Fly Away Peter Essay

Australia is filled with many different aspects in which makes it the country it is today. I believe it is important to study texts that explore aspects of Australia by studying texts such as ‘The Club’, by David Williamson, a play written in 1977 about an Australian football club and movies such as “The Castle”, directed by Rob Stitch in 1997, about the daily life of an Australian family when their happiness is threatened when developers attempt to buy their house to expand the neighboring airport. Both these texts show us what Australian life was like in the past. By us looking at themes such as language, tradition and the mateship shown we are able to explore different aspects of Australia that make it what it is today.

Through the use of poetic devices, the author has successfully encouraged the audience to explore their thoughts on Australian identity and to reflect on our nation’s history.

In the incredible book, All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, the reader follows Paul Baumer, a young man who enlisted in the war. The reader goes on a journey and watches Paul and his comrades face the sheer brutality of war. In this novel, the author tries to convey the fact that war should not be glorified. Through bombardment, gunfire, and the gruesome images painted by the author, one can really understand what it would have been like to serve on the front lines in the Great War. The sheer brutality of the war can be portrayed through literary devices such as personification, similes, and metaphors.

Throughout the novel Fly Away Peter, published in 1982, David Malouf explores many binary opposites as a way to map Jim’s existence. Some of the opposites explored by Malouf include life and death, war and peace, and, innocence and experience. While exploring each set of opposites individually, Malouf is also able to touch on other sets of opposites in the process. For example Malouf explores war and peace hand in hand with light and dark. Malouf explores most of these opposites through the protagonist, Jim Saddler, the supporting characters of Jim’s father and Ashley Crowther, as well as the setting and the structure. The main opposite explored throughout Fly Away Peter is innocence and experience. At the beginning of the novel Jim is portrayed

The grim reality of war interpreted as Hell, and the suffering is a striking theme in this novel. The fear, terror and cold deprivations which war unleashes is told through the images given of Jim who suffers the brutality of life in the trenches. These images are continuously juxtaposed by bright images of a better life in another land known as Queensland and interpreted by the readers as the Garden of Eden. Fly Away Peter opens with the description of the swampland and a biplane “where a clumsy shape had been lifting itself out of an invisible paddock” and which had been making “slow circuits of the air” over the peaceful swamp on Ashley Crowther’s property at South Burleigh. The biplane was “a hundred times bigger than any hawk or eagle”. The plane represents a disturbance, something that lacks purpose, which could perhaps be war. Malouf expresses the difference between the graceful birds and the clumsy biplane as they are displayed as binary opposites and one is a disturbance to nature and one belongs to nature. The migratory birds remind Jim it is possible to to see the immense distance that separates him from Europe. Another binary opposite is the metaphoric wall of the men in the trenches and the wall in Queensland of the waves at the beach. Imogen is intrigued by the waves and the surfer, Malouf describes the moves of the surfer as "the brief etching of his body against the skyline...when he would slide into its hollows and fall". The surfer's movements are similar to the rise and fall of Jesus symbolising new life, new like Imogen's new interest in waves instead of birds. The wall in the trenches of men dehumanises them as they are described as objects with "faces all of one colour, the earth colour...[allowing] a man to disappear unnoticed". Another example of the dehumanising experience of war is when Malouf describes the

(A literary analysis of what went wrong on the island in “Lord of the Flies”)

In conclusion, contrast is used between settings, characters and symbols presented throughout the text. Fly Away Peter is written in a way such that the audience can identify techniques thoroughly throughout the text. Contrasting these techniques allows Malouf to highlight the main ideas in the text such as the change in Jim, life cycle and the different experiences associated with

1914, was the year Britain asked Australia for men to fight against rival countries in war, such as Germany. On the 10th of August 1914, recruitment started and many Australian men were already ready and influenced to enlist. Numerous Australian men enlisted to protect the ‘Mother Country’, Britain , but though, protecting the ‘Mother Country’ would sound much more heroic, several men enlisted for other reasons such as, romance, adventure, and pride. After days, 40 000 men enlisted and they all had a reason, from protecting the ‘Mother Country’ also known as Britain, to the romantic views of war and the romance that can come out of it.

Innocence. Migration. Transformation. War. All of these are the central ideas and themes are encased in the pages of Malouf’s novel, Fly Away Peter. The author conveys these intricate and profound themes using a multitude of techniques, such as structure, style, atmosphere, and tone. However, one of the predominant methods is imagery. Imagery is a vast and multi-faceted aspect of literature. It conjures an image in the audience’s mind, allowing them to fully understand the depth of a situation. By using vivid, imaginative and figurative language, the author is enabled to expand on a setting, interaction or description, and therefore expand on the central themes and ideas of the novel.

When the narrator first introduces the fly to the reader, it is shown as having, “fallen into his broad inkpot and was trying feebly but desperately to clamber out

Herbert was a different man know, well his body most defiantly. His eyes stared at his new bald scalp, it was hard to believe that the body he was in, was only thirty years old. He tilled his new head forward examining the deep stitched groves from the crown to the base of the skull. His physician had told him that it was likely he’d be growing hair in the following months. Herbert remembered that his selected donor was rare natural blonde, the recessive trait was sadly going the way of the redhead in the past decade.

Peter suddenly jolted forwards as a stern voice echoed down the trench. He felt loathsome and he could barely see through his blurry eyes. He could feel his bones trembling, his heart pounding. A shattering sound filled the air. He felt the mud on his knees as his body collapsed. Lower and lower, the body of the German bomber fell like a limp body. The deafening crash of the explosions splashed dirt as if it were water, louder and louder they grew. A piercing ring filled his ears as he flinched from the world spinning around him, his vision becoming all but a blur.

The sun sets on a magnificent secluded island with rushing ocean waves, warm lagoons, exotic fruits, and more privacy than one could imagine-- that is, until a plane filled with dozens of boys aged six to twelve comes crashing down from the sky. Lord of the Flies, a novel by William Golding, starts on the boys’ dream island, a place with plenty of food to eat, plenty of friends to play with, and plenty of freedom, considering that there are no grownups for miles. The novel exhibits a theme centered around civilization. William Golding's use of symbolism in the forms of the conch shell, the character, Jack, and Piggy’s glasses create the theme that the perfect civilization doesn’t exist.

Yet he says nothing much about the culture of that nation and concentrates more on the non-fictional writings of Malouf. He focuses on Malouf’s fictional and non-fictional prose as something concerned with cultivating Australia’s national imaginary. Rooney says that it is impossible to look across the range of Malouf’s writings and not to be struck by how consistent his cultivation of nation has been. In fact this orientation of his could even appear compulsive if it were not for his acceptance and prominence as literary and public figure. Rooney even states that Malouf’s preoccupation with “nation” has in some quarters drawn negative reactions ranging from indifference to suspicion. Rooney goes on to quote David Tredinnick, who declared himself a ‘lapsed Maloufian’, and whose review reminds us that over emphasis on nation may both attract and repel readers and may sometimes become stale and outmoded. But Rooney also refers to Benedict Anderson, who upholds the idea that prints media has been integral to the shaping of national imaginaries. In the circle of Australian fiction, the compulsion to narrate nation has always been integral to the individual

William Golding's 1954 novel ‘Lord Of The Flies’ is an allegorical castaway novel which follows a group of school age boys whose plane crashes on a deserted island as they are being evacuated from war-torn England. The island plays host to the boys as they attempt to create a democratic community like the one they were from. However, a majority of the boys ultimately give into their primal instincts and resort to savagery. There are many connections between the themes within the novel and the setting in which it takes place.