Sammy+S

TWTWB assignment

Tomorrow when the war began Task 1 1. Homer put 3 choices to everyone, they were to try to rescue their families, try and hurt the enemy as much as they can or just stay in hell. All of these have the potential of taking their lives; however the safest option would have to be to stay in hell. That option is very good to stay safe but they just can’t live on rabbits and they will have to keep going into the town anyway for supplies unless they learn to live totally independently. They would have to keep going into town and when more enemy troops and supplies and coming in every day, their chances of getting caught just keep getting higher and higher. So the best way would be destroying the main access route and at the same time staying safe. They made a very good choice but it was still very dangerous, although it’s pretty hard to stay safe when they’re doing something that dangerous. Even though they did stop the enemies access route, they would eventually find another way to get resources in. So I would say the best way to survive would be to learn to live independently in hell. I also think Homer hit the nail on the head when he said the biggest risk is to take no risks. 2. There are situations in war where you might have to take someone else’s life to save others, Ellie found here self in this situation a few times. One was the bridge explosion, Ellie was relieved that she probably didn’t kill anyone in that one but she felt bad for killing 3 other enemies in the mower explosion. That was a good idea because if she didn’t do that herself, Kevin and Corrie would have all probably been killed, plus the enemy had taken everyone in captivity and had probably killed a few civilians as well. This can be justified in just a few words “its either you or them”. 3. All of the times that the enemy had been shooting at any of the 8 teens they had intended to kill them. This shows that they would probably not treat Corrie because they wanted to kill in the first place, but I think it would come more down to how they don’t want America to get involved and rumours can be spread easily and if America gets word of that it might just be enough to get them involved in the war. 4. Robyn ‘could understand’ why the ‘enemy’ had invaded… The enemy doing a ‘role reversal’ would have been worse than the way Australia already was like. Australia doesn’t have any slaves and that’s what they are doing. If anyone says that its unfair that we have such a beautiful land and they don’t have as much as us, i would just throw it back on their leaders and they didn’t share their wealth enough and didn’t run their own country well enough.

Task 2 1. They all show parts of leadership, but one person mainly lead the group and that was Homer. The reason Homer was the leader was because he was the main person coming up with ideas and everyone seemed to listen to him. They also showed parts of leadership though because when Robyn, Chris, Corrie and Kevin when into town to observe the showgrounds clearly showed that Robyn took the lead. I think in the group there were followers and leaders but there was one main leader. I think the main followers were Chris, Corrie, Kevin, Fi and Lee. They still all showed signs of leadership. 2. Like leadership they all showed signs of great courage but some just showed it more. Ellie showed great courage a few times but it was really courageous when she was running away with the rope with bullets flying past her. It was very courageous at the start of the book when she was talking those few steps towards the showgrounds and she didn’t know what she could expect to see. Robyn showed great courage when she picked up Lee and carried him to safety and also by being able to keep a cool head when the soldier was looking around the room for her and she rolled out and back under the bed. Kevin also showed a great deal of courage when he said he wanted to go with Corrie to the hospital even after how dead against he was to surrendering. I think they were 3 of the main signs of courage but all of them showed great deals of courage. 3. Well, being together for that long would test any friendships. From the point of view of Ellie she had a moment where she was annoyed with somebody. Kevin and Corrie, Lee and Ellie and Fi and Homers relationships would have all been tested because that’s just what happens when you are that close with someone. The main one we really know about was Lee and Ellie. Their relationship was tested, but it was ironic that she didn’t want to get close with Lee in case something happened with their relationship, but that made it awkward anyway.

Task 3 1 I think she made a very reliable narrator. We will never be able to tell how reliable she was but she seemed to tell things how she saw them. She didn’t make herself sound like a hero when she said she killed people. Also when she liked Homer she didn’t try to cover it up by saying she didn’t like him like a lot of people would have. She also didn’t say that the Hermit was real to try and make the story better. She said she hoped he was real for a bit of entertainment, but then she found out that he really was real. Because she was smart and had the intuitiveness to foresee happenings, like when she was about to get the hammer and chisel and smash open the motor, but she told them not to because it would burst into flames. She had the ability to remind us of ourselves. She was also like the average person in the group, like she was not pre-occupied by boys as much as Corrie and Fi. She wasn’t the main leader but she showed elements of leadership, but she wasn’t a follower. 2 Foreshadowing is when the author is giving hints about what might happen in the future. For example, when Lee said “it’s probably the start of world war three”. There were many different occasions when he interfered something was going to happen, like when Ellie said “their noise, their speed, their darkness frightened me”. John Marsden is very good at doing this but he may not always do it in the most obvious way. Task 4 1 It would have been impossible to say that some of them didn’t change because they all clearly did. Homer seemed to have a lot of on and off change with being serious and joking around also Robyn didn’t end up being scared of blood. The one person that you could really know how much change they had been though was Ellie. From what we saw she changed from and innocent naive country girl to almost a battle hardened warrior. She changed a lot emotionally after she killed the soldiers. A great example was when she blew up the bridge and Homer said she didn’t kill anyone she was happy but it didn’t mean that much because she knew she could have killed someone and she was prepared to. 2 Homer was a very smart person and he had the ability to be a genius, but he didn’t always use his intelligence. In school Homer wouldn’t have been considered a very smart person, but when they were invaded it gave him a chance to shine. Homer was partly a genius because he came up with the idea to destroy the bridge, but he was actually always a genius he just didn’t get the opportunities to show it. 3 Ellie had 2 choices when they were being chased by the soldiers one was that they surrender and possible risk getting shot and the second option was to blow up the ride on mower and kill them or try and slow them down. This can quite easily be justified by saying it was ether them or her and her friends. Deep inside Ellie will know herself if she is a good person, but she shouldn’t hold that against herself because in my eyes it was self-defence. 4 When she found Chris sleeping on sentry duty she had the right to be fuming but she definitely didn’t have the right to kill him. Chris did belong in the group, but I don’t think the reality hit him as hard as anyone else because he didn’t have any family involved. The fact that he atoned was good news, because it meant her understood what everyone else had been though and he realised he was wrong. Task 5 1 In the book Hell seems to change in the way it makes the reader looks at it. At the start of the book it is a beautiful holiday destination. When they get to Hell it turns into a much deeper place, this is because Ellie talks about how many people have been down there and she wonder whether it was just them and the Hermit. When Ellie hears the Planes go over I think it changes for her because she says “It’s funny how artificial noises sound so different to natural noises”. Once the jets flew over she seemed to have a different perspective of Hell. When they found out that there was a war going on they seemed to have another view on Hell. Like it was the safest place they could be. After they had been in Hell for a while they seemed to have a different idea about Hell which was like it was there home. 2 The book sometimes suggested that people belonged to the land and I think that’s why the group had a lot of aggression this was mainly because they had they family’s but also because they felt they had come into their land. I also think it suggests that because they end up having to live a lot off the land.

Task 6 1 It’s hard to tell what inspired her to use the lawn mower as a bomb. Maybe the smell of the fuel or maybe even corrie hitting it and Kevin saying that it was a ride on lawn mower. It really opened her mind up after she said they could roll it because she was thinking of something else to do with the ride on. But it is quite amazing that she kept a cool head and was able to think of that under pressure. 2 John Marsden created a lot of suspense when Ellie went looking for matches and she opened the car door and the light went on. She quickly turned it off but she waited for bullets to come through the wall of the building. This created a lot of suspense while she was standing there trembling waiting for bullets to come through the door. Another time was when Ellie said “I felt my skin go colder and colder. It was like icy insects were crawling over it”. 3 & 4 John Marsden did this by not giving you a good description of the soldiers. Also by Ellie calling them soldiers and not calling them people or even by a name. When the soldiers came into the yard they shot at them straight away and I think if they didn’t shoot and they asked them to surrender and she blew the mower up and killed them just so she wouldn’t be caught. We do not condemn Ellie because we don’t know the soldiers and we don’t know if they have family’s or kids. We know Ellie because we have been reading about her and we know things about her like her secrets and who her friends are. That is why John Marsden didn’t strongly identify the soldiers. If we did condemn Ellie for killing the soldiers we wouldn’t have a good time reading the book.

What dose TWTWB suggest that loyalty, goodness and courage are? “Loyalty, Courage, Goodness. I wonder if they are human inventions or if they just are.” We are trying to find out if loyalty, goodness and courage are all man made feelings or if they are natural traits. Every one of these three words are different so they do not all have the same answer. Some of them are natural traits and some can be manmade inventions. Argument Loyalty Loyalty is something you are born with although there may be something’s that happen in people’s life that can change this like anything else. There are to different levels of loyalty, the first level is where you won’t sell your friends out or trade sides. The second level is one that you have to be born with. It’s when you’re loyal enough to get energy when you have to do something for the people your loyalty belongs to. Chris showed signs of not having that second level of loyalty like when he fell asleep on sentry duty. Goodness Goodness is partly in everybody it just talks certain moments to bring it out. For goodness to be shown more or less it totally relies on how the person was raised. There were a lot of examples of goodness in Tomorrow When the War Began, but a lot of them were one sided goodness like when Ellie killed the three soldiers. When Ellie killed the three soldiers she saved her friends from possibly being killed, but on the other hand she killed three normal people which is an act of badness. This shows one person’s good deeds may be another’s devastating news. Courage Some people are born with more courage than average but some people are born with less. Courage is another form of confidence so it can be improved in most people. Some people are born with natural courage so there courage would exceed the courage of most people. If you are doing something that requires a lot of courage and you do it again and again you will eventually get more and more courage. Eventually you will be able to do things that you never thought you would be able to do. When you really need courage you can pull it from somewhere when you never even knew you had it. There were thousands of examples of courage in Tomorrow When the War Began. One was when Kevin chose to go to the hospital with Corrie. That showed great courage because they could have done anything to him because Corrie had been shot. Conclusion By reading this you can see that there are something’s that people are born with and are just parts of their personality traits, but most things are manmade inventions and by saying that it is showing that the certain traits can come out at any time. That is the same message John Marsden was trying to get across. Sam Scicluna

Task 7 The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton (These novels – it’s a series – are about a group of friends who find adventures and mysteries close to home and solve them when the adults around them can’t. They are written for young children.) The Secret 7 is a series where young kids form a secret society led by Peter and his sister Janet. There friends are Jack, Colin, George, Pam, Barbra and there dog Scamper. The society was formed in a previous story called Seaside Cottage. Peter is the clear leader of the gang and tells them what to do. The reason John Marsden chose to refer to that book was because they had so much in common with The Secret Seven. They both had tasks that they needed to do even though in tomorrow when the war began they are more serious tasks.