Richard Flanagan's "Question 7" teachers' review for NSW HSC 2027-2028

Brief description and distinctive features

Question 7 is set for study in 2027-2028 in Year 12 in Advanced and Standard Texts and human experiences.

Teaching this text for HSC English Standard cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Brief description of Question 7

Flanagan takes the reader on a physical, psychological, philosophical, speculative and genre-busting meditation through history, life and death, family, thought and landscape. We start in Japan as Flanagan explores where his father spent time as a POW slave in the coal mines of Ohama Camp. But we roam in time and space as we see Thomas Ferebee release the atomic bomb over Hiroshima that saves Flanagan’s father’s life while destroying 60,000-80,000 other lives in an instant. The structural seesawing of the book means we revisit Tasmania’s convict and settlers past, Australia’s black history, Richard Flanagan’s youth and that of his parents, a near-death experience on the Franklin River, the passion of famous writers, the Manhattan project, the role of unconventional physicist Leo Szilard as we follow a maze of material that provokes a powerful and emotional response.

Distinctive features of Question 7

• A meditative and non-linear narrative on what it is to be human that connects many disparate threads through butterfly history and chains of events e.g. the extraordinary story of the love affair between two famous writers, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West between 1913 and 1923 and its intersection with other threads about the atomic bomb and the Manhattan project
• A first person narrative that incorporates the personal and the public
• A personal memoir connecting human experiences from his own near death experience on the Franklin river to his father’s life as a prisoner of war slave in Japan and the lives and loss of his parents
• Language choices that slice into your mind e.g. A devastating meeting with a guard who tortured his father that is emotionally draining
• Prose that captures and treasures the landscape of Tasmania   
• A philosophical, psychological and physical exploration of love and death 
• A confronting examination of different aspects of Tasmania’s brutal history, particularly for its First Nations people  
• Epigraphs and Acknowledgements that point to the hybridity of the text that resists classification while tantalising and challenging the reader
• Inspired imagery and factual prose jostle each other as motifs (the near death experience, the landscape, human grief, love and loss) illustrate the woven fabric of this text. 

When studying Question 7 in Texts and Human Experiences students will find many possible answers to these questions

What are the:

• Experiences which affect individuals and the wider collective?
• Emotions and human qualities/traits arising from those experiences?
• Insights into emotional, intellectual, physical, cultural and lived experiences?
• Representations of identity, culture, acceptance and growth?
• Representations of the tension between agency and conformity in our human experience?
• Revelations of the paradoxes of motivation and behaviour?

Ways into teaching Question 7 in the HSC classroom

Teaching this text cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Context regarding the title 

Provide students with the background about the title.  In 1882 Anton Chekhov, the Russian master of the short story published eight “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” No answers were supplied to the questions he asked. The 7th question, listed below gave Flanagan’s book its title. 

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Is Chekhov illustrating that life cannot be reduced to a series of equations? This question is unanswerable, as Flanagan says on p25, ‘In Chekhov’s stories, the only fools are those with answers’. Yet, as Flanagan attempts to understand his parents and their place and his place in life, he interprets the question as ‘why do we do what we do to each other?’ His representation of the variety and intensity of human experiences illustrates the profundity of the question Chekhov asks. 

‘Like so much of what Chekhov wrote, Question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world, a superficial world, a frozen world of appearances, beneath which an entirely different world surges, as if a wild river that at any moment might drown us.’ p24

Celebrate a hybrid text 

Question 7 is categorised as non-fiction; it is in part a memoir but it is also so much more and this hybrid text could prove fascinating, especially to students who read widely. They will find many examples of other types of writing in this text. Some students may be disconcerted by the hybridity of the text with its historical references and endnotes teamed with fictional recreations and autobiographical interludes.  But as they explore this text the movement through different genres should prove rewarding. In his chosen epigraphs (those short quotations at the beginning of the book that suggests its theme) Flanagan gives the reader plenty of warning: 

‘The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama or fantasy. It may be myriad, it may not. The question is put but where is the answer?’ HOBART TOWN MERCURY, reviewing MOBY-DICK, 1851

In his Acknowledgements at the end of the book Flanagan explains some of these genre intersections 

‘Parts of this book have appeared in different forms over many years as articles, essays and speeches… the known facts of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West’s relationships I have adhered to, their conversations and thoughts are though my own invention I have sometimes used words of theirs, sometimes made them up and occasionally combined both…. His [Szilard’s] bath before it is pure fantasy on my part] ’ p277-278 

Tracking through the text 

Task: Place students in groups with responsibility for two sections in the book so there will be some overlap.  Ask students to contribute to the construction of a table that tracks central ideas, settings and places incidents and motifs through the 10 sections of the text. 

Some contributions have been made to get students started.  

Beginnings  

Question 7 begins in Japan in the winter of 2012.  

Ask students to read the first two sections (pages 3-4 see below) and to ask questions in groups about what they had read. Were there references to events or historical matters?  Could they predict what might happen in this text and what expectations it set up?  What did they think about Flanagan’s word choices, especially his verbs and what impact that choices has on them as readers? How would they classify this book based on this short introduction? What was different about section 1 and section 2? 

1

In the winter of 2012, against my better judgement and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing—much as I said they were—and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned. It was very cold, a bitter day, and an iron sky threw a foreboding cast on the Inland Sea beneath which my father had once worked in a coal mine as a slave labourer.

Nothing remained.

Though I had no wish to be bothered with it, I was taken to a local museum where a very helpful woman found numerous photographs documenting a detailed history of the coal mine from the early twentieth century—its growth, its processes, its Japanese workers.

There was no photograph of slave labourers.

The woman was kind and, as they say, a fount of knowledge about local history. She had never heard of slave labourers working at the Ohama coal mine. It was as if it had never happened, as if no one had ever been beaten or killed or made to stand naked in the snow until they died. I remember the woman’s tolerant smile: a smile of pity for me thinking there had ever been slave labourers at the Ohama coal mine.

2

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.

But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.

And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.

Writing response 

When Flanagan went to Japan, he met a former Japanese guard who tortured his father. The guard was known as the Lizard and he had no recollection of any violence enacted against Flanagan’s father. He offered money to Flanagan to give to his father.  Flanagan’s response (see below) is seared into my memory. 

In groups establish the broader context of Flannagan’s response, and its aftermath by re-reading pages 204-213

“I felt so many things but above all I felt powerless.  For what good was done, what wrong righted, what dead man resurrected, by giving offence? And so I accepted the gift politely, knowing I would never give it to my father nor tell my father about it, feeling that I had somehow traded away something invaluable and beyond any price. I hated the feel of that envelope, and the deep sense of complicity and shame it summoned up in me.  I threw it in a bin as soon as I left, fearing it had some power over me, some magical hold, but the feelings were not so easily disposed of.  The unwelcome sense of shared guilt.  I felt as if covered in filth.” (p.210)

Individual written task: In 400 words describe your response to this incident and the impact it had on you.  Consider what human experiences have been revealed and how they were represented.

HSC style questions for Question 7

Teaching this text cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

In what ways are we drawn into Flanagan’s representation of human experiences in his book Question 7?   

“Meaningful connections, whether they be to people, places or beliefs, define the quality of human experience.”  To what extent do you agree with this statement? In your response make detailed reference to Question 7.

Relevant details in relation to the new NSW English Stage 6 HSC syllabus

Teaching this text cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

There are requirements for particular types of texts to be selected from the prescribed texts list for different courses. Great care must be taken in selecting a pathway of texts that meets all the requirements.

For the Advanced course

Four prescribed texts to be studied with at least ONE from each of the following categories (prose fiction, poetry, and drama OR nonfiction OR film OR media) and ONE authored by Shakespeare

Question 7 is an Australian non-fiction text.

The pathways below include a drama text by Shakespeare which can be found in all sections of the course, except Texts and human experiences. 

Possible pathways for HSC Advanced English course

For the Standard course

Students are required to closely study 3 prescribed texts, with ONE drawn from each of the following categories:

• prose fiction
• poetry
• drama OR film OR media OR nonfiction.

Possible pathways for HSC Standard English course