NL English Academy
NL English Academy
Discursive Exemplar
Dear parents,
The below exemplar is written by one of our longest-time students, Rowan, who we have proudly
mentored for over 4 years at NL English Academy.
Rowan’s discursive scored full marks (20/20) in the North Sydney Boys internal assessment, which
secured him 1st rank in his cohort.
Watching Rowan progress so quickly throughout the years whilst seeing his love for English grow is a
journey I am honoured to have witnessed.
I hope you enjoy his piece as much as I have.
Yours sincerely,
Nelson Luo
Founder & Principal, NL English Academy
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History
Perhaps the greatest lie ever founded in this world is the lie that history tells the truth. It is possible that
history has been written deceptively since the beginning of history itself. Herodotus, the Father of
History, was known for the mythological influence on his work, his accounts of Troy intertwined with
ultra-nationalism, the acts of divinity and fictive sources. Yet, the Ancient Greek text that stood the test
of time was not Herodotus’s “The Histories.” Indeed, when I think of Trojan warfare, I cast my mind
to the fictional epics of Homer, not the history of Herodotus.
In reality, it is not just that “all history is fiction,” as Michel Foucault claimed. It is the reverse: fiction
captures history, and history falls at its feet for all of time, as we unravel the journeys, lives and values
that resonate with our humanity, reconstructing the zeitgeists of the past. History is a finely
constructed network of sources, metanarratives and power. While, fiction is a portal of exploration,
worlds formed by sources, diverging from metanarratives and describing the struggles of the
marginalised.
However, we do not need to imagine Ancient Greece to analyse the falsehoods of history and the truth
of fiction. Imagine Modernity.
Let me give an example. If necessity is the mother of invention, then efficiency is the mother of
colonialism, and the British Empire expanded through massacre - of Indigenous people, the working
underclass, and connection to the natural world. In the origins of capitalist-colonialism, the Industrial
Revolution raged in the Great Catalyst of Modernity, where humans became second to capital for the
first time in all of History. Crushed in slums across Manchester, London, and eventually the whole of
the British Empire, workers and the great spectre of economics, “the unemployed,” lost their way.
That is the world of Dickens. Explored through the voices of the vulnerable, examined in the diaries of
convicts, we learned of the darkness brought by industrialism. Such is the value of fiction.
However, do we despise our Postmodernity, built upon the expansionism propagated by British
history? Some do. Yet history tells us a grand narrative, it tells us of the economy, of the success of the
empire, of the greatness of Britain as it conquered swathes of Asia and Africa in its colonial glory. This
is the fine network of power and metanarratives.
Historian Bede, Christian of old Britain, tells us of Britain defeating its enemies during the rise of the
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Anglo-Saxons. Reality suggests that it was a time of peace. This network of power and nationalism is
long-lasting.
History, as von Ranke sought to achieve, is a culmination of sources, a collective study of the past.
Therefore, how could it be wrong? Most poignantly, history omits the voices of the lost, its collectivity
silences stories.
Let me tell you of industrial Britain. As Benjamin Disraeli enjoyed the elitism of classical liberalism
(“There is economy only where there is efficiency"), the byproducts of his efficiency suffered. Oliver
Twist, in fiction, was left alone in a broken world of market slavery and child labour. Balram, in fiction,
tells us of the “jungle law” that governs postcolonial India, where Britain’s failings lie bare. This is the
portal of exploration that lends itself to the marginalised.
So, in Modernity, novels tell us the truth, the individual truth, the real truth. The real suffering. What
does history do? It tells us a story, a story of strange detachment. In this sense, Modernity’s fiction
explores history, and Modernity’s history forms fiction.
Winston Churchill told us that history will be kind to him, because he “intend[s] to write it.” It isn’t
just Britain, either.
The USA, too, allows its history to be governed by the Columbus narrative. Some fool who couldn’t
sail in the right direction, who couldn’t help but massacre locals, who couldn’t help but instigate
centuries of chaos in Latin America, is the hero of the United States.
Therefore, we have no choice but to resort to imagined spaces, those fickle constructions of humanity
that are never quite real, but feel as if they are, constructions that breathe new life into the dots on
pages that read as history, constructions that enable us to live the lives of the dead.
We know that because Dante, an architect of modern Italian, wrote his Inferno in religion and
propaganda, he formed fiction which evolved into history. Perhaps this proves that fiction holds more
power than history. Just in this way, Shakespeare’s propagandist account of King Richard III has
replaced history. Our fictive spaces hold more power over humanity’s exploration than history does.
Indeed, fiction is history, just as much as history is fiction.
Therefore, what does it mean to those of us in the postmodern world? Let us delve into Postmodernity,
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where we examine our recency with some disdain.
History will show our mental health epidemic, with climate anxiety and severe mental health diagnosis
reaching 20% of people. History will show our collapse in wage growth, falling below productivity.
History will show our demise into a state of Apocalypse, confronted by the climate crisis. The question
is: what do we learn about those things? History doesn’t teach us about humanity. Only humans do
that. Only humans have the capacity to write our despair as the world is torn apart around us, only
humans capture the suffering of industrialisation. Yet, fiction does.
You see, fiction is escapism. Our portal into other worlds that actualises our reality that our
entrapment is not constrained to just us, and that our suffering is a product of humanity.
The rise of migrant novels that discuss the governmental perpetration of crimes against humanity, the
imprisonment of refugees, reveal how we hold power accountable through fiction. We are no longer
constrained to revolution, we are empowered by the fictive accounts of previously marginalised
individuals, who write novels that fill in the gaps of what will become history. Fiction supplements the
detachment and dehumanisation of history with its stories that unmask the reality of humanity.
The history of Postmodernity, amidst our climate crisis and progressively more powerful elite, will be
written in fiction, in the accounts of the marginalised. History has evolved. Fiction is now more
empowering, more real and more beautiful than a fine network of history texts, its patchwork portal is
constantly reformed.
The greatest lie ever founded in this world is the lie that fiction doesn’t tell the truth, that fiction
doesn’t hold history. Fiction is History.
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