English Standard

General Instructions
● Reading time – 10 minutes
● Working time – 1 hour and 30 minutes
● Write using black pen

Text 2 – Essay

I was never particularly kind to my grandfather. He was my mother’s father, and he lived with us when I was a teenager. I remember him coming into the lounge room one night, and when he went to sit down, I said to my brother, “I hope he doesn’t sit down.” I didn’t think my grandfather understood much English, but he understood enough, and as I watched, he straightened up again, and without a word, returned to his room. I was 12 years old. 

My grandfather wrote poetry on great rolls of thin white paper with a paintbrush. He offered to read and explain his poems to me several times over the years, but I only let him do it once. I’d let my Chinese go by then, which made listening to him too much of an effort. Though I was raised speaking Chinese, it wasn’t long before I lost my language skills. I spoke English all day at school, listened to English all night on TV. I didn’t see the point of speaking Chinese. We lived in Australia. 

Monday to Friday, Grandad went to the city, dressed in a suit with a waistcoat, a hat, and carrying his walking stick. He would take the bus to the station, the train to the city, the tram to Little Bourke Street. On Mondays, he’d be sitting at a large round table at Dragon Boat Restaurant with other old Chinese men. Tuesdays to Fridays, he was at a small square table by himself with a pot of tea and the Chinese newspaper. I watched him leave in the morning and come back in the afternoon, as punctual and as purposeful as any school kid or office worker, for years. 

At the funeral, my sadness was overshadowed by a sense of regret. I’d denied my grandfather the commonest of kindnesses. I was 16 years old. I am now 26. A few weeks ago, during a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant, the waiter complimented my mum on the fact that I was speaking to her in Chinese. The waiter told mum with a sigh that his own kids could barely string a sentence together in Chinese. Mum told the waiter I had stopped speaking Chinese a few years into primary school, but that I had suddenly started up again in my late teens. 

Whenever I am stuck for a word, I ask her. Whenever I am with her, or relatives, or a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, or a sales assistant at a Chinese department store, I practise. I am constantly adding new words to my Chinese vocabulary, and memorising phrases I can throw into a conversation at will. It is an organic way of relearning a language. Text books and teachers are not necessary since I am only interested in mastering the spoken word. I am not interested in the written word or in the many elements of Chinese culture of which I am ignorant. I am not trying to “discover my roots”. I am simply trying to ensure that the next time an elderly relative wants me to listen to them, I am not only willing, I am able. 

Text 4 – Poem

The Door 

Go and open the door. 

Maybe outside there’s a tree, or a wood, a garden, or a magic city. 

Go and open the door. 

Maybe a dog’s rummaging. Maybe you’ll see a face, or an eye, or the picture 

of a picture. 

Go and open the door. 

If there’s a fog it will clear. 

Go and open the door. 

Even if there’s only the darkness ticking, even if there’s only the hollow wind, even if nothing is there, go and open the door. 

At least there’ll be a draught. 

Miroslav Holub 

Text 5 – Short Story

She crept gingerly across to the window, and waited. Her thin shoulders rising and falling with every lethargic breath she took. Weighted down by a black shawl, which lay draped across her feeble frame, she blended well into the shadows of the dim room. For the last two months she wore the same shawl: intricate black cotton, with a small gold pin – the pin he gave her, tucked delicately among its folds. For the last two months, she stood by the window until the very last ray of a waning sun was engulfed by the night sky. She wanted to smell the familiar fumes from his blue jeep, which had signalled his return from work on any other day. She didn’t want to accept what had happened, just like the way she was towards everything. 

Time flies, hurrying by like the birds I observe. High; out of reach; unstoppable. The cherry of her lips, plump and soft; the smoothness of her fingers, supple and slender…they once were. Her lips, now pale, parched, lean painfully on shrivelled skin. Her frail hands lifted from her side, where she played with the fabric of her skirt. Gnarled hands etched with memories, tracing the folds like a piece of driftwood lighting the tide. Everything has aged by the wand of time. 

A troupe of sons and daughters often intruded her reticent world offering their sympathy, their open arms. They hugged her, consoled her, and advised her to forget. She became lost in a world she now calls her own. She did not know what or how to feel. Time has erased any traces of recollection of what life was without him. Their lives had been inextricably fused as one. The laughs they shared, the trials they encountered…life had been such a joy. Those same parched lips lifted into a faint smile. In the reminiscent airways of her mind, the reel of the past has started to unwind once again. She’d be entranced by his passionate gaze as the words “I wish everything would be the way they are at this moment” were uttered from her cherry lips. She’d take photos – countless in number, just so to capture the memories they were creating. 

Those are all she has now. Her glazed eyes surveyed the mantelpiece above the fireplace, halting incessantly in great longing at a time no more. Every photo is encased as tightly as its possessor wished to have held on to the memories it captured. There is an array of wrought-iron frames lined up with such precision, one row mirrored the uniformity of the next. They had been intimate lovers, doting parents… savoured despair gradually seeped through her gaunt sockets. These all so many “had beens” penetrated her with the reality of the present. 

All so suddenly, the cancer just rotted him away. She was petrified in the last few months of his life. She didn’t want to accept what was happening. “These things never happened to good people like us!” she’d wail in tears. 

She did her best to preserve the traces which symbolled his existence. His shoes were polished, just like she did every Sunday evening. His cologne sprayed on his every shirt after dry-cleaning. But those attempts had all been in vain. Those same caring sons and daughters snatched what they could in their race to relieve their mother of her supposed burden. “Reminders,” they called them, horrified, eyebrows raised in such a manner, which suggested these vile “reminders” should not be tolerated any longer. His shirts, pants, shoes, belts…became all but crumpled in the boot of a car. “Who would wear them now?”, they reasoned as she protested. “He’s gone now”, they reminded her ever so gently. 

And now she’s alone. Thrust into a world she does not want to be in. Yet, it had been inevitable. And that’s what life is. 

Text 6 – Poem

Midway along our road of life I woke to find myself in a secret dark wood, for I had lost the narrow path. To evoke 

what it was like – how hard, I barely could, This wood was savage, dense and strange! The thought of it renews those fears that I withstood, 

a place so bitter, only to be caught in death is worse, Yet there I found my share of good, so now I’ll tell what else it brought. 

I cannot rightly say how I came there, I was so drugged with sleep the moment when I lost the true way, wandering unaware, 

Yet when… I looked up, saw the hill’s wings with their clean early light cast from the planet whose sight leads men straightly on every road. The scene 

diminished and I felt the force of fright lessen in the lake of my heart, that fear I felt so piteously throughout the night. 

Dante Alighieri, Italian (1265-1321) 

Section II

20 marks

Attempt question 1

Allow about 45 minutes for this section

Your answer will be assessed on how well you:
– demonstrate understanding of human experiences in texts
– analyse, explain and assess the ways human experiences are represented in texts
– organise, develop and express ideas using language appropriate to audience, purpose and context

Question 1 (20 marks)

‘Composers shape our view of the human experience.’

Discuss this statement with close reference to your prescribed text, as well as one text from Section 1.

• Drama

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

– Arthur Miller, The Crucible

– William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

• 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