VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: personal journies
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 75%: The funny thing about distance is that it just sort of happens. No one tells you it's happening, no one says…
The funny thing about distance is that it just sort of happens. No one tells you it's happening, no one says “this is where we stop being close now”, there's no big moment where it all changes.
But it will change.
My brother and I used to be inseparable, we would share everything from desserts at dinner and drawing on a Sunday morning, to arguments for who got the front seat of the car and screaming at each other to “stop breathing my air!”. Our childhood was filled with noise, colour, inside jokes and friendship, and lots of lego.
Building things together was how we used to spend our time. We would open up the big lego bags and watch the floorboards disappear as we poured the bricks all over the ground. Hours would pass as we would find a 4 stud, the special diamonds to put in our bases, the white door that would always end up being confiscated because we would fight over it. We would build houses that didn't make sense, cities with robots to come destroy them, cars that couldn't move, and weapons for our characters. We never followed the instructions when we were building, the same way we had no instructions to follow about growing up.
But once we stopped going to school together, when I went to high school and he stayed at our old primary school, things began to stop. Not suddenly or bluntly, but in a way you never really noticed until you realised the lego bag you once opened everyday, was gathering dust in the cupboard.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: VCAA 2025 EXAM
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 70%: Life is a game. 48 hours without optimising yourself A review of WATTLE Point, two hours away from Melbourne.…
Life is a game.
48 hours without optimising yourself
A review of WATTLE Point, two hours away from Melbourne.
Productivity: 0/5
Value for money: 5/5 (85 a night for cabins)
Colour: 5/5
Wifi: None. (See productivity)
Best Time to go:
On the weekend you are most certain you cannot spare. You know the exact weekend I am talking about. The weekend filled with gym classes, brunch booking, side hustles, ‘Life admin,’ and a podcast about becoming a better person. Cancel all of it! Go and see Wattle point. If you have entered a point in your life where the ball and chain of the ridged 9-5 has drained colour from you life. Your work week is mundane, bland, typical and draining. This is when you must go to wattle point. If you've lost yourself within the work schedule, you must remind yourself of who you truely are as you can only find yourself through play.
What to Pack:
A jumper, a towel, $50 in cash and one paperback book that you can abandon on page forty. Leave your laptop, your step counter and the phrase “make the most of it” at home. Wattle point is not the place where you catch up on emails, admin or sort out your life, this trip is to foster your true self from playing again, doing what you truely want.
My review:
Only consider reading this review if you are someone who has scheduled ‘relaxing’ between your gym session and meal prep. Your have graduated a few years ago, and now you have your own lanyard, cubicle and calendar filled with nothing but colourless and lack of play never ending to-do lists. We were all fooled by the work week with the promise of having our two full day weekends, that would satisfy our naturalistic instinct to play. Our weekends have quickly and quietly turned into our second job. The 6am run club. The meal prep. The ‘self-care’ squeezed between two other commitments. Somewhere we forgot that true meaning of play, the game of life has turned into a ridged controlled schedule rather than a gamble within playing and taking risks to be out truest selfs. Rest and finding our own play has been turned into something that is captured, preformed, photographed and improved. So, I went to wattle point to find my truest self through playing again, playing the authentic game of life through having no schedule.
I wasn’t good at playing at first. Not at all. I arrived on Friday night with a mental Itinerary, as list of ‘hidden gems’ saved on my phone, and a low hum of guilt that I was not being productive enough at being unproductive. The anxiety crippled into me as I worried weather or not I was doing enough with my spare time. The cabin was small and slightly crooked, and out the front stood a lopsided old pear tree, entirely uninterested within my career or my life trajectory. I stood their admiring the pear tree, reminiscing on my childhood where i would climb my pear tree at my Childhood home. I remember looking at the pear tree as a little girl, with my eyes admiring its beauty wondering how high I could climb, but now I just stood their waiting for the tree to reveal its fundamental purpose, waiting for its use to become clear to me. It never did. It stood their in the dusk, offering me everything by asking nothing of me.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: personal journeys
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 85%: THE HALLWAY LIGHT I've always been alone. At least, that's what I told my friends when Mum started working late…
THE HALLWAY LIGHT
I've always been alone.
At least, that's what I told my friends when Mum started working late shifts at the hospital. She wouldn't be home until nearly midnight, which meant I had the house to myself every evening.
At first, I loved it.
I could play games without being told to finish my homework. I could eat dinner in front of the television and go to bed whenever I wanted. When Mum left for work, she'd switch on the hallway light and remind me to lock the door.
I'd wait until her car disappeared, then turn the light off.
Every night at nine, she'd call.
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“What did you have?”
“Food.”
She'd laugh, then ask about school and remind me to put the bins out. I usually answered while playing games, waiting for her to say goodnight so I could take my headphones off mute.
A few weeks later, I came home from basketball and called out, “Mum, I'm home.”
No answer.
Her slippers were beside the sofa. Her half-finished cup of tea was still on the kitchen bench. I stood there for a moment before remembering she was at work.
I made noodles and ate them at the kitchen table. The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming.
At nine, my phone rang.
“Have you eaten?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you have?”
“Noodles.”
“You should have some vegetables tomorrow.”
Usually, I'd have rolled my eyes. Instead, I asked what she'd eaten.
There was a pause.
“Something from the staff kitchen.”
“What something?”
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: In Jane Eyre, Brontes deepest quest is for…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 85%: In Jane Eyre, Brontë's deepest quest is for spiritual nourishment to what extent do you agree? Set in the…
In Jane Eyre, Brontë's deepest quest is for spiritual nourishment to what extent do you agree?
Set in the nineteenth century, during a time with harsh religious institutions and when women were marginalised, Charlotte Brontë's protofeminist novel Jane Eyre explores the journey towards spiritual fulfilment. Brontë contends that although the pursuit of religious enlightenment is profound, the journey towards female liberty and true love is often more complex. Ultimately, Brontë reveals to her Victorian audience that the deepest quest is for spiritual nourishment, female liberty and true devotion, in a world that sought to keep females submission and upheld a conventional marriage system.
Through revealing harsh, institutionalised religious dogmas, Brontë highlights the intense quest for spiritual nourishment. Brontë uses the visual contrast between the "top knots" to be "cut off" and the "elaborately curled" hair of Mr Brocklehurst's daughters to critique class based power. By demanding uniformity and removal of "vanity" from the poor girls while allowing his daughters to display wealth and status through their curls, he reveals that his "Master" is actually a tool for class oppression. Thus, Brontë exposes the hypocrisy of evangelical religion, uncovering the complex journey towards authentic spiritual fulfilment. Additionally, through Helen's didactic tone, Brontë establishes a rigid stoic framework that prioritises institutional duty over individual agency. Helen's insistence that one must "endure patiently" reflects a form of Christian stoicism that demands the total stifling of emotional expression to avoid "evil consequence." However, Brontë critisises this philosophy, by showing how it strips Helen of the capacity to defend her own identity, when she is condemned by the alliterative insult of being a "dirty, disagreeable girl." Brontë underscores how Helen's refusal to resist leads to a passive acceptance of injustice, ultimately resulting in the annihilation of selfhood, therefore displaying the deep journey towards spiritual self determination. To contrast, Jane's declaration that she "prayed in [her] own way" signifies the climax of her spiritual maturation. By bypassing the institutionalised, restrictive religiosity of both St. John and Brocklehurst, Jane instead communes with the sublime forces of nature. Through this spiritual self determination, Brontë reveals how this moment serves as a rejection of external conformity, suggesting that true growth is not found in the blind following of societal expectation, but an authentic morality that empowers the individual to act with agency. overall, by displaying the difficulty of escaping institutionalised religiosity and finding an authentic morality, Brontë uncovers the deep quest for spiritual nourishment.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: “I am not bird, and no net ensnares me …”…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 70%: Emerging from the rigid class structure of mid-nineteenth-century England, Charlotte Brontë's 1847 Bildungsroman…
Emerging from the rigid class structure of mid-nineteenth-century England, Charlotte Brontë's 1847 Bildungsroman Jane Eyre critiques a society shaped by patriarchal control, religious rigidity, and strict social convention. Brontë historic novel is centered around the pursuit of personal freedom, however Brontë challenges that personal freedom does not equivocate into isolation and loneliness but is forged upon enduring hardships and adversing societal conventions that grant personal freedom. Utilising a three-part volume structure within ‘Jane Eyre,’ Brontë uses a female retrospective narration along with a Fichtean curve, to explore the limited capabilities and divine intervention that it takes within the Victorian era to formulate growth and change within the rigid social settings.
Brontë uses Volume one to establishes that personal freedom and ones individual control over their own autonomy, is the most important possession a women can attain in Victorian England. Brontë utilises the pathetic fallacy of Gateshead to mirror Jane Eyre’s internal and external feelings of control and neglect. The gothic tableau of Gateshead holding “cold winter winds” with “cloud so somber” being surrounded by “leafless shrubbery.” Brontë adopts this gothic first-person retrospective narration to portray Jane’s own internal emotions of neglect and resentment within Gateshead. Brontë uses the pathetic fallacy to isolate Janes external environment to her internal emotions, showcasing Jane’s internal desires for personal freedom and autonomy away from the neglect and tourment of the Reeds. Furthermore, Brontë characterises John Reed as an abusive and torturous young man who is granted primogeniture power through the rigid class structure and evangelicalism of the mid-nine-tenth Victorian England. John Reed continuously diminishes and removes Janes personal freedom and autonomy in attempt to maintain his primogeniture labelling her a “dependent” with “no money” who often “ought to beg.” Through John Reed Brontë showcases how primogeniture power thrives upon stripping women of personal freedom as John Reed continuously locks and entraps Jane into the “Red Room.” Brontë symbolically uses the Red room to showcases how male authority thrives upon the abuse upon women’s attempts to hold personal freedom and autonomy. Brontë connotes through the use of “red” to connote blood, passion and sin, showcasing the abuse and tourment of the evangelicalism social structures that accept old testament retribution. Brontë uses the Red room to serve as a domestic space that holds “massive pillars” of “splendid solemn” to represent how Victorian Englands has granted the entrapment and abuse of women forcing them to surrender personal freedom. Showcasing how women of the time are abused within domestic spaces in order to maintain the social class that stripps them of their freedom and personal autonomy. Thus, Brontë structurally implores through volume one how women within Victorian England were stripped continuously of their own autonomy and personal freedom in order to adhere and maintain the societal conventions that granted and justified men’s misuse of power.
VCE · Language Analysis
Language Analysis: VCE ENGLISH UNIT 2 Task 10: Exploring…
VCE Language Analysis essay scoring 97.5%: "Daylight Robbery" (Draft 5) FIVE DOLLARS... for a basic loaf of white bread. [Pause] ANOTHER five dollars...…
"Daylight Robbery" (Draft 5)
FIVE DOLLARS... for a basic loaf of white bread. [Pause] ANOTHER five dollars... for a standard two-litre carton of milk. SEVEN... whole dollars if you also want free-range eggs. It's just your regular weekly trolley. Lately... standing at the checkout makes me feel like I'm watching a slow-motion car crash. MOST of us have stopped looking at the digital screen... because we already KNOW the total is going to empty our wallets.
But don't let ANYONE convince you this is just normal inflation. Yes, inflation explains SOME price increases. But when the price of a basic loaf of bread has climbed more than TWENTY-TWO PERCENT, and eggs by over FORTY-ONE PERCENT, in just a few years... we have to ask whether MARKET POWER is playing a role. Because market power doesn't automatically mean price gouging. But it CAN create the conditions where anticompetitive conduct becomes harder to challenge. And that's the problem. There's ONE tool that would genuinely tip that balance back: the Federal Government should give the ACCC conditional, last-resort divestiture powers... allowing it to require major supermarkets to sell stores when an investigation PROVES sustained anticompetitive conduct and existing remedies have failed.
[Long pause]
Because behind all these percentages and corporate reports... are REAL people. The ACCC found that Coles and Woolworths account for roughly SIXTY-SEVEN PERCENT of Australia's supermarket retail sales, while Australians faced significant cost-of-living pressure. And groceries are just ONE part of the problem. Housing. Electricity. Transport. Food. Every essential expense takes another bite.
But behind those statistics is the HUMAN cost, and it's worth being specific about what that actually looks like. It's the single mother of three recalculating her trolley over an extra dollar. It's the pensioner who wants to get sweets for their grandchildren, then quietly puts them back. It's the uni student choosing between rent... [Pause] ...and dinner. When market power is concentrated, the people with the least room to move can have the most to lose. And THAT is why competition matters.
[Long pause - shift tone]
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: The stimulus was a person standing…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 100%: I could have picked up my butter knife and sliced through the tension in the air. It would split into…
I could have picked up my butter knife and sliced through the tension in the air. It would split into halves, quarters, eighths and so on. The pieces would scatter onto the floor like rainbow sprinkles onto a cupcake, shattering the wall between me and my parents. I would have to answer their questions.
I was trapped in a cage of my own thoughts, in the middle of a dry, dusty, barren field. Behind me was my past. I could see all of it. Every smile, frown, achievement and loss – everything I have lived from my first breath to present reality. I saw a girl who was smart, serious and academic.
She wasn’t me.
I was in the breeze that made the trees sway; in the soothing, gentle serenity of a job well done. You couldn’t have found me if you didn’t try. That’s why in my parent’s eyes, there was only one version of me. I felt that their small-minded attitudes could never accommodate the thought of my alternate reality, where I could be who I was and everyone would understand. My parents saw one version of me and one version only.
In the distance, I saw two paths, leading into the unknown. It was a fork in the road, and whichever path I chose would determine my journey. It would impact my entire life, like skimming a stone across a pond. I would flick my wrist, and the pebble would dance across the water - leaving ripples that spiral outwards, before plummeting in. Then the whole pond would never be the same again. I didn’t know which stone to throw, or which path to pick, or who I wanted to be. Duty or desire?
A tap on my shoulder jolted me back to reality.
“(Name)?” said Dad. “We were just wondering what college you have chosen. We really wanted to give you a choice.”
Give me a choice. If I really had one, I would choose piano. When I play, I feel it. I find the rhythm in my chest, the vibrations in my skin and the tones across my heart. Together, they whisked me away to a world where I could be who I was and be proud of my passion for my songs.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: "I'm beginning to feel used up" How does…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 70%: In Regeneration, Pat Barker suggests that the impact of war on the individual is a culmination of multiple factors…
In Regeneration, Pat Barker suggests that the impact of war on the individual is a culmination of multiple factors that finally results in suffering. Barker explores the process of breakdown resulting from trauma, alluding to the idea that the toll on an individual is amplified through various means. The institutional repression of individuality through constructs of duty and honour, along with strict authoritative military leadership provided soldiers with no formal means to express their thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, societal ideals of masculinity and illusioned views about the war that were ingrained internally within soldiers lead to an internal resistance against expressing built up trauma. Barker delves into the combination of these two factors, which give no path to deal with the toll of war, ultimately leading to physiological and psychological breakdown.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Framework - Protest Title: Move…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 77.5%: Move Forward Good evening everyone, I hope you’re all well. I wanted to host this on a weeknight as I know…
Move Forward
Good evening everyone, I hope you’re all well. I wanted to host this on a weeknight as I know most of you will be playing at concert halls, clubs, bars, rooftops, warehouses and other obscure locations over the weekend. All of this could be lost however, or to better put it, replaced, by AI.
If any of you have been listening to any ambient playlists or 70s rock compilations online in the past year, you may have come across The Velvet Sundown. This soft rock band has no real presence. No live gigs performed. No studio recordings. Just a photo of their ‘band members’ and a soulless streaming page that replicates the raw and authentic sounds of real artists, creating hollow echoes in the music industry. This band went on to rack up millions of streams, even appearing on UK Spotify charts. Many of their listeners thought they were discovering a new band inspired by 1970s soft rock. It wasn’t just inspired, but purely modelled and stolen. These generative AI work and learn from existing human discographies, creating huge copyright and plagiarism problems for artists worldwide. This disgusting loophole leaves performers like you and me potentially uncompensated for having our work illegally borrowed. There could be an indie pop record out there modelled from your guitar melody, or an old-school house track trying to copy your unique analog synth sound.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: How does Ogawa explore the gradual erosion…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 77.5%: Dreamlike and lyrical, Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian narrative The Memory Police (1994) dissects the desecration of the…
Dreamlike and lyrical, Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian narrative The Memory Police (1994) dissects the desecration of the human spirit at the hands of oppressive bureaucracies and societal conditioning. Indeed, Ogawa presents the human spirit as dependent upon emotional attachment, individuality and meaningful human connection, all of which are progressively weakened by the enforced dissipation of memories. Ultimately, Ogawa expresses these ideas through literary devices, presenting a gradual, yet sombre erosion of humanity which exposes readership to the insidious implications of acquiescence and totalitarianism.
In The Memory police the gradual deterioration of the islander’s emotional capacity is signified through the motif of the heart. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s mother recounts a time where “people gathered in little groups to talk about their memories,” demonstrating a capacity to mourn and process loss. Yet, as the disappearances permeate the novel, Ogawa examines the gradual deterioration of this mourning, as the residents become “reliev[ed]” after their loss, elucidating how the islanders are not just tethered from their objects, but unmoored from the realisation that something meaningful has been taken from them. The habitual, almost mundane nature of the residents’ loss leaves them emotionally numb, underscored through the Old Man’s assertion that the island used to be “a lot fuller,” symbolic of the emotional resonance that has been eroded from the residents' livelihoods. Moreover, the notion that “[the islanders]” hearts got thinner, too, diluted” signifies how the constant disappearances did not just diminish their ability to process their emotions, but rather curb the extent to which they can engage and sustain emotional connection. More profoundly, through the description of the heart becoming “thin,” Ogawa suggests the islanders lose their humanity by having their ability to sustain emotional attachment weakened. Indeed, this is foregrounded in the narrator’s lament that “[her and R’s] hearts are being pulled apart to such distant, different places,” divulging how her emotional numbness and unprocessed trauma leaves the narrator unable to sustain her relationship with R. Moreover, through the present- progressive lexical choice “being” Ogawa implies that their relationship is continuing to weaken, exploring the gradual erosion of R and the narrator’s relationship through the mechanism of their distant hearts. Thus, Ogawa suggests that when an individual's capacity for emotional connection is weakened, compassion and empathy becomes exhaustive, preventing the consolidation of relationships that are integral to their humanity.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Personal journey
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 97.5%: We always sat on the same bench. It was outside the library, underneath a jacaranda tree that dropped purple…
We always sat on the same bench.
It was outside the library, underneath a jacaranda tree that dropped purple flowers all over the concrete. By the end of lunch, they would be crushed under our shoes.
We had made a game out of collecting the best ones.
“Five points for a whole flower,” she would say.
“That’s not even a real rule.”
“It is now.”
We kept score in the Notes app on my phone, adding ridiculous things like half a point for finding one that hadn’t been stepped on.
It was stupid.
I still remember it.
Back then, I thought that was what friendship was. Knowing someone well enough to turn something completely ordinary into something that belonged to the two of you.
Then, slowly, things changed.
At first, we stopped sitting together every lunch. She started sitting with another group. I started sitting somewhere else. Neither of us mentioned it.
One day, I walked past the library and saw her on the bench.
There was an empty space beside her.
For a second, I thought she would look up.
She didn’t.
I kept walking.
That night, she sent me a TikTok.
I stared at her name on my screen.
For months, we had sent each other videos almost every night. Some were actually funny. Most weren’t. We would send them at 1 a.m. with no explanation, already knowing the other person would understand.
I watched the video.
I didn’t reply.
Neither did she.
That became normal.
The messages got shorter.
What are you doing?
Nothing.
Oh okay.
Then nothing.
The strange thing was that my phone still remembered us.
Her name was still near the top of my messages. Our old photos were still there. Memories appeared without asking, showing me things I hadn’t thought about in months.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Personal Journeys - write a memoir…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 82.5%: WHERE WORLDS COLLIDE Between Different Selves The first thing you learn about belonging is that it is rarely…
WHERE WORLDS COLLIDE
Between Different Selves
The first thing you learn about belonging is that it is rarely a place. More often, it is a performance, to whom the audience remains unknown.
You sit down beside the girl in the crowded prayer room, with no where else to sit. The carpet beneath you smells faintly of dust and rosewater, the scent of hundreds of foreheads pressed into surrender. Around you, girls both younger and older move like softened pages of a book; linen hijabs draped carefully around their shoulders, sleeved pulled to wrists, whispered Arabic curling through the room like smoke. It is as if this attire is stitched onto their bodies, and not something temporary, something that feels obligatory. Someone recites Surah Maryam under her breathe. Someone else adjusts the gold pin grasping the fabric at her throat.
The girl besides you smiles politely, then lets her eyes flicker downwards.
Your acrylic nails. Your “not loose enough” jeans. The small ring on your finger your mother told you not to wear because it looked too grown.
You know that look. It is not cruel enough to be called cruelty. It is softer than that. Sharper, like an assessment. And suddenly, it makes you feel too loud in your own skin.
There is a verse your grandmother used to repeat while folding warm laundry at sunset: “And “Beware of suspicion, for suspicion is the worst of false tales. Do not look for the other’s faults, and do not spy, and do not be jealous of one another”. The words once sounded expansive to you, like open doors. But now you wonder if people spend more time judging then knowing. About how fair this world is to you.
The girl returns to reading Quran. You sit there, pretending to not notice how your body feels like such a mistranslation. Too secular for the sacred girls, too sacred for the secular ones. You exist in the thin corridor between to doors that never fully open.
World Apart
At lunch, the other girls sit cross legged on the concrete stairs outside the library. Perfume and tropical lip gloss hang thick in the air. Someone laughs so hard that her soda bursts through her nose. Someone else is talking about boys again – who kissed who at a party, whose mother found cigarettes hidden inside a pencil case, who’s social media stories were “actually insane”.
You laugh when they do. You know exactly when. Exactly how much “involvement” to pour in. A pure performance, once again. Because as much as you try, something within you forbids you from being able to genuinely relate to these girls.
Someone next to you nudges your shoulder. “Come this weekend, you never do”, she says. “just don’t go all moral and halal on us”. The other laugh. You chuckle too, though the sound comes out delayed, like an echo arriving too late to matter.
The words land strangely on your chest. Once, it tasted warm. Like your mother frying sujuk at night during Ramadan. Like dates split open with thumbs. Like your father reciting du’a before flights.
Now it sounds like accusation.