Creating and Presenting

CREATING AND PRESENTING

The Mind of a Thief

In this Area of Study, you will be asked to examine and explore what influences our sense of self, and what shapes our desire to belong.

You will ask yourself the following questions, and examine these concepts through the ideas of two stimulus texts: The Mind of a Thief and Invictus.

CONTEXT: IDENTITY AND BELONGING – The Mind of a Thief

1.  Anticipation statements: (Tick the appropriate answer AGREE/DISAGREE/UNSURE)

Agree / Disagree / Unsure
Our identity is something which we create for ourselves.
A sense of belonging can only come from those around us.
The more we learn about our family’s history; our sense of self grows stronger.
Our identity is shaped by the place we love most.
Our identity stays the same forever.
When we have to retell an event from the past; it helps us to understand that event more clearly.
To own something and for something to belong to you is not the same thing.
Our identity is something which is shaped by our experiences, but something we have little control over

2.  Choose one of the statements above and write a fully developed paragraph (Using TEEAL), explaining your answer in detail. (attach more paper if necessary)

3.  The Mind of a Thief - Synopsis The following synopsis of the memoir will help you in your reading of the memoir.
In this memoir, Miller travels back to her home town, Wellington in New South Wales, to discover more about her background. As an adult, she recognises that Wellington and the area surrounding it is Wiradjuri land, although she had not realised this when she was growing up on her family’s farm. Through a number of visits to Wellington, some interviews with key Wiradjuri people and careful research into the white settlement of Wellington, Miller finds her ancestry may be tied more closely to the Wiradjuri people than she thought.
Miller first meets the Wiradjuri women when she offers to help them write their own ‘stories’ (p.1). During this meeting, she is introduced to Wiradjuri elder Joyce Williams, who tells her that they are cousins who share a common ancestor. Using this incident as a framing device, Miller begins to trace her history by threading backwards and forwards through time, focusing on how her identity has been shaped by her sense of place and her love of narrative. Miller describes her childhood on the farm on the fringes of Wellington and her move from the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney, to Kings Cross, in the centre of the city. It is from here, two years after the move and prompted by a dream, that she makes her trips back to Wellington.
Wellington is a divided place, with an Aboriginal settlement, Nanima, on its outskirts, adjacent to the Town Common. Miller presents a fractured picture of the people of Wellington Valley: the Wiradjuri and the whites have different stories about who is related to whom, there is some petty crime that is always attributed to the Aborigines and there is a rift in the Wiradjuri community over who is entitled to represent the whole tribe. Nevertheless, Miller creates a sense that, although there is conflict and ambiguity in the relationships in the town, each individual’s story is authentic and contributes to an understanding of the complexities of relationships, memory and justice.
Running parallel to Miller’s investigations of her background is her effort to understand the first post-Mabo land claim, which was lodged over land in Wellington. Miller attempts to understand the competing claims on the Town Common from two separate parts of the Wiradjuri tribe, represented by Joyce Williams and Rose Chown, and the conflict that has been created because of these claims. In trying to recover the land, both Joyce and Rose are caught up in white man’s law, which Miller describes as ‘an elaborate, wiry construction … mostly invisible to most of the people involved, determining the validity of their every move’ (p.160). The text primarily explores the claims of Joyce’s group as they attempt to overturn the ruling that gave ownership, perhaps wrongly, of the Common to Rose’s group.
http://www.insightpublications.com.au/pdf_preview/TG_Preview_The_Mind_of_a_Thief.pdf

4.  Read the memoir The Mind of a Thief by Patti Miller.

5.  To assist you with your reading of the text, answer the questions below, ensuring that you provide your own comments, and textual evidence such as examples and quotations:

a.  How would Patti Miller answer this question: What defines one’s identity? Consider the following moments within the text when answering this question:

i. Miller’s observations about her cloak of identity

ii.  Her observation that identity is a pastiche

iii.  Her time in Ireland, and the comparison she makes with her connection to the landscape of Australia

iv.  The unresolved ending of the text

______

______

______

______

______

______

b.  How have Patti Miller’s experiences shaped her sense of self?

Consider: - her childhood on a farm - her Irish heritage - her city living

- her role as a mother - her role as a daughter - her reconnection with her memories

- her research into the Aboriginal heritage of Wellington

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

6.  Read the extract from Tim Winton’s memoir Island Home, a landscape memoir, and fill in the table below:

Now and then, of course, I just bolt. I pile a few chattels into the LandCruiser and hit the road. I drive until sunset and then pull over in a different state of mind, or even another state of the Federation altogether. There's often no purpose to these trips beyond the joy of being in the open, unrolling a swag in a creekbed or in a hollow between dunes, sitting by a fire and watching the stars come out like gooseflesh in the heavens. These headlong excursions begin as flights from enclosure and I know they sound like escapes, but to me they're more like calls answered. Within moments of leaving, once I've achieved some momentum, it's as if I'm subject to a homing impulse I barely understand. Lying under the night sky I feel a curious sense of return and restoration, not unlike the way I felt as a kid coming in the back door to the sudsy smell of the laundry and the parental mutter of the tub filling down the hall.

Still, going home is not always a cosy business. It can be harsh and bewildering. The places dearest to me can be really hard to reach. They're austere, savage, unpredictable. And like taciturn cousins and leery in-laws they don't always come out and say what they mean. They give you the stink-eye at breakfast and do what they can to make your stay uncomfortable. You arrive moody and distracted, unprepared for the complexity of the family dynamics, wrongfooted from the get-go. Not much of our country is lush or instantly congenial. The regions I know best are particularly challenging and my home range in the west can be hard work – it's spiky, dry, irritating, even humiliating, and after some visits I often feel as spent and dismayed as any guest at a Christmas lunch, wondering why the hell I bothered. But homecomings are partly about submitting to the uncomfortably familiar, aren't they? Like a hapless adult child, you go back for more, despite yourself, eternally trying to figure out the family puzzle. Even so you get sustenance, just from trying, by remaining open to the mystery, suspecting that if you give up on it you'll be left with nothing.

This country leans in on you. It weighs down hard. Like family. To my way of thinking, itisfamily.

Extract fromIsland Home, a landscape memoir,by Tim Winton, published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, Copyright © Tim Winton, 2015.

How does Tim Winton feel about leaving the city? What comforts him? / He also suggests that ‘going home’ can be ‘harsh and bewildering’; list some of the words/phrases Winton uses to describe the feeling of going home / According to Winton, why then are we drawn by a ‘homing impulse’? Why are we drawn back? With what are we rewarded?

7.  Consider your own use of social media (such as Facebook)

Everything we post online is a considered choice, aimed to present ourselves in a particular way. In dot points, fill in the table.

How do we construct our identity on social media? / What are the possible consequences of this?

8. Read the following quote, and (in your own words), explain what this student is saying about cultural identity.

An individual's sense of identity is grounded in theircultural identity.

"I have... come to the conclusion that my identity does not have to be static. Sometimes, I feel Spanish and I like to identify with the Spanish culture while at other times I choose to reinforce my German, Irish-Anglo background. In many ways the two identities have become interwoven. A part of me is expressed through speaking Spanish and singing Spanish songs which is not expressed through speaking English or playing classical music... each language I speak and each music tradition I engage in carries with it a different world of meanings."

Student respondent, quoted inSmolicz, et. al., 1998. (www. http://www.racismnoway.com.au/about-racism/understanding/culture-language-identity.html)

EXPLAIN:

______

______

______

______

______

______

8.  Choose two examples from the three listed above (Tim Winton, Facebook, Student Quote), and write two separate extended responses (5-6 sentences each), examining the similarities/differences between the ideas about identity and belonging presented by Miller, and the other examples presented to you.

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

______

HEADSTART POWERPOINT – ‘Unlocking the core concepts of THE MIND OF A THIEF’

a)  The desire to feel connected to people and place:

Read the information below, and summarise in 1 -3 dot points:

______

______

______

______

______

______

b)  What does Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs reveal about our need for love and belonging?

______

______

______

______

c)  Read the following document, and answer the question below:

Finding vs Creating Yourself

19 JUNE 2013. http://www.themodernnomad.com/finding-vs-creating-yourself/

Find Yourself

“Have you found yourself?”

I am often asked that question after explaining my nomadic journey. It is such a common question that I wonder if there is some pavlovian conditioning at work. We seem obsessed with finding ourselves. Large forests have been cut down to create mountains of self-help books expounding on the need to find ourselves. Oprah inspired millions of people to bravely venture into the TV in search of themselves.

Superficially, it is a cute analogy. A man feels that he isn’t living his true life and so begins a life of travel in search of his real self, as if my true self was patiently waiting on some tropical beach or perhaps lying prostrate in a Chinese opium den.

But I take umbrage to this turn of phrase. I do not believe in theexistenceof a ‘real’ self, waiting to be discovered. The idea reeks of fatalism. If there is a true self for which we can search, then it must be static and preordained. It is as if the world is a jigsaw puzzle and this elusive ‘self’ is a man-shaped hole in the puzzle named ‘destiny’. Finding and fulfilling this destiny then becomes the motivation to explore ourselves and the world, but this motivation is external, in control of us rather than the other way around. It suggests that we are not complete before we find this destiny and once found there is no reason to explore and change anymore as there are no alternative selves to go looking for.

Create Yourself

So if I am not out there searching for myself, what am I doing? I am activelyevolving, one change at a time, experimenting with new experiences and ways of life, discarding the bad and incorporating the good. There is no end goal at which point I can stop evolving. As I grow older, I can shed the aspects of my life that no longer fits as a snake sheds an outgrown skin. My motivation does not come from a preordained destiny but from a desire within to live many different lives and experience all that this world has to offer. It is up to me to direct and shape my own life in any way I desire. I am notmeantto do anything and thereby I am free to do any-and-everything. And thus, step-by-step, I amcreatingmyself.

One final difference between someone searching for himself and someone in continuous evolution is their views on sunk costs, and here I’d like to use a concrete example from my own life. When I decided to become a nomad, I had spent the last ten years studying and working my way up the corporate ladder. I had an identity grounded in my work as a software engineer at an investment bank.

If I had thought that we have a place in the world, a destiny or a self, for which we should search, then leaving my life in London would have been traumatic. I would have to think of those ten years as wasted time during which I came no closer to finding myself.

But that was not how I thought about it. There is no self to be discovered, only experiences to be had and lives to be lived. My corporate 9-6 job was no longer filling me with awe and it was no longer teaching me new things. I let it go to evolve into something different and more rewarding. I have no regrets. My former life is a valued experience, and it remains sobecause I left itwhen it was no longer right for me. When the day comes that the nomadic life no longer fits me, I will do the same again.

Life is a journey absent destination.

i) Summarise the document in 3 dot points

______

______

______

ii) Based on what you have discovered so far, do you think Miller wants to ‘find’ or ‘make’ herself? Which option appeals to you? Explain.