Smyth, Elizabeth (2020) Will it Leave a Scar? In: Owens, Rod, Barker, Peter, and Serenc, Mary, (eds.) Green Ant Dreaming. Tropical Writers Anthology, 8 . Tropical Writers, Cairns, QLD, Australia, pp. 17-26.

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Abstract

[Extract] Ebanee pinches her nose to stop herself from crying. And Mum looks at her with those volcano eyes, all red around the edges. Ebanee had a sore like that once, I remember, wet and leaking. And Mum said, ‘You have to let it dry.’ Now I watch Mum’s eyes and wait for them to scab over. Another time, Mum said she wanted to be a child like me and start her life again. She could be thinking that now. But what she doesn’t know is that some kids are luckier than others. Some kids get good things they don’t deserve. She shouldn’t want to be a kid like me.

In our family, Dad is the strongest one. He never cries. When things go wrong, he gets angry. Like the day he backed his car into a star picket. He had a mean look on his face and said stuff about insurance and a job he didn’t need. And he said a swear word. The B one. If a kid says that, they get put in time out! What Dad didn’t know is that it’s good to run into star pickets. The stars hidden in those pickets follow you home, and you get to choose a special star to be yours, and it looks after you for the rest of your life. Yeah. Dad never understands important things like that.

Research Statement

Research Background	Inclusive education to meet diverse needs has been a long-standing aspiration in Australia, constrained by ineffective policies and practices (Anderson and Boyle, 2019). North Queensland literature lacks a strong representation of children’s perspectives. It is instead known for reflecting an adult male hegemony (Taylor and Perkins, 2007, 214). In the same way that fiction can be used to recover the lives of women to ‘cultural memory’ (Rigney, 2004), it can recover the lives of children. How can a creative writer offer insights into the diverse lives of children in primary school?
Research Contribution	“Will it Leave a Scar?” is a short story that depicts the experiences of a young twin girls, Ebanee and Jaz, prior to Ebanee’s diagnosis of cancer. This story offers a child’s perspective of life at primary school. This child’s perspective is under-represented in regional literature. Although autobiographies often include reflections on childhood, fiction allows the use of a contemporary setting and the invention of scenarios for a specific literary purpose. “Will it Leave a Scar?” points to childhood difficulties without diminishing the agency, inner strength, and importance of the individual.
Research Significance	This work explores how casting the protagonist as a child can enrich insights into children’s experiences of primary education. This story was published in Green Ant Dreaming, the 2020 anthology of Tropical Writers Inc, where it adds to a wide collection of stories by contemporary writers of Far North Queensland. The story contributes a child’s perspective to other short story genres and an original voice to the literature of Australia’s Wet Tropics Bioregion.
Item ID:	79896
Item Type:	Book Chapter (Creative Work)
ISBN:	978-0-646-82103-0
Keywords:	Creative writing, North Queensland
Related URLs:	Publisher
Copyright Information:	© Tropical Writers Inc 2023.
Date Deposited:	18 Aug 2023 05:31
FoR Codes:	36 CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 3602 Creative and professional writing > 360201 Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1301 Arts > 130103 The creative arts @ 50% 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130203 Literature @ 50%
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