HSC Advanced English
Module C, Elective 2: Representing People and Landscapes
Sample response: Ten Canoes
The question
‘Experience of landscape may be diverse, but the influence on identity
is always profound.’
Evaluate this statement with detailed reference to your prescribed text
and ONE other related text of your own choosing.
What it
requires
• The suggestion is that while landscapes affect people in a variety of
ways, the constant is the effect on people’s sense of identity, their
sense of themselves and how they fit.
• The word ‘evaluate’ requires that a value judgement be made about
the statement in relation to the prescribed text and ONE other
chosen text. This question does not specify, but the module
requires students to ‘demonstrate understanding of and evaluate
the relationship between representation and meaning’.
Prescribed text: Ten Canoes directed by Rolf de Heer, 2006 (film)
Related text: ‘Australia’ by A. D. Hope (poem)
Response by: Derek Peat
Introduction
opens with
thesis
statements,
directly linking
to question,
and
introducing
texts
Landscape affects individuals in many different ways and cultural
background is an important factor in this. The experience of landscape
not only affects the way we feel about the land but also about ourselves
in relation to it. Rolf de Heer’s film Ten Canoes suggests that the
Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land’s symbiotic relationship with their
landscape creates their sense of identity and remains an integral part of
their culture. A.D. Hope’s poem ‘Australia’, on the other hand, suggests
that while the landscape is recognised as both powerful and awesome for
white Australians who compare it to the European landscape, it remains
alien to them as they fail to recognise its potential and their own.
Topic sentence
links to
question
Ten Canoes begins by suggesting that the landscape itself is an integral
part of the world of the people of Arnhem Land. After an opening
sequence in which the camera tracks, in a bird’s eye shot, above the
landscape with only diegetic sound we cut to a close up of rain on gum
leaves (the importance of water is already evident) and then to a high
level shot, now lower down but also tracking, more slowly, a mighty
river as we hear the narrator’s first words, ‘Once upon a time in a land,
far, far away …’. This allusion to Star Wars is ironic for an Australian
audience who have recognised that the landscape, the sounds of the
native birds and the names in the opening titles of the Aboriginal actors,
are clearly Australian, and the narrator admits as much: ‘Not like that.
I’m only joking!’ The second irony is that this film is quite different to
what the audience is used to. The narrator makes a distinction between
his story and the world of the audience: ‘I am going to tell you a story.
It’s not your story, it’s my story, a story like you’ve never seen before.’
Detailed
analysis of
cinematographic
techniques
suggests how
the
relationship
between
landscape and
people is
established in
the film
Textual
evidence
selected for
relevance to
thesis, used to
build a line of
argument,
while
concluding
sentence links
back to thesis
The story will be ‘seen’, the verb is significant, and it will be about his
people. As the sequence continues through another series of close-up
cuts, we move to water level and again the tracking shot slows and the
narrator tells us the land was created by ‘the great water goanna’ and that
he himself began in the waterhole as a ‘little fish’ who leapt into his
mother’s vagina when it was ‘the right time’. The fundamental
connection between landscape and these Aboriginal people’s sense of
identity is thus established from the very start.
Connection
between
prescribed and
related text
created with
contrast
In contrast, Hope’s poem ‘Australia’ begins by suggesting that the
landscape itself is unprepossessing:
A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniforms of modern wars …
This ‘nation’ is peopled by ‘trees’ and the negative connotations of ‘drab’
and ‘desolate’ sap the colours of life. The lack of individuality, allied to
the violent military metaphor ‘the field uniform of modern wars’
suggests that the landscape is lifeless. This idea is developed through
Western metaphors suggesting the land is a disappointment: ‘Sphinx
demolished or stone lion worn away’, ‘A woman beyond her change of
life, a breast/ Still tender but within the womb is dry’. Already the
personification of the land as menopausal suggests that the poem, titled
portentously ‘Australia’, is not really about the landscape itself, but about
the people who inhabit it and fail to respond to it. As the poem
continues, Hope’s satire on the new Australian inhabitants becomes
increasingly biting. Alluding ironically to the myth of the inland sea
sought by explorers, he writes:
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribe from Cairns to Perth
That first line ends a stanza and the enjambment carries us into the next
to suggest with the added irony of ‘floods’ and ‘tribes’, and that
wonderfully understated adjective ‘monotonous’, that the people, like
the trees, are ‘drab’. They lack individual identity because of a failure to
embrace the landscape.
Analysis of
additional text
focuses on
poetic
techniques and
how they
suggest the
people’s
relationship to
their landscape
Concluding
sentence links
back to thesis
The contrast
between the
two texts leads
into a more
general point
about the
structure of
the film and
analysis of how
it is conveyed
In de Heer’s film the landscape is far from drab and he uses it to tell two
distinct stories. In both stories, landscape forms an integral part of the
identity of the characters. One story concerns the ‘ancestors’ Minygululu
and his younger brother Dayindi, who make bark canoes and gather
duck eggs from the swamp. This story is told in black and white in a
documentary style. The narrator explains what the characters are doing
and we see static shots, with the characters moving within the frame.
The first time we see people in the film is in one of these black and
white sequences involving a long static shot of the Australian bush. A
row of Aboriginal men carrying spears enter in single file mid-frame
right and cross the frame to exit left. The black and white almost makes
them blend into the trees, becoming a part of the landscape.
Detailed
analysis of
narrative and
Dayindi fancies Minygululu’s youngest wife, so Minygululu tells him a
story about two other brothers, Rigjimiraril and Yeeralparil, set back in
film techniques
suggests how
the author
represents his
story
The reference
to culture in
the opening
paragraph is
picked up here
Concluding
sentence links
back to thesis
mythical times. This older story is told in full colour with constant
camera movement, so while there is continuity – in that the younger
brother fancies the older brother’s wife and the same actor, Jamie
Gulpilil, plays both brothers – the audience can clearly distinguish
between the two points in time. De Heer uses several shots based on
photographs taken by anthropologist David Thompson in the 1930s.
One such shot follows a sequence in the colour story where Rigimaril
has just declared war on another tribe and excitement is conveyed as the
hand-held camera moves quickly, following the shouting warriors
running through the bush. This is followed by an abrupt cut to a long,
high-angle, black and white shot, based on the photograph from which
the film takes its name. In it, we see the ten bark canoes in the swamp
and in each a standing figure. The complete stillness and silence form a
stark contrast to the previous scene as again the people and the
landscape become one.
The Aboriginal people appear at one with their world, but the people in
Hope’s ‘Australia’ not only lack identity but also vitality. He refers to
them ironically as the ‘ultimate men’ ‘Whose boast is not “we live”, but
“we survive”’. His view of these ‘second-hand Europeans’ who breed
‘timidly on the edge of alien shores’ remains scathing, but towards the
end there is a change of tone as the persona finally enters the poem: ‘Yet
Comment on
the composer’s there are some like me turn gladly home’ to a place where he feels he
choice to enter belongs, in contrast to the Europe he describes metaphorically as ‘the
lush jungle of modern thought’. The contrasts continue to use landscape
the poem
metaphors as he describes Australia as ‘the Arabian desert of the human
Detailed
mind’. The allusion to the Arabian Nights suggests positive connotations
analysis of
of imagination, and because deserts harbour ‘prophets’, with an
judiciously
outpouring of sibilance he therefore hopes for ‘Such savage and scarlet
selected textual as no green hills dare/ Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes/
evidence
The learned doubt’. As the poem ends, the scorn he has poured out
upon the inhabitants of his homeland is now turned on not ‘the secondAnalysis
hand Europeans’, but the old world as he decries ‘the chatter of cultured
suggests
apes/ which is called civilization over there’. The contemporary
distinction
American allusion ‘over there’ suggests his own feeling of separateness,
between the
poet’s feelings so that while he remains hopeful, the sense that the landscape remains
difficult for the majority to accept remains.
and those of
Contrast
between
additional text
and core text
relates to thesis
his
countrymen
Final statement
on Ten Canoes
implicitly
returning to
the thesis
In complete contrast are two moments near the end of Ten Canoes
suggesting the close connection between people and landscape. Dying
from a wound, Rigjimiraril dances until he falls to the ground on his
back. With the camera at ground level we see a close up shot of his body
and at first it is not clear exactly what we’re seeing. The scars and the
contours of his body, coupled with the back-lighting, makes it look like a
barren landscape of hills, enhanced by the fog-like smoke drifting across
it. As he dies his spirit is re-entering the landscape and the process is
completed when we see a fast-tracking aerial shot that zooms down
towards the waterhole as we hear the sound of something plop into the
water: he came from the waterhole and he returns to it.
Short
conclusion that
sums up the
texts in
relation to the
question
While de Heer’s film Ten Canoes explores the fundamental connection
between people and landscape that provides identity for the Aboriginal
people, Hope’s poem suggests that most European settlers have yet to
fully accept their new home and as a result lack identity.