Standard Module A

Contemporary Asian Australian Poets by Adam Aitken (Editor), Kim Cheng Boey (Editor), Michelle Cahill (Editor)
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Prose Fiction
Merlinda Bobis, ‘This is where it begins’; Miriam Wei Wei Lo, ‘Home’; Ouyang Yu, ‘New
Accents’; Vuong Pham, ‘Mother’; Jaya Savige, ‘Circular Breathing’; Maureen Ten (Ten
Ch’in Ü), ‘Translucent Jade’
Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Poetry
‘Trance’, ‘Unearth’, ‘Oombulgarri’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Leaves’, ‘Key’

Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet, is at the forefront of Australian Indigenous poetry. Inside My Mother is both a political and personal collection, angry and tender, propelled by the need to remember, yet brimming with energy and vitality qualities that distinguished her previous, prize-winning verse novel, Ruby Moonlight. Tributes to country, to her elders, and to the animals and spirits that inhabit the landscape, coupled with the rhythms of mourning and celebration that pulse through the poems, make this a moving and personal collection. Grief is deeply felt and vividly portrayed in poems such as ‘Inside My Mother’ and ‘Lament’. There is defiance and protest in ‘Clapsticks’ and ‘I Tell You True’. In the final section there is a marked generational shift as the elders begin to pass away and the poet as grandmother comes to accept her rightful place as matriarch.
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by George Bernard Shaw
Drama Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw’s feminist views. In Shaw’s hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his ‘creation’ has a mind of her own.
Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah by Alana Valentine
Drama Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
What do you do when you profoundly disagree with someone you love? Wearing a hijab is a touchstone of religious identity, but it is also imbued with a complex array of historical and contemporary meanings. The cultural meaning of the hijab has become a wedge between generations. At the heart of Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah is the relationship between an aunt and her niece. Both devout Muslims, the younger woman wants to put on a headscarf, the older woman tries to dissuade her. For Aunt Sarrinah, the hijab represents a world from which she has escaped; for her niece, Shafana, it is a personal statement of renewed faith.
Small Island by Andrea Levy
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Prose Fiction
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It s desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Gilbert s wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler
Drama Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
Ray Lawler’s revised script (2012) of his (and Australia’s) most famous play, in which two larrikin cane cutters and their women awaken to middle-age. The impact of The Doll cannot be overstated. Its success both here and abroad was quickly recognised as a defining moment in Australian theatre history.
The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories by Henry Lawson
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon
- HSC ear 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Prose Fiction
‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, ‘Shooting the Moon’, ‘Our Pipes’, ‘The
Loaded Dog’

One of the great observers of Australian life, Henry Lawson has become part of the Australian national psyche, and his short stories and verse have come to affect how Australian’s view their country. Yet at his best Lawson transcends even the very bush, the very outback, the very up-country, the very pub or selector’s hut he conveys with such brevity and acuity- he makes specific places universal.
Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon
- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Nonfiction
This story does not begin on a boat. Nor does it contain any wild swans or falling leaves.
In a wonderland called Footscray, a girl named Alice and her Chinese-Cambodian family pursue the Australian Dream – Asian style. Armed with an ocker accent, Alice dives head-first into schooling, romance and the getting of wisdom. Her mother becomes an Aussie battler – an outworker, that is. Her father embraces the miracle of franchising and opens an electrical-appliance store. And every day her grandmother blesses Father Government for giving old people money.