Change

Change is when something or someone becomes different, altered or transformed. Change is inevitable in everyone’s life. Some people welcome it, but others fear it. three texts that represent change are; the poem Drifters by Bruce Dawe, the poem Darwin 1967-1992 by Peter Goldsworthy, and the movie Mean Girls directed by Mark Waters. They show different types and different ways change can be represented. In Drifters it is the change a family faces after moving around a lot. In Darwin there is the change the persona experiences in going back to his childhood home. And in Mean Girls there are the changes of personality in different people. The poem Drifters by Bruce Dawe, is about a family that keeps moving around. The mother of the family is always told “its time to start packing,” by her husband. They have two daughters, one that is happy about the move, and the other one isn’t. “She won’t even ask why they’re leaving this time, or where they’re heading for”, indicates that the family moves around, but the mother is exhausted and tired of moving. Bruce Dawe uses symbolism through the repetition of the berries and the bottling set as a sense of hope that one day they’ll stop moving around. When the family moved to their previous location, the blackberry bush is in full flower, but at the end of the poem, the blackberry bush “Canes with their last shriveled fruit”. The poem is written in third person, but in a slightly different way then usual. The third person is easily extinguishable and easy to see with words such as "he'll" and "her". It is written from an external view, but has another perspective from the woman’s point of view. She seems to be treated as a lesser by the male, from being told when to leave without any input. This poem relates to Darwin through the way they are both moving around a lot. In Darwin, the persona travels a lot to escape his past. And on Drifters, the narrator and its family is always moving around because the male is telling them to. They both move around and travel for different reasons, but to either escape something or to find something new. The poem Darwin by Peter Goldsworthy is about a man that hasn’t been home in 25 years, and is not looking forward to how much it has changed, “redecorated by a famous cyclone”. Goldsworthy continues to describe the town as it is now, the feelings and thoughts of the narrator as he takes in the town, and the feelings as he eventually leaves. The poem relates to change as the man returns home to find that nearly everything has transformed. The poem explores how the re-creation of his hometown affects this man and how he reacts to the change. Goldsworthy uses the metaphor of a dog throughout the poem, referring to himself as one, and also his keen sense of smell. “I step nose-first into the falling Wet, dragging my body behind: a heavy tail,” Goldsworthy uses similes to allow the reader to get a better sense of what the character is experiencing, “It fills the nose like a childhood dunked in scented tea”. The form of the poem is free verse, which helps to convey the man’s changing thoughts on home and as it makes it easier for the reader to pick up on. This poem can be related to the movie Mean Girls in the way that the persona of Darwin has changed and allowed himself to revisit his past, almost like he was ashamed of it, and how the heroine in Mean Girls has changed and done some things that she will regret in the future. The movie Mean Girls, written by Rosalind Wiseman and Tina Fey, is about a girl, Cady, who moves to America from Africa, and how she settles into high school. It shows all the different cliques and social statuses in school, and how they affect everyone’s lives. The movie explores change in many ways; through Cady moving to a different country, and the way she thinks and acts, “I used to think there was just fat and skinny”, changing to “I had learned how to control everyone around me”. The movie uses contrast to compare how much the heroine, Cady’s personality has changed, “From home school jungle freak, to shiny plastic, to most hated person in the world, to actual human being.” The film not only shows the transformation of Cady, but of the three plastics as well. The leader, Regina, goes from being not very nice, and hated and feared but also liked by everyone in the school, who is also jealous of her, to being into sports and not feared anymore. The movie has a first person narration, by the voice of Cady, who is played by Linsday Lohan. Mean Girls is similar to the poem Drifters, in the way that Cady has moved from Africa, and the family in Drifters has moved around a lot. They both show the hardships of having to pack up and move, and meet new people. Change is inevitable in life, and some people fear it and others welcome it. In the poem Drifters, the persona fears and dreads change, from too much moving around. In Darwin, the persona fears the change of his hometown at first, but when he finally goes back he doesn’t want to leave again. And in Mean Girls, Cady welcomes the changes she goes through in her social life, but in the end she fears who she has become. All these texts are related to change and express them in similar but different ways.