Authorial Purpose and Audience (VCE SSCE English): Revision Notes

Authorial Purpose and Audience

Introduction to Lynch's purposes

Cassie Lynch crafted Split with multiple interconnected purposes, all centred on giving voice to Country itself. By making Derbarl Yerrigan (the Swan River) the narrator of her text, Lynch achieves several significant goals. Her primary purpose is to assert Noongar sovereignty by demonstrating that Indigenous identity and connection to Country persists through Deep Time—vast stretches of geological history—regardless of colonial modifications to the landscape. Her secondary purpose builds bridges between Noongar and settler worlds, offering a hopeful vision of coexistence grounded in acknowledgement and understanding. Finally, Lynch provides VCE students with a powerful model of country-centred persuasive writing, showing how geological testimony can become an ethical argument.

Lynch targets multiple audiences including VCE students, Perth residents, non-Indigenous readers generally, fellow First Nations writers, and academic Australia. Each audience receives a tailored message that transforms their relationship with Country from passive observation to active recognition.

Primary purpose: Sovereign geological testimony

Lynch's most fundamental purpose is to prove that Noongar sovereignty and identity endure, embedded in the land itself rather than vulnerable to surface-level colonial changes. By positioning Country as the protagonist-narrator, Lynch makes the land itself the primary witness to history and truth.

Country as narrator

The revolutionary choice to make Derbarl Yerrigan/Swan River speak in first person achieves several goals simultaneously. When Country says Beneath my feet... ancient scar, the river testifies to its own existence and memory. This narrative perspective proves that Noongar identity lives through geological strata—the physical layers of earth—not merely through cultural practices that colonisation attempted to disrupt.

Geological time versus colonial time

Lynch emphasises that Wagyl sovereignty (the Dreaming serpent who created the river) existed for billions of years before the 1829 colonial settlement. Whilst dams, banks, and urban development have modified the river's flow, they cannot erase Bilya—the Noongar name and essence of the river.

This geological scale reframes human history entirely. What seems permanent to colonisers—their buildings, their names, their infrastructure—becomes a mere geological footnote when viewed against Deep Time. The purpose here is to demonstrate that colonial temporality (the colonial sense of time and history) is insignificant compared to the enduring reality of Noongar Country. The modifications settlers made are recent scratches on an ancient surface, not fundamental transformations of identity.

Secondary purpose: Hopeful ontology bridge

Lynch's second major purpose distinguishes her work from more accusatory texts. Rather than adopting an unrelenting critical stance, Lynch offers what she describes as a balance between disparate landscapes that becomes achievable when history is recognised and acknowledged. This represents a significant authorial choice about tone and approach.

Coexistence through acknowledgement

The image of a scooter-riding youth treading over the scar beneath their feet becomes a powerful symbol of coexistence potential. Urban Noongar people successfully navigate dual realities—the colonial city above and the Dreaming country below. This symbolism suggests that acknowledgement need not be zero-sum; recognising Noongar sovereignty doesn't require abandoning modern Perth, but rather understanding and respecting what lies beneath.

Dual ontology education

By fusing Wagyl (Dreaming creation story) with geological fact, Lynch collapses the Western nature/culture binary. For Lynch, the Dreaming isn't mythology separate from physical reality; it is physical reality. The river's geological formation and Wagyl's creative journey are the same event viewed through different knowledge systems.

Tertiary purpose: VCE persuasive model

Lynch writes with full awareness that VCE students will study her text, and she deliberately equips Crafting Texts students with country-voice mastery. Her text serves as an exemplar of sophisticated persuasive techniques that students can analyse and potentially emulate in their own writing.

Technical features for student writers

Lynch demonstrates several key writing techniques that VCE students can study and adapt:

The overarching purpose is to transform student writing about Country from mere description to sovereign testimony. Students learn that Country can be a character, narrator, and authority rather than just setting or backdrop.

Targeted audiences and effects

Lynch crafts her message to resonate differently with each specific audience whilst maintaining a consistent core argument. Understanding how she adapts her approach reveals the sophistication of her purpose and technique.

Perth urbanites

For residents of Perth who walk daily across Derbarl Yerrigan, Lynch confronts obliviousness. The repeated phrase scar beneath feet forces Perth readers to recognise that they literally tread on Noongar Country every day without acknowledgement.

The intended effect follows a progression: defensive resistance, then growing awareness, then hopefully relational understanding. Lynch anticipates initial defensiveness but works through it towards recognition. Perth urbanites are guided from ignoring Country to recognising its presence to potentially developing a respectful relationship with it.

VCE students

For student readers, Lynch models country persuasion by using Country's first-person voice. Students studying the text are meant to become analytically equipped to understand persuasive techniques, then rhetorically sovereign in their own writing—capable of adopting authoritative Country-centred voices in their creative work.

Non-Indigenous readers generally

Beyond Perth specifically, Lynch aims to educate all non-Indigenous Australians about dual ontology—the concept that Dreaming and physical reality coexist as unified truth. Through the Wagyl/geology fusion, she intends to collapse the Western binary between nature and culture.

The effect Lynch seeks is a fundamental shift in understanding: Indigenous knowledge systems describe physical reality, not just cultural belief. This challenges readers to reconsider what counts as knowledge and truth.

Fellow Noongar readers

For Noongar readers, Lynch's purpose shifts from education to validation. The phrase patterns across deep time affirms Noongar identity and models cultural resilience. Rather than proving sovereignty to sceptics, Lynch reminds Noongar readers of what they already know: connection to Country endures.

The intended effect is identity affirmation—reminding Noongar readers that their connection to Country remains strong—and resilience modelling, showing how survival and sovereignty persist despite colonial attempts at erasure.

Academic Australia

For academic and literary readers, Lynch challenges the settler gaze by adopting a billion-year perspective that exposes what might be called temporal arrogance—the assumption that recent colonial history represents the meaningful timeframe for understanding Australian landscape and culture.

Authorial positioning and choices

Lynch's effectiveness stems from careful authorial positioning that establishes her authority whilst maintaining an accessible, educational tone. Her choices about voice, language, and publication context all serve her multiple purposes.

Noongar authority

Lynch authenticates her voice through deliberate linguistic choices. The use of Wagyl and Derbarl Yerrigan nomenclature (Noongar names) rather than exclusively English terms establishes cultural authority from the opening lines.

Her geological precision—accurate references to billions of years, to river formation, to physical processes—proves that Dreaming stories constitute physical reality rather than abstract mythology. This combination of cultural and scientific authority makes the text difficult to dismiss from either position.

Ethical outsider bridge

Despite her critique of colonisation, Country's narrative gaze indicts without alienating. The voice maintains what might be called omniscient patience—a knowing, ancient perspective that observes human behaviour without harsh judgement.

Publication context

Split appeared in Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now (University of Queensland Press, 2021), an anthology of contemporary First Nations writing. This publication context positions Lynch within the broader sovereignty literary movement that emerged with renewed energy following the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The anthology format connects her voice to a larger chorus of Indigenous writers asserting presence and sovereignty through literature, suggesting this work participates in a collective project of reclamation and education.

Purpose-driven voice features

Lynch's distinctive narrative voice serves her multiple purposes through four key features that work together to create the text's persuasive power. Each feature supports specific aspects of her authorial purpose.

Geological omniscience

The narrator speaks with a billion-year perspective that dwarfs the 1829 date of colonial settlement. This isn't personal memory or cultural history but what Lynch terms crust memory—the literal geological record embedded in stone and sediment.

Sentient relationality

Country experiences modification as lived rupture rather than abstract change. When the river describes dams, banks, and renamed features, these register as felt violations of relationship rather than neutral developments.

This personification isn't mere literary device but reflects Noongar ontology where Country possesses consciousness and feeling. The purpose is to make colonial modification morally significant: readers cannot dismiss changes as mere progress when Country experiences them as harm. Sentient relationality transforms environmental change into ethical violation.

Hopeful didacticism

Despite documenting violations, the narrative close teaches acknowledgement practice rather than ending in despair. Lynch adopts a pedagogical approach—Country becomes teacher, showing readers how to see and how to relate properly to place.

Noongar lexicon

Throughout the text, Lynch embeds sovereignty linguistically. Terms like Bilya (river), Wagyl (creation serpent), and Derbarl Yerrigan (place name) assert ongoing Noongar presence in the language itself.

When Lynch writes Was Bilya. Now Swan River, the dual naming creates dual reality: both names coexist, both are true, both demand recognition. This linguistic choice reinforces that colonial naming hasn't erased Indigenous reality but rather created a layered landscape where both truths persist.

Key purpose quotes with intent

Several specific quotes from the text reveal Lynch's purposes with particular clarity. Understanding these phrases helps readers grasp how individual sentences serve larger goals and can be used effectively in analytical writing.

Exam advice: Crafting and creating texts

For VCE students studying Split as a model for their own persuasive or creative writing, Lynch offers several practical lessons about technique and structure that can be adapted to various contexts and topics.

Country-voice speeches

Students can emulate Lynch's approach by adopting Country as speaker in their own texts.

Audience progression structure

Lynch models how to progress audiences through stages of understanding. A student text might structure itself similarly:

Metalanguage for analysis

When analysing Lynch's techniques in analytical writing, students should deploy precise metalanguage. Terms like Country sentience, Deep Time omniscience, ontological bridge, and geological didacticism all describe specific features of her approach that can be identified and explained with textual evidence.

Stimulus response application

If given a visual stimulus like a footpath image in an exam, students can adopt Lynch's perspective to transform observation into Country-centred testimony.