Tim Winton & Robert Connolly's "Blueback" teachers' review

Brief description and distinctive features

Distinctive features of Blueback

• Blueback is written in sixteen short chapters, many of which are made up of a series of brief sections. The chapters move the story along quickly. 
• In some editions, illustrations of shells, crabs, seaweed and other marine life, feature on the opening page of each chapter. 
• The narrative is told through the third person privileging the perspectives of Abel and Dora Jackson.
• The descriptions of the coastal landscape and ocean showcase Winton’s evocative imagery and reveal his passion and engagement with the natural world.
• Reviewers and Winton himself call Blueback a fable. This is a specific genre intended to instruct and teach.

Ways to use Blueback in the classroom

To contextualise Tim Winton’s passion for the Western Australian coastal landscape, consider showing the first episode of Ninagaloo Nyinggulu the 2023 television documentary series written and narrated by Tim Winton.

Blueback has been re-published in Australia and internationally many times since 1997. Sometimes the publisher has aimed their design at younger readers and other times at adults. Look at these book covers: which do you think are aimed at adults and at younger readers? Explain what elements of the covers influence your decision?

What design features are common in these book covers? Which one most appeals to you and give your reasons. In half a page respond: In what ways are you drawn into the book by the cover?

• Alert students to the fact that in the second part of this unit they will be looking at how the director Robert Connolly has taken the Winton novel and created a popular and successful film. In their reading students could think about how features of the novel could be represented by film. 
• There is an excellent audio version of Blueback which may assist reluctant readers and is a wonderful way into the power of storytelling.
• The opening chapter fulfills its role as orientation: we are introduced to the two key characters, Abel and Dora Jackson, and we learn a little about them. We see them in their natural habitat of diving in the sea and the reader and Abel are introduced to Blueback, the old, huge, blue groper. It is clear these three will be the key characters.

• The opening chapter also introduces the reader to Winton’s effective and glorious imagery:

  Tiny silver fish hung in nervous schools. Seaweed trembled in the gentle current. Orange starfish and yellow plates of coral glowed from the deepest slopes where his mother was already gliding like a bird. p. 5

  The groper arched back. The mosaic of its scales shone in the morning sun. p.11

• As students read the novel encourage them to notice more examples of Winton’s engaging style. 
• Later in the narrative, in chapter 7, we are introduced to the fable’s villain: Costello. He is vicious, cruel, reckless and shares none of the Jacksons’ compassion and love of the sea and its creatures. Costello represents the greed and avarice of some people.

Winton specifically uses language to influence our opinion of Costello. Dora tells Abel that ‘the water belongs to everybody’ but that ‘people say he [Costello] takes everything he sees’ (p. 69). Abel is worried that ‘Costello’s giving the bay a real hammering’ (p. 75) and that ‘there won’t be anything left on the reef at all’ (p. 76). Abel is agitated at the thought of Costello out in the bay and notices ‘bag after bag of abalone hauled up’ (p. 76). Abel decides to confront Costello, and Dora joins him to protect her son.

Winton also uses language to convey Costello’s power: ‘Costello’s compressor roared and his flags snapped in the breeze’ (p. 78). Winton describes the deck of Costello’s boat as ‘awash with blood.’ Abel reflects that he ‘had speared fish nearly every day but he had never seen such slaughter’. The deliberate choice of the words ‘awash with blood’ and ‘slaughter’ communicates a senseless destruction that goes well beyond a need for fish to eat.

Note the long list of fish species caught up in the carnage: ‘blue morwong, trevally, sweep, boarfish, harlequins, breaksea cod, groper, jewfish and samsons’ as well as ‘crates of writhing abalone and a box of illegal crayfish.’ 

Dora releases the abalone and Winton’s description of the abalone returning to nature is one of gentle beauty: ‘In a scattered mass behind them, falling like snow, abalone were finding their way back onto the reef’ (p. 80).

Students as Writers

Blueback is a marvellous model for student’s own writing. Specific extracts will reward close reading and discussion of language choices made by Winton to deliberately position the reader to Winton’s perspective on the environment. 

The ocean and its environs is clearly Winton’s place. 

In chapter one the narrator tells us that “Abel loved being underwater”. 

In groups encourage students to share where they love being. What is their place? 

Pre-writing is important to build ideas and establish the reasons why students have chosen this place. This could be an individual or collaborative task:

• Write about 500 words to capture the special quality of your place.
• Think about the language you want to use to evoke the sights, sounds and textures of your place. Go back to Blueback and re-read favourite sections which celebrate the ocean as Abel’s place. 
• Include specific details of your place to add interest and colour to your writing and establish a sense of the landscape.
• Experiment with literary techniques, including aural techniques like alliteration and onomatopoeia.
• Choose strong verbs.
• Edit your writing to remove unnecessary repetition, refine your images and add or substitute different words for effect.
• Form pairs or small groups and share your descriptions. Discuss each text’s effectiveness in capturing the special qualities of each place.
• Use the feedback and suggestions from the group discussion to further edit and improve your text.
• Choose an image to accompany your writing. It can be a photograph, or your own illustration or a collage.
• Publish the writings as a class anthology entitled My Place-Our Place. Be sure to include the authors’ names and captions that acknowledge the source of all the images.
• Reflection: In about 300-400 words explain in what ways Tim Winton’s language choices inspired and influenced you own writing. Be sure to include at least two specific examples of your own craft and your explanation  of how your writing was influenced by Winton’s craft.  

From book to feature film

In exploring a film which has been based on a book by a popular author there is often a compulsion to compare the two mediums. It might be more productive to consider the deliberate choices Blueback’s director, Robert Connolly, has made in how he tells his story.

For example:

• Why do you think the Connolly has re-cast Abel as Abby?
• Why does Connolly choose to represent the narrative in three time frames and how do these contribute to our understanding of Abby?
• Consider how the underwater cinematography takes Winton’s marvellous prose into another dimension. 

• The filmmaker, like the writer, has a range of stylistic devices to use to not only tell the story but to create an engaging setting. In an interview about Blueback the director, Robert Connolly commented:

  Stories have a great power to impact the world, to illuminate aspects of the human condition, to inspire change, and to take audiences to places they would never otherwise experience.
  – Give Me the Backstory: Get to Know Robert Connolly, the Writer-Director of “Blueback” | Sundance Institute

In groups students are to choose a scene which they think powerfully explores the fragility of the marine environment. Analyse how the tools of filmmaking have been used to tell this story and create these ideas. 

Be sure to revisit film language with your students and encourage them to use the terminology of film as a medium. For each film technique mentioned, students need to discuss the impact and effect on the viewer. The Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) has produced a very valuable study guide to accompany the film.

View/listen/read Tim Winton’s powerful and beautifully crafted speech to save Ningaloo. His medium is just as effective as his message. Source a transcript of his speech and highlight the key language choices which echo Winton’s passion and commitment.

Task

“Literature, film and public speeches are important vehicles for enriching our community about what matters.” In about 600 words discuss in what ways the novel and film of Blueback and the Winton speech to save Ningaloo have influenced you to think about what matters. 

Relevant details in relation to the new NSW English 7-10 syllabus

Text requirements: Blueback is a novel (extended prose) by an Australian author and the novel is widely regarded as quality literature. It includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives. Blueback is also a film by an Australian director. It includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives. 

Concepts could include Genre, Narrative and Characterisation

Relevant NSW English 7-10 Syllabus content

A student uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to read texts that are complex in their ideas and construction EN4-RVL-01

• Revisit texts to develop a clear understanding of the themes, ideas and attitudes they express
• Explore the main ideas and thematic concerns posed by a text for meaning
• Engage with the ways texts contain layers of meaning, or multiple meanings
• Identify and understand that relevant prior knowledge and personal experience enables and enhances understanding when reading, viewing or listening to texts
• Explain personal responses to characters, situations and issues in texts, recognising the role of written, oral or visual language in influencing these personal responses
• Identifying and articulating how the opinions, motivations and choices of characters in fiction evoke empathy, sympathy, antipathy and identification.
• Explain how the use of language forms and features in texts might create multiple meanings
• Read texts selected to challenge thinking, develop interest and promote enjoyment, to prompt a personal response
• Understand the ways reading helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world
• Reflect on how reading, viewing and listening to texts has informed learning
• Reflect on how an understanding of texts can be enhanced through re-reading and close study
• Discuss and reflect on the value of reading for personal growth and cultural awareness
• Reflect on how reading promotes a broad and balanced understanding of the world and enables students to explore universal issues
• Reflect on own experiences of reading by sharing what was enjoyed, discussing challenges to strengthen an understanding of the value of reading

A student analyses how meaning is created through the use of and response to language forms, features and structures EN4-URA-01

• Understand how language forms, features and structures, in a variety of texts, vary according to context, purpose and audience, and demonstrate this understanding through written, spoken, visual and multimodal responses
• Analyse how figurative language and devices can represent ideas, thoughts and feelings to communicate meaning
• Analyse how engaging characters are constructed in texts through a range of language features and structures, and use these features and structures in own texts
• Describe how characters in texts, including stereotypes, archetypes, flat and rounded, static and dynamic characters represent values and attitudes, and experiment with these in own texts
• Understand how the interactions of characters, such as protagonists and antagonists, might be perceived to represent aspects of human relationships, and experiment with interactions when composing texts
• Understand narrative conventions, such as setting, plot and sub-plot, and how they are used to represent events and personally engage the reader, viewer or listener with ideas and values in texts, and apply this understanding in own texts
• Examine how narratives can depict personal and collective identities, values and experiences

(English K-10 Syllabus 2022 © NSW Education Standards Authority for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales, 2023)

Connecting texts