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]
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.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: Section A - Text response of sunset…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 77.5%: Billy Wilder's 1950s film Sunset Boulevard explores the mystifying allure of Hollywood's golden era. Yet Wilder…
Billy Wilder's 1950s film Sunset Boulevard explores the mystifying allure of Hollywood's golden era. Yet Wilder enhances his warning against falling into the illusory lure of film through innovative directional and writing choices that are essential to the message of the movie. Wilder presents the allure of fame within Sunset Boulevard as fatal, but he also depicts the fantasy that exists before one is consumed by it. Wilder's mystery-oriented film noir imparts continuous contention into the narrative, emphasizing each moment that allure drags characters closer to their fate. He uses metacasting to present the fickleity to fame, the reality past the allure, as consistent with real life, and ultimately depicts the eponymous Hollywood machine that is both unbothered and thriving off of the tragic conclusion of the film.
Wilder's use of dark lighting and ominous score accentuates the fatality created by a circular narrative, signposting each moment that allure brings the story closer to tragedy. The opening of the film features a low angle from within the silent film star Norma Desmond's pool. The camera focuses on film writer Joe Gillis's limp floating body, overshadowed by clamoring police officers with indiscernible expressions. This powerful shot establishes the unsympathetic image of the media, and by extension Hollywood, enjoying the benefits of Joe's death. Aside from that, by showing Joe's death first, the circular narrative allows the sordid humor of the film to be perceived for the danger that it entails. As Joe wakes from his dream, he describes an image of a "chimp dancing for pennies". This ridiculous scene illustrates Joe's desire for wealth, the allure of it, placing him under Norma's control. Yet the recent burial of Norma's monkey, as well as the knowledge of Joe's eventual death in Norma's pool, send a different message: the allure of wealth has brought Joe to his death. The typical film noir genre emphasizes the mystery of Joe's death, imploring the audience to decipher these moments themselves to find clues to Joe's death, thus allowing Wilder to emphasize the danger of allure. Furthermore, the organ playing of Bach's Toccata underpins the morbidity of Joe's situation in Norma's house, as it is known to be used in haunted houses. Yet in contrast, Wilder depicts the reader Betty Schaefer in a completely different light, her character at the creatives' New Year's party portrayed in warm, bright lighting and jazzy music accompanying. These lighting and sound choices highlight a safer atmosphere to Betty, her brightness conveying a literal lack of the underlying darkness of the film's promised tragedy. Furthermore, Betty is characterized with artistic integrity, unlike Joe, who wants to "make a living". Betty thinks pictures "should say little something". Wilder presents her as unencumbered by the allure of wealth and Hollywood, and also distances her from morbidity. Thereby Wilder suggests to his audience that without moderation, the allure of Hollywood and wealth is fatal.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: "When I saw him safe and sound, I thought…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 72.5%: In Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a non-linear narrative that follows the impact of…
In Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a non-linear narrative that follows the impact of rigid social codes, Marquez explores how despite major external influences, the events of the novel proceed due to individual choices. Marquez provides insight into the true pressures of society, however, highlights how decisions made to act or not act are responsible for how fate unfolds.
In his novel, Marquez the author outlines the pressure implemented in society’s expectations, demonstrating how external influences can dictate someone’s choices. The events of the novel are majorly initiated by the dishonouring of Angela Vicario in her "lost possessions." Marquez repeatedly uses specific language to refer to her deflowered of something of great concern, calling it "the stain of honour." In doing this Marquez suggests just how important a woman's virginity is to her reputation and image. Angela was then labelled by the towns people as "the returned bride" which indicates how her loss of identity in marriage ended in condemnation. This allows Marquez to contrast the expectations of a different gender in a society where girls are reared to get married "and boys are 'brought up to be men," reinforcing the toxic culture of machismo and Marianismo. The murder itself presents the Vicario brothers as subjects of rigid social codes, placing them with a 'duty'. The wording of the murder makes it an obligation by society for the Vicario's to claim their status as men and restore their family's honour. Marquez strongly criticises the extent of pressure held upon individuals of society, infiltrating their actions. When Angela Vicario prays to God to give her the 'courage to kill [herself]," Marquez is adding weight to the extent to which strict social expectations overpower the will of life, whether by murder or by suicide. Throughout his novel, Marquez demonstrates how strong social codes can be coercive and destructive, initiating the storyline.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Playtime is Over
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 80%: Playtime is Over Like most babies, baby Charlotte entered the world almost entirely bald. Yet before long, her…
Playtime is Over
Like most babies, baby Charlotte entered the world almost entirely bald.
Yet before long, her hair became her first plaything, growing rapidly and wild. Mum tucked it into crooked ponytails or uneven pigtails, only for it to tumble loose as Charlotte raced off, even Dad's proud attempts rarely survived the morning. Tiny hands tugged at the soft curls, twisting them around curious fingers. Hair clips became scattered treasures across the carpet, and the ribbons were dragged with chubby fists, abandoned in favour of crawling.
Family photo albums had captured this stage vividly: Charlotte grinning widely beside her brothers. Her hair, like theirs, either tangled with food, stiff with dried paint, or knotted from games that wandered beyond dusk. The curls and cowlicks clung to the children’s sweaty foreheads, but they remained blissfully unbothered, toothy smiles stretching ear to ear.
Waking up on the first morning of Grade 1, Charlotte stood on her tippy-toes to reach the view of her mother's bathroom mirror. Ribbons and hair ties were scattered across the sink-side counter, clumps of casualties knotted into the bands. She tried to stand still as her mother battled the thick curls, each stroke met with a reflexive jolt of resistance.
Before rushing out the door, Charlotte found the largest bow in her drawer and clipped it into her hairband. "Adorable," she thought.
During assembly, Charlotte had sat cross-legged on the floor, studying the row of girls in front of her. She began to notice their uniformity. Their sleek, identical ponytails, each polished and high. In contrast, her own natural curls felt unruly, out of place, and increasingly undesirable.
That night, Charlotte begged her mum to recreate the same tightly pulled ponytail, pulling it back until her scalp stung and temples ached. She tightened it again. Then again. And for a moment, it held. She ran outside, cartwheeling. The tug-of-war between order and gravity left her ponytail sagging at the nape of her neck. By dinner, the game had one. Her hair unravelled entirely and order had loosened its grip.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Framework: Personal Journeys
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 95%: April 25 - Age 9 Mum let me lick the bowl today. She made my birthday cake, the same one I’ve been having ever…
April 25 - Age 9
Mum let me lick the bowl today. She made my birthday cake, the same one I’ve been having ever since I was allowed to eat cake. It’s a cheesecake, with strawberries on top like a crown. She says it was her mother’s recipe, and it will be mine too, which is a weird thing to own, but I like it. Dad says the crust is the best part simply because he likes the texture of Arnott's Maries. I ate my slice so fast my stomach hurt. Nine is going to be the best year. I wonder if I’ll get an iPad, or a bike, or that giant LEGO set I’ve been eyeing since January. I think about when I’ll lose all my baby teeth, or whether Dad will finally let me stay up past 9 pm. I want a strawberry cheesecake for every single birthday forever. Mum chuckled a bit and said, “We’ll see.”
April 25 - Age 12
I told Mum I didn’t want the strawberry cheesecake this year. I said I wanted a store cake, a normal one, a Woolies mud cake with those plastic race car toppers and fancy-looking cursive messages written with melted chocolate. She got quiet and said okay in that distinctive voice that means it’s not okay.
I think at some point this year I realised other people existed, and I felt as if they were constantly watching me, judging me, grading me on whether I’m cool enough. Maybe it was the uncomfortable silence between blowing out the candles and making a wish, or the jarring dissonance in Happy Birthday being belted in twelve different keys at once. I don’t know why I suddenly believed that being loved by strangers was more important than being loved by my family, the people who already loved me. Maybe I realised that growing up doesn't start with independence. It starts with a kind of shame about the people who made you, before you're old enough to know that shame is just fear wearing a disguise.
The store cake was bland. The melted chocolate cursive writing was underwhelming. It tasted like nothing.
I didn’t tell her that.
April 25 - Age 15
Mum and Dad split up in November. We had to move to a different suburb so I could attend my new school. This is my first birthday in our new apartment, the one with the kitchen too small for two people to stand in at once. It doesn’t matter. Mum made the cheesecake anyway.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: Prompt: “I learned that even though I…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 85%: In Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, Noah explores what it was like to grow up as a “mixed-race” child during the final…
In Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, Noah explores what it was like to grow up as a “mixed-race” child during the final years of apartheid. Noah argues that although the government’s systemic objective was to strip away individuals' privileges and rights by enforcing racial categories, individuals would utilise "humour" as a tool of resistance to find a sense of belonging in South Africa.
Through his humorous stories of his childhood, Noah demonstrates his desperate need for belonging in a brutal environment in the eyes of the law that refuses to accept him because he was “born a crime”. Ultimately, Noah reveals that humour and communication are effective to rebel against an "illogical racist system” that prevents individuals of any race from coming together in unity.
Throughout the text, Noah’s “tools for survival” were his sense of humour, even though the law refused to let him feel that he belonged anywhere. Because he was born to a Black mother and a White-Swiss father, he was “proof of their criminality", as it is illegal to have interracial marriages and have mixed-race children in South Africa. Through this law, he didn’t have a specific group to call his own. Throughout his schooling, he sought a way to navigate through distinct groups. Noah explains that he “didn’t belong to one group”; however, he realised he could be “a part of any group that was laughing”. Noah demonstrates that laughter is a “language” that allows you to connect to people from any kind of community. For instance, when navigating the schoolyard, he would often mimic the mannerisms of different groups or make light of his own ambiguous appearance, turning his 'otherness' into a source of shared amusement. Through his self-deprecating and observational tone, Noah applies humour to “humanise” himself, strategically disarming social tensions and making other kids from different racial groups see him as a friend rather than a threat. Therefore, Noah proves that his character was his best “tool” to navigate apartheid, allowing him to find a home in any group despite the racist laws of the time.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: Refusal to relinquish dreams is at the…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 70%: Billy Wilder's 1950 film noir, 'Sunset Boulevard; uproots the toxic disempowerment of the working machine of…
Billy Wilder's 1950 film noir, 'Sunset Boulevard; uproots the toxic disempowerment of the working machine of Hollywood. Throughout the film, Wilder condemns the selfish manipulation of oneself and others in order to achieve hollow satisfaction and inevitable suffering. Contrasting such self-absorbed decline, Wilder celebrates the affinity for beacons of hope and optimism within Hollywood. However, Wilder ultimately posits that the brutal corporate machine of Hollywood stardom entraps the idealists, capturing its subjects in a society of hardship without means for escape. Ultimately, Wilder criticses the exploitative and disillusioning system of Hollywood, juxtaposing the dreamscape with the truly oppressive machine.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: TITLE: Into the Unknown Stimulus:…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 77.5%: Into the Unknown Stimulus: 'play is your ticket to places, real or imagined' [Press Play to Start] [Play] The…
Into the Unknown
Stimulus: 'play is your ticket to places, real or imagined'
[Press Play to Start]
[Play]
The vivid pixels on our screen illuminate as we press play on our gaming computer. We enter the game of Minecraft, a peaceful world where we can do whatever we please. This world exists with certainty. We become the truest version of ourselves . There is no façade we put on for the audience that scrutinizes our every action. Just the soft percussion of placing blocks and the wandering hum of NPC villagers who roam this imaginative world. We build kingdoms unconstrained by regulations. We battle deadly monsters unthreatened by consequence. Forests wait to be explored. Plains encourage us to frolic. Caves remain unlooted until we build up the courage to venture. Our actions in this game are free. We discover authenticity. When we press play on the game, we pause the real world around us.
[Pause]
The game pauses as we switch tabs on out computer. In doing so, we unpause a place we never wished to return to. Our university application portal is open on our browser, but we can still see Minecraft, highlighted in the task bar at the bottom of our screen, signalling our incomplete gaming session. We have received four different offers for four different courses. Four different Doors. Four different futures. There is a dropdown menu for a preferred campus. A thirty-minute timer until we are timed out. A big, green [SUBMIT] button waiting to be pressed. This form consists of the rest of our lives, reduced to a series of selections from a pre-approved list. This is the moment our childhood ends. The game we have been playing up until this point was linear. It had a tutorial. But now, without a respawn point if we decide wrong; if we fail, we have levelled up into a choose-your-own-adventure game titled adulthood. There is no genre label on the CD cover. We are tasked with a difficult decision. Which door should we open? Which version of the unknown future should we pursue? We don’t know what's behind this door, how are we meant to throw ourselves into the deep-end? You see, in video games, decision making is freeing because failure is survivable. When we play, we open a door without second guessing the risk. After all, we are sitting behind a screen playing in a virtual reality. If the door is wrong, no problem. We can try another. Minimal consequences to our tangible self. Nevertheless, the adult world has real doors that disappear if missed. The stakes are high. We can fail. There is no respawn point. So we sit here, cursor blinking, our eyes alternating between the [SUBMIT] button and the glowing Minecraft icon at the bottom of the screen, realising that the tutorial has ended and we must colour in the uncoloured parts of our drawing by choosing a door, despite the lack of knowledge we have about the other side.
[Play]
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: Yoko Ogawa's dystopian novel The Memory…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 85%: Yoko Ogawa's dystopian novel The Memory Police explores the consequences of living within a society where memory,…
Yoko Ogawa's dystopian novel The Memory Police explores the consequences of living within a society where memory, identity and individual expression are progressively erased by an authoritarian regime. Through the unnamed narrator's experiences on the isolated island, Ogawa demonstrates that oppression does not merely operate through physical force, but through the gradual destruction of the memories and connections that allow individuals to understand themselves and their world. However, although the Memory Police repeatedly succeed in suppressing physical forms of resistance, Ogawa suggests that resistance remains possible through the preservation of objects and memories, the development of human connection, and ultimately the creation of stories and art. In doing so, Ogawa reveals that attempts to control human memory may destroy what people possess, but cannot completely eliminate the human desire to preserve meaning.
Ogawa initially presents resistance through the preservation of physical objects, demonstrating that individuals can challenge authoritarian control by refusing to completely surrender their memories. From the beginning of the novel, the narrator's mother secretly preserves objects that have been “disappeared” from the island, transforming her basement into an alternative archive of the past. The narrator recalls how the objects in her mother's collection seem to her “like the names of little girls from distant countries or new species of plants,” employing simile to emphasise her fascination with a world that official society has attempted to erase. The comparison to unfamiliar living things suggests that these objects retain a sense of vitality despite the island's attempts to remove their meaning. More importantly, the mother's secret collection demonstrates that remembering itself can constitute resistance. Although the islanders collectively accept each disappearance, her preservation of the objects refuses this imposed forgetting. This resistance is later developed through the narrator's hidden room, where R and the disappeared objects are protected from the Memory Police. The room consequently becomes a symbol of resistance, physically separating memory from the authority that seeks to destroy it. R reinforces the importance of preservation when he observes that “no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it.” The conditional statement emphasises that memory requires active human participation to survive. Through these hidden spaces and preserved objects, Ogawa therefore suggests that resistance begins when individuals refuse to allow authorities to determine what deserves to be remembered.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Write a story about a person who…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 77.5%: The first thing I packed was the photograph. I found it beneath a stack of old birthday cards in the bottom…
The first thing I packed was the photograph. I found it beneath a stack of old birthday cards in the bottom drawer of my bedroom, its edges softened from years of being handled. Four people stood in front of the ocean: Mum with her sunglasses crooked on her face, Dad pretending to look annoyed, my sister pulling a ridiculous expression, and me, small enough to still believe that summer would last forever. I stared at it for a long time before placing it face-down in the suitcase. Tomorrow, the house would belong to someone else. The room, the street, the crooked fence Dad had promised to fix, the jacaranda that dropped purple flowers across the driveway every spring — all of it would become part of a life I no longer lived. I had spent months imagining this moment as an escape, believing that leaving meant becoming someone new. So I was surprised by the heaviness in my chest when Mum called that dinner was ready. For the last time, I walked downstairs.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: personal journeys
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 80%: Soft beginnings In the beginning Pinky was whole, square, certain but still unique. Her corners were firm, like…
Soft beginnings
In the beginning Pinky was whole, square, certain but still unique. Her corners were firm, like the unquestioned truths of childhood, when everything had a place and every fear could be folded neatly away beneath the weight of routine. I would press her into my neck, breathing her in like oxygen, convinced she held something essential to survive, maybe she did.
Back then, I believed comfort was something you could hold.
Her threads were tight, unbroken, like the certainty of being loved without condition. Nights were simple: tucked in, lights off, Pinky held between my fingers, her softness a quiet promise that nothing could reach me. Outside, the world stretched vast and unknowable, but within the small architecture of my bed, I was safe.
I did not yet know that safety could unravel.
First unravelling
The first loose thread appeared without ceremony. A small pull at the edge, barely noticeable, like the first doubt that enters your mind and refuses to leave. I remember tugging at it absentmindedly, watching as it lengthened, curious about how something so small could alter the shape of something so whole.
That was the year I learnt that things break slowly.
Arguments seeped through the walls at night, low and unfamiliar. The voice I once trusted became sharp, edged with something I couldn't name. I held Pinky tighter then, wrapping her around my fingers until they tingled, as if they could anchor everything back into place.
But the more I pulled, the more she changed. Still the same, but different. And maybe that was the first lesson, that love when grasped too tightly, does not stay intact. It stretches. It distorts. It becomes something else entirely.
Learning the language of loss
There is a particular silence that follows loss. It is not empty, but heavy, pressing itself into the spaces where something once existed. I learned that silence young.
Pinky absorbed it all.
Her wool. Once soft and full, it began to thin under the weight of nights spent awake, listening to the absence of what used to be. I would trace her edges, now uneven, as though I could smooth them back to their original shape. But grief does not work like that. It leaves marks. It reshapes.
I stopped asking questions for a while. Children learn quickly when answers do not come.
Instead I learned to listen to the quiet, to the in between, to things people do not say. Pinky became my translator, her worn threads speaking the language of everything I could not articulate.
She taught me that not all loss is loud.
Some of it settles gently like dust.
The illusion of holding on
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: Title: Great Southern Land Stimulus 1:…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 85%: Great Southern Land The bird squawked furiously. Yet again, the nest it had worked so hard to build had been…
Great Southern Land
The bird squawked furiously. Yet again, the nest it had worked so hard to build had been destroyed. This time the great oak had been replaced with an apartment building. The last patch of wildlife in this concrete jungle had been filled. Now the bird of the sky had its omnipotent view drowned out. The bird had had enough. Flapping its great black wings, it climbed higher and higher. The towering buildings stretched upwards, enclosing around the bird, suffocating its escape. Yet the bird emerged, soaring through the gap, and piercing above the ceiling of the city.
The bird continued to climb. The urban sprawl filled its vision in all directions, so the only escape was up. The air thinned, wings beginning to labour, so the bird relaxed, just floating amongst the clouds. Looking down, it observed the land. The once wild and harsh bush of Australia had given way to the plague of cities, spreading across the land like a virus. In spite of the suffocating size of the city, the vast bushland, hilly plains, red-hot deserts, and warm oceans stretched farther than even the bird could see.
It decided to travel north, further into the heart of the great Southern Land. It glided over the city, far from the oppressive bustle of cars and noisy humans, high in the serenity of the wind. The plague of buildings continued beneath the bird, but concrete castles turned to humble houses as the land was spread thin. The white blood cells of Australia were fighting back, in green dots of parkland resisting the great decay all around it..
As the bird continued to soar, tangles of roads thinned, giving way to dirt tracks as nature took over. The bird began to glide lower, brushing across the leaves of trees and listening to the light conversation of the land. As dusk began to fall, the bird was now circling over broad farmland, finally landing on an alone hilltop.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: Trevor’s outsider status both limits and…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 87.5%: Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, explores the draconian, oppressive rules present in South Africa and how…
Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, explores the draconian, oppressive rules present in South Africa and how these segregated and influenced the identities of marginalised individuals, like himself, during and post-apartheid. Through his anecdotal childhood experiences, Noah suggests that although being classified as “coloured” caused him to feel excluded, attributing to limiting opportunities and creating worry, his outsider status ultimately played a significant role in momentously/deeply enabling his success throughout the memoir. Noah evidences this through his mother, Patricia's, resilience positively influencing him to condemn reinforcing stereotypical values of minorities, as well as Noah’s ability to utilise languages as a way to adapt to different racial and social groups as a survival mechanism.
Through Noah’s portrayal of the violence and systemic racism embedded in South Africa, Noah presents restricted opportunities and fear experienced by coloured people like himself. Noah recounts his childhood under the apartheid rationale by likening himself to an illicit substance, being ‘dropped like a bag of weed’ when him and his black mother, Patricia were seen by white people during their walks at the park. This metaphorically underscores the limitations that being ‘born a crime’ in South Africa had on ‘mixed’ race Trevor Noah, and how this negatively impacts family dynamics that traditional single race families possess. In addition, this comparison depicts the dehumanising impact that the ‘atrocities’ of apartheid instilled on citizens and why being an ‘anomaly’ disables his succession. Furthermore, Noah portrays his life in Soweto, a ‘99.9%’ black populated township that was ‘designed to be bombed’ as highly segregated, with himself being ‘refused’ to ‘leave the house’ by his own family due to the illegality of his mixed race. This in turn isolated Noah, yearning to be outside ‘where the rest of the boys and girls were playing’, nonetheless he was forced to remain inside. Noah connotes in seriousness that him being ‘coloured’ increased the risk of him being taken from his family unbeknownst to them, as ‘children were taken’ during this time. Noahs shift from his frequent humorous tone throughout the memoir to urgency in this moment emphasises the importance in Noah remaining hidden from South Africa’s ‘militarized’ police. Thus, whilst necessary to be secluded, this emphasises how being different for Noah led to a lack of freedom and evidently disables the fulfillment of opportunities in ‘Born a Crime’. Ultimately, Noah exemplifies that his outsider status limited himself from opportunities, as well as engrained fear in minority groups in South Africa.
VCE · Text Response
Text Response: How does Sunset Boulevard explore the…
VCE Text Response essay scoring 85%: Set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Billy Wilder’s 1950’s film noir ‘Sunset Boulevard’ presents Hollywood as…
Set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Billy Wilder’s 1950’s film noir ‘Sunset Boulevard’ presents Hollywood as alluring yet unforgiving, where the pursuit of recognition and success often comes at a profound personal cost. Through his cynical deception of the industry, Wilder examines the detriments that can arise through individuals’ narcissistic self-interests. Wilder demonstrates this through individuals’ pursuit of fame tainting their wellbeing, amplified by the fickle nature of Hollywood. Moreover, Wilder alludes to the idea that striving for material success and stability often leads oneself to bend their morals, and in turn, generate their ultimate downfall. However, Wilder combats this by highlighting that achievements towards genuine creative ambitions are deserving of success by juxtaposing this with others selfish desires and their tendency to harm others in the process.
Wilder exposes the psychological consequences of an obsessive quest for stardom, suggesting that dependence on the industries recognition can skew one’s perception of reality and entrap them in delusion. From the exposition of the tragic narrative, Wilder accentuates Normas insanity, characterising her as delusional given her belief that her fame in Hollywood still prevails, despite ‘all [her] fans leaving twenty years ago.’ Wilder attributes Normas deluded state to the brutal film industry, and its tendency to dispose of people as though they are single-use commodities after they no longer fit the harsh reality of western beauty standards that infiltrate the system. Through this, Wilder immediately presents Norma as a victim of Hollywood, and condemns the system for leaving her with a corrupted state of mind. To exemplify this idea further, Wilder reveals Joe’s beliefs of her mansion and its macabre essence. When arriving at Normas mansion at the onset of the destructive tale, Joe compares its dilapidated appearance to that of ‘Miss Havisham’ in her ‘torn veil and wedding dress’ from ‘Great Expectations’. Through employing allusion, Wilder draws a parallel between Norma’s gothic horror-esque mansion and her compounding insanity throughout ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ Thus, Wilder further criticises the ability of Hollywood to make aging ‘stars’ fall into deep states of delusion and emphasises the difficulty of breaking this cycle. Moreover, Wilder reveals how those surrounding Norma reinforce the delusions upon which her psychological stability depends. Despite recognising Salome as a “hodgepodge of melodramatic plots”, Joe refuses to challenge her delusions, while former director Cecil B. DeMille similarly admits that he “didn’t have the heart” to reveal Paramount’s disinterest in her screenplay. Wilder suggests that Norma’s destruction is not solely self-inflicted; rather, Hollywood and those within it sustain the illusions that ultimately consume her. Yet, Wilder emphasises that condoning such delusion only fosters a greater deal of insanity through the ending of the tale. Following Joe’s rejection of her manufactured stardom, Wilder transforms the mansion’s spiral staircase into a visual metaphor for Norma’s final descent into madness. Ironically, while Norma perceives herself to be making a triumphant ‘return’ to the screen, her downward movement physically embodies her psychological deterioration, as the attention she has pursued is finally granted only once she is consumed by delusion. Thus, her declaration that she is “ready for [her] close-up”, accompanied by Wilder’s close-up, ultimately exposes her toxic dependence on fame. Thus, Wilder presents the pursuit of fame as a debilitating cycle resulting in total delusion and condemns the system for facilitating this.