Past the Shallows (HSC SSCE English Advanced): Revision Notes
Characters and Relationships
Introduction to characters and relationships in Past the Shallows
Favel Parrett creates a powerful portrait of a broken family in Past the Shallows, using the Curren brothers and their relationships to explore themes of dysfunction, isolation, and brief moments of tenderness. Set against Tasmania's harsh coastal landscape, the novel examines how family bonds can be both protective and destructive. Through Miles' third-person perspective, we witness relationships marked by loyalty and betrayal, resilience clashing with cruelty, and the disturbing paradox of love expressed through violence.
These character dynamics directly address the Texts and Human Experiences rubric, exploring qualities such as protectiveness, unusual paternal behaviour, and how family secrets can devastate lives. Understanding these relationships is essential for analysing how Parrett represents human experiences of connection, trauma, and survival.
Miles Curren: Resilient protector and reluctant survivor
Character overview
Miles is the middle brother, in his early teens, who demonstrates quiet strength and endurance throughout the novel. He takes on the role of surrogate parent to his younger brother Harry whilst working dangerous abalone diving shifts with his father. His character embodies careful calculation and scepticism as survival mechanisms.
Key character traits
Methodical and cautious: Miles constantly assesses risks in his environment, thinking as long as it kept pumping, as long as he sorted in time, everything would be okay. This calculated approach helps him navigate both the physical dangers of diving and the emotional dangers of his home life.
Suppressed trauma: Despite appearing stoic, Miles carries deep psychological wounds from his mother's death. He pushes these feelings down rather than processing them, which shapes his protective but emotionally guarded personality.
Surfing as transcendence: The ocean waves offer Miles a rare escape where he feels safe and supported. When surfing, the waves hold him up... like nothing bad could happen, providing temporary relief from his difficult reality.
Character development and arc
Miles' journey centres on protective self-sacrifice. His most significant actions demonstrate this quality:
- Giving Harry the shark tooth necklace, a precious object that becomes symbolic of their bond
- Carrying Harry through freezing waters during the climactic storm despite his own exhaustion
- Trying to save Harry even when it puts his own life at risk
The novel's tragic ending leaves Miles hospitalised and emotionally fractured. He clutches the returned shark tooth, symbolising both loss and survival. His departure with Joe suggests a new chapter, though his resilience has been fundamentally shaken by Harry's death.
Exam tip: Analyse Miles' internal monologue carefully for Paper 1 unseen texts dealing with isolation. For Band 6 responses, connect his character to specific rubric qualities, particularly how his protective nature illuminates human experiences of familial responsibility and moral courage in adverse circumstances.
Harry Curren: Innocent scapegoat and emotional mirror
Character overview
Harry, the youngest Curren brother at around eight years old, displays pure, youthful innocence that stands in stark contrast to the brutality surrounding him. He is enthusiastic, sensory-focused, and generous by nature, yet struggles with a phobia of water and feelings of being overlooked within his family.
Position within the family
Primary target of abuse: Harry becomes the main focus of his father's rage, particularly during drinking episodes. Dad's cruel declaration I never wanted you reveals the depth of rejection Harry faces. He is forced to endure frightening abuse, including being force-fed whisky during his father's benders.
Scapegoat role: Harry carries the burden of his father's unresolved anger and pain, becoming the outlet for Dad's internal struggles. This positioning as scapegoat makes Harry particularly vulnerable and isolated within the family structure.
Key relationships and qualities
Ethereal warmth and connection-seeking: Despite his traumatic environment, Harry actively seeks positive connections. He befriends the reclusive George Fuller, craves protective attention from Miles, and demonstrates emotional maturity beyond his years by contemplating mortality—one day he would die.
Literary Technique: Demonstrating Unconditional Love
In a powerful moment demonstrating the bond between Harry and Miles, Harry kicks Dad to protect Miles, prioritising his sibling's safety over his own wellbeing. This act embodies the novel's exploration of loyalty within broken families, showing how even the youngest and most vulnerable family member will sacrifice for those they love.
Symbolic significance
Harry's death by drowning whilst clutching the shark tooth necklace serves as the novel's most tragic moment. His drowning symbolises the complete destruction of innocence, showing how vulnerable individuals cannot survive in environments dominated by violence and neglect.
Exam tip: When discussing Harry's character, focus on how his innocence highlights the brutality of his environment. Use phrases like exenterates the brutality to demonstrate sophisticated vocabulary, but explain what this means—Harry's pure nature makes the violence around him even more shocking and visible.
Steve Curren (Dad): Narcissistic destroyer and paradoxical patriarch
Character overview
Dad represents harmful masculine behaviour in its most destructive form. His character traits include narcissism, dismissiveness, cruelty, violence, and bitterness. He processes his internal struggles through alcohol abuse and exploitative ocean fishing rather than through healthy emotional outlets.
Relationship with the ocean and work
Predatory approach to fishing: Dad's abalone fishing becomes an outlet for his aggressive, exploitative nature. The quote Abalone – Takes... Illegal captures both the illegal nature of his work and his taking, destructive approach to life more broadly.
Little genuine connection: Dad views his sons instrumentally rather than emotionally. Miles exists as a useful labourer for the boat, whilst Harry is dismissed as a waste of money. This transactional view of family relationships reveals Dad's inability to form meaningful bonds.
The paternity revelation
The storm scene exposes Dad's deepest emotional wound and the novel's central family secret. When Dad recognises Harry's shark tooth necklace as belonging to Uncle Nick—his wife's lover—he confirms what he has always suspected: Harry is not biologically his son. This moment of recognition leads directly to his ultimate act of violence: hurling Harry overboard during the storm.
Understanding Dad's paradoxical nature
Rage masking buried pain: Dad's violence and cruelty stem from his own unprocessed grief and betrayal. His wife's affair and subsequent death left him with overwhelming emotions he cannot handle, which he redirects towards his sons, particularly Harry.
Representative of abusive cycles: Parrett uses Dad's character to explore how family trauma perpetuates across generations. He embodies the archetypal abusive father figure, showing how pain transforms into cruelty when not addressed through proper support and healing.
Exam tip: When analysing Dad's character, avoid simply labelling him as evil. Instead, explore the paradox of his fatherhood—how his rage masks deeper pain, and how this complexity makes him a more realistic representation of abusive behaviour patterns.
Joe Curren: Escapist mentor with self-preservation flaw
Character overview and initial role
Joe, the eldest Curren brother and a carpenter by trade, represents a different response to family trauma: escape. Rather than staying to protect his younger brothers, Joe focuses on building his own life and future, literally constructing a boat to sail away from the family's dysfunction.
Approach to trauma
Water as therapeutic escape: Unlike his father who exploits the ocean or Harry who fears it, Joe uses water constructively. The ocean becomes his escape from the real world, offering him freedom and distance from family trauma.
Intelligent but abandoning: Joe possesses the awareness to recognise his family's toxicity and the intelligence to plan his departure. However, this self-preservation comes at a cost—he initially sails alone, leaving his younger brothers behind to face their father's abuse.
Redemption arc
Joe's character develops through a delayed redemption. Following the tragedy of Harry's death, Joe appears at Miles' hospital bedside and takes responsibility for his remaining brother. This belated action shows him finally accepting his mentor role, though it comes too late to prevent the family's ultimate destruction.
Thematic significance
Contrast with Miles: Joe's emotional distance and self-preservation starkly contrast with Miles' hands-on protective approach. This comparison allows Parrett to explore different responses to family trauma and raises questions about loyalty—when is self-preservation justified, and when does it become abandonment?
Complex moral position: Joe's character resists simple moral judgement. Whilst his initial departure seems selfish, it also represents healthy boundary-setting and trauma survival. His return suggests personal growth, but also highlights the tragedy of timing in family relationships.
Supporting figures: Marginal nurturers and enablers
Whilst the Curren brothers and their father form the novel's core, several peripheral characters illuminate different aspects of family dysfunction, community response, and alternative forms of care.
Aunty Jean
Basic nurturing role: Aunty Jean provides practical care such as feeding Harry and offering guidance to the boys. She represents the minimum level of external family support, doing enough to keep the boys alive but not enough to truly protect them.
Suspect but inactive: Significantly, Aunty Jean suspects Harry's true paternity, understanding the family secret that drives much of Dad's rage. However, she maintains distance and avoids direct confrontation with Dad, embodying the community's broader pattern of knowing but not intervening.
Limited guidance: Her provision of a version of guidance suggests incomplete or inadequate support. She offers what she can within her comfort zone, but fails to challenge the family's fundamental dysfunction.
George Fuller
Reclusive but compassionate: George exists as an urban legend in the community, living as a hermit away from society. Despite his withdrawal from the world, he demonstrates genuine kindness, warmth, and empathy—qualities notably absent from Harry's home life.
Surrogate grandfather role: George becomes Harry's chosen family, offering him safe refuge in his shack and acting as a patient, caring listener described as a good human. This relationship reveals Harry's desperate need for nurturing adult attention.
Jake the dog: George's dog amplifies the theme of familial replacement, providing Harry with uncomplicated affection and companionship. The dog-human-child bond offers Harry a glimpse of what healthy relationships can feel like.
Uncle Jeff
Uncle Jeff represents the fishing community's callous camaraderie and enables Dad's worst behaviours. Though jovial on the surface, he demonstrates violence by slamming Miles' head, embodying the normalised brutality of the masculine fishing culture that surrounds and reinforces Dad's abusive patterns.
Absent presences: Granddad and Mum
Granddad: Dad's deceased father haunts the narrative as lost wisdom and a reminder of previous generations' trauma. His absence suggests missed opportunities for guidance and healing within the family line.
Mum: Though dead before the novel begins, Mum lingers spectrally throughout the narrative, particularly through memories of the car wreckage. Her affair with Uncle Nick set in motion the family's current dysfunction, whilst her absence leaves a devastating void in the boys' lives.
Key relationships analysis
Understanding the dynamics between characters helps reveal how Parrett explores human experiences of connection, betrayal, and survival.
Miles and Harry: Brotherly loyalty's self-sacrifice
Symbolism of the shark tooth: The shark tooth necklace that Miles gives Harry becomes the novel's central symbol of their bond. This gift represents protection, connection, and love. During the fatal storm, Harry clutches this necklace, and after his death, it returns to Miles—a circular symbol of their unbreakable connection despite tragedy.
Protective actions: Miles' physical act of carrying drowning Harry through the waves demonstrates extreme self-sacrifice. His protective instincts override self-preservation, embodying the purest form of brotherly love.
Technique: Parrett uses sensory detail and symbolism to develop this relationship, allowing readers to feel Miles' physical endurance and emotional investment in Harry's survival.
Human experience illuminated: This relationship explores unconditional familial love and the heavy burden of protective responsibility. It shows how loyalty can demand complete self-sacrifice.
Dad and Harry: Paternal paradox
Rejection and recognition: Dad's statement I never wanted you represents the cruelest form of parental rejection. Yet this rejection stems from his recognition of Harry as Uncle Nick's biological son, creating a complex emotional paradox where knowledge breeds cruelty.
The overboard moment: The storm scene where Dad hurls Harry overboard after recognising the shark tooth serves as the novel's darkest moment. This action represents the ultimate failure of paternal responsibility, where recognition leads directly to destruction rather than acceptance.
Technique: Parrett employs stark, unadorned dialogue to convey emotional brutality, whilst foreshadowing throughout the novel builds towards this tragic climax.
Human experience illuminated: This relationship explores the paradoxical nature of paternal bonds—how recognition can coexist with rejection, and how unresolved pain transforms into violence against innocent parties.
Miles and Dad: Resilient submission to cruelty
Labour exploitation: Dad uses Miles as necessary labour for abalone diving, creating a relationship based on utility rather than paternal care. Miles endures dangerous work conditions without real choice or fair compensation.
Engine blame: During the storm crisis, Dad blames Miles for engine problems despite Miles' competence and effort. This scapegoating reveals Dad's refusal to accept responsibility, instead projecting failure onto his son.
Power imbalance: The relationship operates through an extreme power imbalance where Dad holds all authority and Miles must submit to survive, despite recognising the injustice of his treatment.
Technique: Parrett uses internal monologue to reveal Miles' awareness of the dysfunction whilst showing his enforced compliance, creating dramatic tension between thought and action.
Human experience illuminated: This relationship examines how individuals develop resilience in abusive situations, and how survival sometimes requires submission rather than resistance.
Harry and George: Nurturing anomaly in isolation
Refuge space: George's shack becomes Harry's safe haven, offering an alternative to the violence and tension of home. This physical space symbolises emotional refuge.
Listening and validation: George provides what Harry desperately needs—a patient adult who listens and validates his experiences. The description of George as a good human captures Harry's recognition of genuine care.
Technique: Parrett uses contrast, positioning the hermit-child relationship against the father-child relationship to highlight the abnormality of Harry's home situation. True nurturing comes from outside the family structure.
Human experience illuminated: This relationship explores how individuals seek and find care in unexpected places, and how isolation can paradoxically create space for genuine connection.
Joe and Miles: Mentorship's delayed consistency
Boat departure: Joe's initial sailing represents abandonment or self-preservation, depending on perspective. His physical departure from the family symbolises emotional withdrawal from familial responsibility.
Bedside return: Joe's appearance at Miles' hospital bedside signals his acceptance of mentorship responsibility. This return creates a cyclical pattern of departure and return.
Technique: Parrett employs cyclical motifs and develops a redemption arc, showing character growth through action rather than explicit emotional revelation.
Human experience illuminated: This relationship examines the complexity of familial duty, questioning when escape becomes necessary and when return becomes redemptive. It explores mentorship as something that can be realised belatedly but meaningfully.
Exam strategies for analysing characters and relationships
Paper 1: Unseen texts
When encountering unseen texts in Paper 1, use your knowledge of character dynamics from Past the Shallows to identify similar patterns.
Comparative Analysis Approach
You might write: Like the protective bond between Miles and Harry representing fraternal resilience, this excerpt explores familial paradoxes through contrasting parental approaches.
Key approach: Integrate specific dynamics from the prescribed text to illuminate unseen material, demonstrating sophisticated comparative thinking.
Paper 2: Comparative essays
Structural approach for Band 6 responses:
Build essays around three key relationships, analysing how each illuminates aspects of human experience. For example:
- Topic sentence: Dad's narcissistic cruelty towards Harry reveals how toxic masculinity perpetuates cycles of abuse.
- Evidence: Provide specific textual moment such as the storm revelation scene.
- Analysis: Examine the toxic masculinity motif and techniques like stark dialogue.
- Link: Connect to rubric language—This examines behavioural anomalies arising from trauma, illuminating how individual experiences of pain transform into collective family dysfunction.
Contextualisation: Reference Tasmania's isolated fishing community and bystander culture to show understanding of how setting shapes character behaviour.
Band 6 requirements: To achieve Band 6, demonstrate sophisticated understanding by linking character analysis to specific rubric terminology, using precise textual evidence, and exploring complexity rather than simplistic moral judgements.
Practice recommendations
Character analysis chart: Create a T-chart for each main character listing qualities versus flaws, with supporting quotes for each trait. This helps develop nuanced character understanding.
Comparative responses: Write 600-word responses comparing character development across texts. For example, contrast Billy Elliot's Jackie (who evolves from rigid to supportive) with Dad from Past the Shallows (who stagnates in his cruelty). This comparative practice builds skills for Paper 2.
Quote bank: Maintain a collection of key quotes organised by character and relationship, noting techniques and human experiences each illuminates. Regular revision of this bank builds confident textual knowledge.
Key Points to Remember:
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Miles embodies protective self-sacrifice: The middle brother takes on surrogate parent responsibilities, using surfing as escape whilst demonstrating quiet resilience. His character arc explores the heavy costs of familial loyalty.
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Harry represents innocence destroyed: The youngest brother's pure nature highlights environmental brutality, whilst his death symbolises how vulnerable individuals cannot survive in violent, neglectful families. His relationship with George shows the search for nurturing outside dysfunctional family structures.
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Dad's paradoxical cruelty stems from pain: Rather than simply villainous, Dad represents how unprocessed trauma and betrayal transform into violence. His recognition of Harry's true paternity leads to ultimate rejection, exploring the darkest aspects of toxic masculinity.
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Relationships reveal different responses to trauma: From Joe's escape to Miles' protection to Dad's violence, Parrett shows various ways individuals respond to family dysfunction. These contrasts illuminate complex human experiences of survival, loyalty, and self-preservation.
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Peripheral figures show community complicity: Supporting characters like Aunty Jean demonstrate how communities enable abuse through knowing but not intervening. Only outsider George provides genuine nurturing, highlighting the failure of social structures meant to protect vulnerable children.