Living in the world. I had no idea what my teacher was talking about when she mentioned we were going to be studying this topic, but now I realize.
Good morning/ afternoon Ms. .... and fellow classmates.

Living in the world, this is how we navigate through life, confronting everything that comes our way, such as racism, relationships, family feuds and love. Many themes like these are explored throughout both texts that I looked at.

The prescribed text, “The Devine Wind”, written by Gary Disher, and the related text I have chosen is a documentary from the ABC, “Contact” directed by Martin Butler and Bentley Dean.

“The Devine Wind” is set in 1946. This era was a huge part of Australia’s history; it was when the Japanese were bombing America’s Pearl Harbor. This time period inflicted a lot of strain on many families, couples and individuals.

“You could say this is a story about friendship, and the betrayal of friendship, of friendships lost and gained”, one of the leading characters, Hart describes. A lot like the friendship and relationship between Mitsy and Hart. This

relationship and friendship is put under incredible strain by racism and jealousy. In the novel a love blooms between the two and they become involved intimately. Along the way, the war begins to make itself felt closer to home and, feeling

helpless, Hart begins to jump to unfounded conclusions and blames Mitsy when the Japanese bomb Alice’s nursing unit overseas. He loses sight of who she is as a person, only seeing her cultural background, tarring her with the same

brush as the Japanese fighter pilots, the enemy!
In “Contact” it is 1964. In 1964 it was a time when the rocket testing was going on in outback Australia. Some of these

rockets were being launched from Woomera. This is ironic really because a Woomera is an Aboriginal word for a tool that launches spears and the non-indigenous people named the place where they were launching rockets from,

Woomera. The Dump zone for these rockets was right in the same vicinity as a place called Yimiri. Yimiri was a region where a group of twenty indigenous desert people lived. Mr. McDougal was a man who had lived among the Indigenous

people all his life. He was worried that these people were around the Yimiri area, so he set out to see if there was before the rocket was launched. He knew this would be a mass murder if these people were still there. When the non-indigenous

people contacted these people they were awfully frightened. “My heart was beating hard. I told the little ones not to cry.” One of the women, named Yuwalli, thought of the men as “monsters”, “cannibal beings” and “devil men” they

had never seen a non-indigenous man before that day, “it looked like his skin had peeled off”, she said. Once the women were captured they seemed to adjust to living in the non-indigenous culture, it took a long time but soon they

joked about it, “we feel good in clothes”. Although the non-indigenous men McDougal and Terry Long – Native Welfare Patrol Officer had taken them in, they still held onto their cultural ties to Yimiri.

Both texts talk about a process where two or more cultures come into contact and sometimes conflict. In “Contact” there is an even attempt to give both cultures’ perspectives. However, this is not shown in the novel “The Devine

Wind” as Hart is the narrator and the story is very one sided, his personal story.
In the novel, Mitsy is living in two different worlds, both Japan and Broome. This is because Mitsy is a young

Japanese girl who believes her home country is Japan although she was born and has lived in Broome her whole life. Alice questions Mitsy “Home?” Throughout the novel everyone jokes around about the war and Mitsy being a

part of it and when Mitsy says, " I wish I was in Japan instead of in this uncultivated dump” Alice Blows up with the comment “Why don’t you just go then. This started a disagreement between the