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Australia Day MELANIE CHENG TEXT PUBLISHING TEACHING NOTES Australia Day MELANIE CHENG ISBN 9781925603972 RRP AU$22.99 Fiction RECOMMENDED READING AGE: 16+ Sign up to Text’s once-a-term education enewsletter for prizes, free reading copies and teaching notes textpublishing.com.au/ education CURRICULUM GUIDE ABOUT THE AUTHOR The following teaching guide has been designed Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. Of to embrace shared curriculum values. Students are Chinese-Australian heritage, she was born in Adelaide, encouraged to communicate their understanding grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne with of a text through speaking, listening, reading, writing, her family. Her debut short-story collection, Australia viewing and representing. Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for The learning activities aim to encourage students an unpublished manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian to think critically, creatively and independently, to Premier’s Literary Award for fiction in 2018. Her writing reflect on their learning and connect it to an audience, has been published in the Age, Big Issue, Meanjin and purpose and context. They encompass a range of Overland among other publications. Her first novel, forms with a focus on language, literature and literacy. Room for a Stranger, will be published in May 2019. Where appropriate, they promote the integration of ICT and life skills. BEFORE READING 1. Write a paragraph summarising what you know SYNOPSIS about the Australia Day holiday and its purpose, Australia Day is an award-winning collection of place and popularity in Australian society. fourteen short stories by Australian author Melanie 2. Define the term epigraph and explain the role Cheng. Each story explores aspects of the human an epigraph plays in a text. Find Australia Day ’s condition, examining the flaws, failings and epigraph and write it down. List the ideas you think vulnerabilities of its characters as well as their grit and the epigraph is intended to communicate. As a strength as they struggle with everyday challenges class, discuss why Cheng chose this epigraph. we can all recognise and relate to—like trying to fit in, make friends, find love or cope with loss. 3. In pairs, discuss the significance of the collection’s title. What do you think the title suggests the stories The stories invite the reader into the lives of a diverse will explore? List your predictions and then compare array of contemporary characters. Most are living and them with another pair’s ideas. working in Australia; others are Australians travelling or working overseas. We meet newlyweds and grieving widows, single and surrogate parents, elderly WHILE READING grandparents, only children and bickering siblings, 1. Australia Day is a collection of short stories. students and social workers and hospital patients. Research the characteristics of the short-story Australia Day has much to offer senior English and form. In a table, compare and contrast the novel Literature students working at different levels and and short-story forms, focusing on length, narrative from different backgrounds, asking them to consider structure, setting and characters. what it means to belong, and the difficulties many of 2. Create a table that compares Australia Day ’s us face in seeking connection. The stories encourage a fourteen stories. Include the following column nuanced understanding of the diversity of experience headings: length, narrative structure, narrative point and identity in Australia, many of them also affirming of view, setting (time, place, season), characters, the capacity of the human spirit to find a way forward plot, ideas and themes. in times of adversity. TEXTPUBLISHING . COM . AU EDUCATION 1 AUSTRALIA DAY MELANIE CHENG TEXT PUBLISHING TEACHING NOTES 3. When you have completed your table, compare the Deepak to deepen the class’s understanding of stories’ similarities and differences. What patterns these characters and their relationship with each emerge? Does Cheng focus on particular settings other. Take turns playing the role of Deepak or Tony. or types of characters? What kinds of relationships Choose one pair to perform their hot seat interview is she concerned with? Do any ideas and themes for the class. recur? List your findings. 4. In a short-story collection, individual stories are AFTER READING often linked in some way. In groups of four, create a visual diagram identifying the links between the CHARACTER stories in Australia Day. Consider what they have in 1. Which character interested you the most? How common. For example: ideas and themes, character did Cheng present this character, and how did types/relationships, setting, narrative voice, this influence your view of them? Write a profile imagery, style, emotions. of this character, including the following details: 5. The collection begins and ends with stories set name (is it significant?); appearance; values and on Australia Day: ‘Australia Day’ and ‘A Good world view (as revealed by what they say and do); and Pleasant Thing’. Identify the protagonist of history (what past events have influenced the each of these stories. What makes Stanley and character’s development?); relationships; personal Mrs Chan different to a traditional protagonist in turning points; key settings in which the character Australian fiction? Compare Stanley’s background appears (how do they feel in this setting?); and the and experiences in Australia to Mrs Chan’s. What character’s fate (are they rewarded or punished problems do they both face? Are they able to solve in some way for their actions or the values they these problems? Why or why not? What ideas and possess?). themes does Cheng underline by framing her 2. Compare protagonists Dr Garrett (‘Macca’) and collection with these two stories? What do you think Tania (‘Ticket-holder Number 5) to their foils, Macca motivates Cheng to give voice to characters like and Ticket-holder Number 5. Who has the most Stanley and Mrs Chan? power in these relationships? Does this change over 6. Like Stanley and Mrs Chan, Kat (‘Clear Blue Seas’) the course of the stories? Write two paragraphs and Evan (‘Muse’) both experience feelings exploring your ideas and include supporting of isolation. Kat and Evan are very different to evidence from both stories. Stanley and Mrs Chan, though, and their personal 3. Australia Day features several characters who circumstances are different too. Why does are grieving. Cora (‘Things That Grow’) and Evan newlywed Kat feel so isolated on her honeymoon? (‘Muse’) are grieving for spouses. Identify two other What has led to Evan’s feelings of isolation? characters who are grieving. What have they lost? Write two paragraphs exploring the different facets As a class, discuss the ideas and themes Cheng of isolation and loneliness experienced by Stanley, explores through these characters. Place each Mrs Chan, Kat and Evan, and another exploring character on a happiness continuum. Who is the how looking at the idea of isolation from different unhappiest? Who is the happiest? Why did you perspectives challenges our understanding of the choose these two? Do you recognise any of Cheng’s epigraph. characters or their experiences in people you know? 7. Are these contemporary stories? Revisit your table from question 2. What conclusions can you draw? STYLE AND STRUCTURE What broad portrait of Australia does Cheng seem 1. Cheng’s style is best described as realism. Though to be painting? How does this compare to your view her stories are fiction, they feel like they could really of Australia? have happened. List the features of realistic fiction 8. ‘Big Problems’ is told from Leila’s point of view. She as a genre. In groups of three or four, read ‘Toy is an au pair with a Syrian background, born and Town’, ‘Hotel Cambodia’ or ‘Allomother’. At least raised in London. List the people she meets on her two groups should read each story. Discuss how and trip and their different perspectives on climbing why the chosen story could be described as realistic Uluru. Note who chooses to climb and who doesn’t, fiction and then summarise your conclusions in and the consequences for those who do climb. a brief paragraph. Support your opinions with The story concludes with Leila feeling ‘as if the evidence. entire world were vibrating’. What has caused this 2. The narrative structures of Cheng’s stories are feeling? What is the connection she feels with her carefully crafted. As a class, create graphs of Syrian mother in this moment? the narrative structures of ‘Fracture’ and ‘Muse’, 9. ‘Fracture’ is one of the longest stories in the marking the key points in the story at which the collection. It explores the different perspectives of tension rises and falls. Chart the level of dramatic two migrants, Deepak and Tony, and how they see tension on the vertical axis and the story’s progress Tony’s accident. on the horizontal axis, starting with the problem or conflict, followed by the climax and resolution. In pairs, prepare ‘hot seat’ questions for Tony and TEXTPUBLISHING . COM . AU EDUCATION 2 AUSTRALIA DAY MELANIE CHENG TEXT PUBLISHING TEACHING NOTES 3. What makes Cheng’s writing style distinctive? ‘there’s a white sparrow in everybody’ (p. 170)? Annotate the opening pages of the first story, Re-read the story’s end. Is it optimistic? What ‘Australia Day’ (pp. 1–9). Make note of Cheng’s use symbolism does Cheng use in her conclusion? of: descriptive language; specific detail; dialogue; 3. In ‘Fracture’, Tony’s sense of self, like Cora’s, is third-person perspective; tone; dry humour; shaken. Draw a Venn diagram comparing Cora colloquialisms; anatomical terminology; italics; and Tony. How do the life-changing moments they and short and long sentences. Write a paragraph experience affect their view of themselves? Whose describing how the portrayal of Neville Cook story offers the greatest hope? Do you think their provides an early glimpse of Cheng’s style.
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