left secretly
 David Athan 12LJ
Year 12 Literature 2014 – Creative SAC

cheering Jimmy in his success at liberating his village from the influence of the ambiguous “lady” of the
story.