Seven teenagers camp in a remote and idyllic location deep in the countryside. But that night, they see the sky filled with military aircraft, and return home to find their houses deserted and the locals detained in the showground. Escaping detection, the teenagers form themselves into a guerilla unit, hoping to prevent the invading Coalition Nations from bringing any more troops in by destroying the only bridge to nearby Cobbler's Bay, where the troop ships are moored.
'When their country is invaded by a large hostile force, a group of teenagers fight for their family and homeland. Based on the era-defining novels by John Marsden.'
Source: Screen Australia.
Unit Suitable For AC: Year 10 (NSW Stage 5)
Duration Four to six weeks
Curriculum Summary
Find a summary table for Australian Curriculum: English content descriptions and NSW Syllabus outcomes for this unit.
Themes
Day of the Girl, discovery, heroism, invasion and occupation of Australia, just war, maintaining moral values even in war, resistance, security, self-discovery, storytelling, survival, teenage gangs, war
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Information and communication technology, Literacy, Personal and social
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia
Number 36 on the Better Reading's Top 50 Kids Books 2023
This work is affiliated with the AustLit subset Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing because it has Japanese, Chinese and Korean translations, and has an Asian-Australian character, Lee, of Thai and Vietnamese heritage.
Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
As a tier two work, this text has been identified as key to prepping in a broader, more conceptual relationship. These texts have been classified as ‘key’ prepper-adjacent texts that are important to prepping, even if they themselves are not about prepping or do not include preppers. These texts have been identified in the database through various means such as interviews with preppers, scholarship on preppers, and online prepper forums.
'In colonial Australian children’s literature, the desire to exert control over the land, its inhabitants, and the construction of a national identity has been a central concern, exemplified in the narrative of the lost child in the Australian bush. The lost child trope offers a reflection of “Australian anxiety” (Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge University Press, 1999), symbolising the troubled negotiation in integrating European ideals onto an Indigenous landscape (Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, xii. Cambridge University Press, 1999); this is heightened when the lost child is female. Colonial texts place deviant female characters as being subsumed by the bush as a culmination of concerns about national identity and gender roles. This chapter explores the colonial tradition of representation of the girl and the bush as entities to be feared and dominated through A Little Bushmaid by Mary Grant Bruce and Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner. It considers how contemporary Australian Young Adult texts rewrite the lost child in the bush trope through the complex symbolic relationship between the girl and the bush in Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden and The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf reclaims a focus on Indigenous land, identity, knowledge, and narrative, returning to Indigenous roots.' (Publication abstract)