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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · Creative Response
Creative Response: Write an opinion piece on any topic
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 72.5%: As right wing parties continue to gain traction in Australian politics, threatening to follow in the USA’s…
As right wing parties continue to gain traction in Australian politics, threatening to follow in the USA’s footsteps regarding abortion laws, it is impossible, as a woman, not to fear. Fear for my autonomy, for my right to live as I choose, to have children if and when I choose. As a woman, I am unable to turn a blind eye to the possibility that my body will be governed as an object of the state and the right to ignore the existence of my personhood will be legislated.
As of April 2025, following the 2022 overturn of Roe v Wade, the US saw a drastic increase in maternal mortality. In states where abortion was banned, mothers were almost twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after. In Texas alone, maternal mortality rose 56% by 2023. These figures represent real wome, who had lives and aspirations, people who loved them. Women who were murdered by the denial of their right to autonomy. Banning abortions doesn’t “save” lives - it takes them.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: PERSONAL JOURNEYS
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 90%: The quarter zip was folded at the bottom of the box marked MISC and the sleeves crossed over its chest like it…
The quarter zip was folded at the bottom of the box marked MISC and the sleeves crossed over its chest like it was waiting to be identified. I almost didn't recognise it. The navy had been dulled by the colour of dishwater, the zip stiff with rust, the collar gone thin, worn thinner by sleep than by wear. I held it to my face without meaning to, and there it was: a smell I couldn’t name, arriving half a second before the memory did.
I was fourteen the last time I wore it, I think. Old enough to remember, too young to have noticed that anyone cared.
Back then, I wore whatever was folded at the top of the clothing rack. I chose things because they were comfortable, or because they were the first thing on top of the drawer. It never crossed my mind that anyone was watching what I picked. Back then, there was no gap between feeling it and doing it. I ran everywhere instead of walking, even to the mailbox, even when no one was looking or timing me. If someone doubted me, I instinctively argued back before I thought it through. It hadn't occurred to me yet to just go quiet. I tended to speak out before I decided whether it was a good idea to say it. It was in that phase where nobody had told me there was a version of myself that I was expected to be performing instead of the one that already existed.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: on our way
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 95%: A dozen rows of anxious workers sit at their stations, heads bent in concentration. The rhythmic hum of sewing…
A dozen rows of anxious workers sit at their stations, heads bent in concentration. The rhythmic hum of sewing machines is drowned out by music blaring from speakers scattered around the room, as though noise could muffle fear. There is no chatter, no laughter, only a silence that feels less like peace and more like submission, the kind of silence tyrants mistake for obedience. In each bent back, in each stitched seam, there is a protest stifled before birth, a cry swallowed in the name of survival.
The cracks in the pillars, discovered the day before, had already spoken the truth. But the owners had issued their own verdict: come to work or starve. Fear became the whip, greed the hand that held it. And so, like prisoners condemned, they returned.
The lights flickered, casting unsettling shadows across the room. The floor beneath their feet trembled, a low rumble growing stronger. And then, within seconds, the world collapsed around them. Darkness swallowed the room. Pillars crumbled. The roofs from the upper floors crashed down in a deadly chain reaction. By the time the dust settled, 1,134 lives were lost, and more than 2,500 were injured. Most of them were women and children. Amma, my mother, was one of them.
In the days following the collapse, Dhaka erupted. The streets, usually choked with rickshaws and tuk tuks, became rivers of protest. I was swept up in the tide of the march, a current of grief and fury pulling me along. My voice, raw and hoarse, joined the chorus of demands, each chant a desperate plea for justice, for some semblance of meaning in the face of such senseless loss. The sun beat down, the air thick with the smell of sweat and dust, but I barely noticed. My focus was on the faces around me, each one a mirror reflecting my own pain, my own anger at the injustice of what Amma had to go through in her final moments.
Then, the arrests. Sohel Rana, the building owner, his face twisted in a mask of fear and defiance, was dragged through the crowd. A wave of satisfaction, sharp and bitter, washed over me. It was a small victory, a single thread of justice in a tapestry of tragedy. But even as the crowd roared its approval, I knew it was not justice, only a performance meant to pacify our rage.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: This is for an oral speech concerning…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 72.5%: small Wiradjuri girl carrying the weight of years of trauma, not just her backpack, on the walk to school. A…
small Wiradjuri girl carrying the weight of years of trauma, not just her backpack, on the walk to school. A darker-skinned fellow still having his position questioned after generations, including himself, having to work twice as hard just to be there.
A hard-working individual who still has to face despicable ridicule and shame as a consequence of just being a woman.
How can we say Australia has instilled itself with fair and equitable values when this is the reality of millions when they walk out the door and into the Australian sun?
‘Australian values’ have been riddled with bitter contempt: who deserves more, who could we just further oppress, how do we manage ourselves as a country to even look respectable to each other?
It's time we reconcile with the dark past and bitter present. It’s our chance to seize the moment and the privilege befallen unto us. Fight the wave of white superiority, misogyny and discrimination. We need to affirm our belief in the Indigenous population, their role in cultivating the land into the beautiful soil we stand on today, and open our eyes to the countless generations of immigrants and their role in establishing and fostering culture. We need to look at each other and pull those out from between the gaps where they suffer silently. Australia is a country built on the prosperity of all its citizens. We need to ensure that change happens for the prosperity of all of our lives.
The sound of the Australian bush, calls of our native birds decorate our open space. The sickly sweet smell of eucalyptus on the tip of each of our tongues. The soil nurturing us from below, filtering water and lending us its land. Surely the omnipresence of our surroundings doesn’t let us forget who we should lend our extended gratitude to?
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: RESIST AND PERSIST Stimulus 1: “If you…
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 82.5%: There is an old tale, a sad one, and we all know how it ends. Yet, we tell it anyway. It goes like this: Once…
There is an old tale, a sad one, and we all know how it ends.
Yet, we tell it anyway.
It goes like this:
Once upon a time, there was a hungry young girl. She lived in a world where the warmth of spring was few and far between. She lived in a world where the days were cold and dark, because spring had been consumed by the ruthless winter. The winter that burrowed its people in thick layers of snow so they could no longer be heard, starved them so they no longer had the strength to think and froze them so they no longer had the ability to move. All so that they could continue to build their mounds of snow, drowning out the land that was once green with love and freedom.
There would be days, weeks if lucky, for which spring would return and happiness would blossom in the population once more, though this time would seem to always be cut short by the inevitable return of winter. Then one day, the flowers stopped blooming, the birds stopped chirping, the water stopped running and the people stopped hoping. This girl was one of those people, her name was Eurydice.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who refused to relinquish the hope that spring would come again. He was a shy boy, yet he loved to sing, bringing light and music to an age riddled with silence and oppression, but more than this, he loved Eurydice. When he proposed to her, he promised that he would write a song, a song so beautiful and so raw that it would melt the winter freeze and allow spring to warm the land once more. The people were humoured by this idea, they laughed:
”How could you, one single man, bring down a tyrant like winter itself?”
“If spring would not come around when we needed it most, it would certainly not come again just for a boy such as yourself, who has decided to sing a song.”
Orpheus heard these comments but he did not care - or at least he tried not to - for he knew that while they sat, huddled together, mocking him and complaining about their conditions, he wrote, he planned and he moved. He asked them:
“How can you be so sure that spring will not come for my song when you yourself have never sung?”
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 90%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like bloody…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like bloody tears. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
The slipping hourglass fell upon me.
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disillusioned by the lacklustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day; the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the hunted I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like rats chewing against the walls, rotting moss in a basement, SACs accumulated like dull dust.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 87.5%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like bloody…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like bloody tears. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
The slipping hourglass fell upon me.
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disillusioned by the lacklustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day, the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the hunted I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like rats chewing against the walls, rotting moss in a basement, SACs accumulated like dull dust.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 77.5%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like wounded…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like wounded angels. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
The slipping hourglass fell upon me.
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disillusioned by the lacklustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day, the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the hunted I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like rats chewing against the walls, rotting moss in a basement, SACs accumulated like dull dust.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 82.5%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like wounded…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like wounded angels. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
The slipping hourglass fell upon me.
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disillusioned by the lacklustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day, the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the hunted I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like rats chewing against the walls, rotting moss in a basement, SACs accumulated like dull dust.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 87.5%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like misguided…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like misguided angels. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
6 months later…
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disillusioned by the lacklustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day, the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the hunted I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like rats chewing against the walls, rotting moss in a basement, SACs accumulated like dull dust.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 85%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like misguided…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like misguided angels. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
6 months later…
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disillusioned by the lack lustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day, the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the hunted I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like rats chewing against the walls, rotting moss in a basement, SACs accumulated like dull dust.
VCE · Creative Response
Creative Response: "How did you change?"
VCE Creative Response essay scoring 77.5%: He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit Deep dark stains lined the bed like misguided…
He had lain there in the medium stone grey intensive care unit
Deep dark stains lined the bed like misguided angels. Throbbing intensified, the body coiled ready to spring forwards to fly like an arrow of God. There he lay in all his glory; someone who had purpose, someone who had style, someone who was happy. I could see through my visor-like eyes the mirror to the perfect alternate version of myself. No one was around but my own conscience to guide me through the pain. My life was fading, something I couldn’t control. Was life ever going to change?
6 months later…
Getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day, disenfranchised by the lack lustre purgatory of not improving. Twice a day, I wrote to myself during the summer; year 12 was looming, I wrote my dreams into a timeless capsule under my bed in the aged monopoly set that smelled of cat piss.
I was told year 12 was suffering…
The start of a brand-new day, the same normal people I called my peers were distant background noise to me. I was silently suffering like a prey animal, but much like the prey animal I had learned to conceal hardships. Bogged down, brought down, beaten. The days went by in a gruellingly slow fashion, like paint drying against the seams, growing grass against the footpath, SACs accumulated like dull dust.