Student Number:

2024 TRIAL HIGHER

English Advanced
Paper 1 – Texts and Human Experiences
Stimulus Booklet

Page

Section I • Text 1 – Visual Image …………………………… 3

• Text 2 – Poem ……………………………………. 4

• Text 3 – Discursive Essay .………………………. 5-6

• Text 4 – Fiction Extract ……...……………….…... 7-8

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Text 1 – Visual Image

— MATTHIEU PALEY, 2023

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Text 2 – Poem

My One Constant Travel Companion

You sit in the cupboard now, but I have carried you so far –
new models have more features, but none of the memories.

On our first trip your green was as rich as the New Zealand hills,
your purple bright as flowers. I carried you on mountain paths,
and fell backwards into a river onto you, waving my limbs like a tortoise.

From our second trip still remains the fading sticker from Vietnamese customs,
that never peeled off, but instead became a part of your fabric,
an incomprehensible tattoo, remembering hot days and drinking coconuts.

Our third trip was long – I carried you, and you were my pillow, my bed,
in a train station in Austria, an airport in England, a boat carrying me
from Ireland on a windy day, you catching my tears as we moved away.

By our fourth trip you were faded, and bore with good will long rides
on the tops of old Canadian school buses in Guatemala, absorbing the jungle mud,
the dust of the deserts of Mexico, Texas – you were constant and uncomplaining.

On our fifth trip your strap broke in Corsica, and I fixed you with a white bandage –
it held for five years, more brown than white, until I repaired you for our sixth trip,
and carried you north of the Arctic circle, to defend me from polar bears and ice.

You sit in the cupboard now, but your green and purple fabric holds the dust
of all our journeys, the sweat off my back from twenty years wandering –

I have carried you so far my sturdy canvas backpack, but I’ve never washed you.

— MIIRANDA LELLO, 2015

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Text 3 – Discursive Essay

“Are they… aliens?” I squeak, much to the delight of my daughter whose eyes are fixed on a
slow-moving string of lights marching across the sky above us. Only moments earlier, we’d been
caught in the usual bedtime toddler tango, when she suggested we say “goodnight to the moon”.

I sheepishly Google “alien lights over Australia”, only to discover that the confounding
Unidentified Blinking Gems are, in fact, just the handy work of Elon Musk. His starlink
satellites are making an unexpected appearance over our small Victorian coastal town.

It’s then I hear my partner whisper: “Is that… an aurora?”

It is a question more absurd than our fleeting belief that we were being invaded by an army of
extraterrestrials in electric vehicles. But as all three of us shift our attention to the horizon, there
it is, stretching wildly across the otherwise ink-black skyline—the undeniable pink and greenish
flares of Aurora Australis*. It takes us some time to fully compute what is happening, until quite
suddenly the penny drops. “Oh my god! Oh my god!” we each start yelling into the silence of the
night.

I’m not sure how long the three of us stand, eyes bulging, watching cosmic columns of colour
dance atop the tree line. It’s like we’ve entered a wondrous vortex where Dr Who’s Tardis * might
just materialize in the backyard at any moment.

With our daughter finally tucked into bed, my partner and I forgo our usual ritual of slumping on
the couch, wine and phone in hand, and instead rug up and spend the evening staring into space.
The sky stays ablaze, stars swooshing and constellations sparkling, and it’s not long until we are
treated to another explosion of activity. When the aurora reignites, the jangling clouds of purple
and green are so vivid that I find myself physically reaching out to the sky around us trying to
grab a handful of the colour.

I can’t stop thinking about how easily we may have missed this. That, heads down, in the routine
of toddler bedtimes and Saturday evening exhaustion, had our daughter not dragged us outside
to look up, this beauty may have passed us by.

I consider my partner and I curious beings. With a deep drive to be immersed in nature, we have
travelled the world and been lost in the stars many times over. But sometimes, life has a way of
distracting us from the wonder right there in front of us.

During the early stages of parenthood, your world shrinks. During those wild early months of
sleep deprivation and self-doubt, phones feel like a fantasy portal to the outside; social media
algorithms cruelly feeding through an absurd see-saw of mum-fluencers rhapsodizing about
organic baby food and old acquaintances sipping wine on the Amalfi Coast. Adventure can begin
to feel like an absurdist construct. Completely ungraspable.

Text 3 continues on the next page

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Text 3 – continued

But then life recalibrates, and a few years into it, your toddler forces you outside on a cold
evening and there in the backyard of your tiny hometown you experience the kind of wonder that
recalls your wildest and most mesmerizing overseas adventures. And for all the heaviness of the
world right now, you stop and feel a connection to this mysterious ball of rock. The kind of
stupefying awe that can only come from such a surprising encounter with natural beauty.

Of course, you don’t need a 20-year geomagnetic storm to feel this. You don’t have to be in a
far-flung place. You just have to be present, to slow down, and to look up (easier said than done,
I know). But even just by stepping outside for a few minutes on a clear night, there is all kinds
of strange beauty to be soaked up. And who knows, you might just spot an alien or two.

— SARAH SMITH, 2024

*Aurora Australis – ‘southern lights’, a natural light display in the Earth’s sky. Auroras are a
geomagnetic phenomenon that display dynamic patterns of brilliant lights that cover the entire sky.

*Dr Who’s Tardis – a time machine and spacecraft that appears in the British science fiction television
series ‘Doctor Who’

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Text 4 – Fiction Extract

‘Here Be Lions’

He cut out a map from a school history book – which he shouldn’t have done and which bothered his
soul – that had pictures of monsters where the oceans spilt off the edge of the world and words written
in Latin that went ‘hic sunt dracones’*. He didn’t identify with anything or anyone but felt sure dragons
would understand him.
Over the coming days, he stared at his new map, and investigated further by looking in big bricks of
encyclopaedia volumes and discovering the edges of Roman conquest tipping into ‘hic sunt leones’,
and then he knew, given dragons weren’t real, that lions held the truth.
There was an ‘open zoo’ lion park on the edge of the city, where the suburbs of back then faded into
vestiges of harassed and damaged bushland, and he asked if he could be taken there and driven through
the park as the lions gathered. He knew he would find answers there, though he was angry the lions
were so far off their own map and that they were providing entertainment in the name of ‘conservation’.
He was that kind of kid. Teachers’ insistence that he needed to think and behave more in keeping with
his age were dashed as soon as an adult sat down and tried to unravel him.
He resisted with words they had to look up in a dictionary and – like kids who suffered from teachers
who said they could only do those math tricks because they had memorised rather than understood
process – he was marooned in the concrete and playground monkey bar jungles of their creation and
prejudice. One teacher even said to his mother Well, he can be an annoying little know-it-all, to be
frank. To be frank. The boy was less upset than his mother, saying, I don’t think the teachers really
appreciate what those ‘trade routes’ across the maps really meant for the people whose paths they
crossed. And the lions suffered as a consequence as well.
They’d been told that the best time to visit was feeding time, and though this tantalised him, he objected.
It’s not right, he said. Not right by what they’re eating and the fact they deserve to eat in privacy. He
didn’t like people watching him eat, and at school ate his lunch on his own behind the school hall where
nobody else ever went, not even the roaming pack of bullies. So his parents found out about feeding
times and avoided the issue.
In the car on the way to the zoo, he said to his dad, Dad, we are going off the edge of the map to see
creatures taken from their homes … we are going into the wild of the suburbs! He never got enough
back from his dad, so he nudged his sister in the back seat as she was looking out at nothing in particular
as far as he was concerned, and said, If we open the windows, which is forbidden, they will rip us out
of the car and devour us.
Don’t be an idiot, she said. You mean eat us – they’ll eat us alive.
Their mother, half turning to half look at them, but wanting to keep her eyes on the road because she
didn’t drive and didn’t trust her husband’s ability to navigate to a new place and drive, said, Devour
and eat …it’s all the same in the end.
And then they were there, at the gates, paying their car fee and being given a brochure that
immediately found its way into the boy’s hands – they were inside! – and they were winding along
slowly and they were passing a sign that said ‘Trespassers will be eaten’.

Text 4 continues on the next page

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Text 4 – continued
…

The car stopped, which maybe it wasn’t supposed to do, but it did. A lion, a massive old lion with a
raggedy-looking mane and patches of missing fur came up, sniffed at the wheels and doors, and circled.
No-one said anything. Suddenly it leapt up at the boy’s window and he squealed. Nobody told him off
because they got a fright as well. The lion slobbered over the window and someone said, I hope the
window doesn’t break, let’s go now. Drive on, drive!
But they didn’t. They just stayed there, and the lion looked at the boy and he got caught in its eyes.
They were mapping him and he was inside them. He wondered if it was born in a circus in Australia,
or if it came from Africa—trapped and taken from its family. It bothered him and then it yawned and
the map broke up and someone behind beeped their horn, which surely wasn’t allowed and his sister
changed everything by returning to her senses, to who she was, with a savvy, What big teeth you have!
comment to the lion. The lion walked on hind legs holding on to the car as they started to move off,
then it yawned and dropped back onto all fours, switched its tail and swayed away, and started doing
odd movements that looked like anger and annoyance and then indifference mixed. It shook itself and
went to roar but nothing emerged.
The boy said, One day they will shoot that lion. They don’t care about it, not really.
…
Monday at school it was his turn to tell news. He said he had none. Everyone has some news, said the
teacher, patiently. What did you do on the weekend? Did you go anywhere or watch an interesting
television show? Nothing, he said sullenly. Well, that’s disappointing, and from one of my best students,
too – you’re usually never short of a word. He was confused – did that mean she liked him, or didn’t
like him? He shrank further as the suck suck sounds came from the boys sitting behind him, but he felt
more frustrated by his own silence than by what they thought of him.
Then he said, Mrs Grady?
Yes?
Can I write something on the blackboard instead?
Why?
It’s my news.
Well, I guess so … it’s better than nothing, at least you’re making an effort.
So he rose slowly, and walked slowly, and shook himself inside like a lion, a tormented locked-up old
lion, and wrote across the board in big shaky letters: ‘hic sunt dracones’.

— JOHN KINSELLA, 2020

*hic sunt dracones – Latin: ‘here be dragons’. The phrase is an imitation of the phrase hic sunt leones (‘here be
lions’), a phrase used by mediaeval map-makers to indicate dangerous or unexplored territories. It is also the
written version of the illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures used on mediaeval
maps for the same purposes.

End of Text 4 – Fiction Extract

End of Booklet
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