What the Historical worlds elective asks of you in the 2024 HSC English Extension 1 syllabus

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This page follows the English Extension 11-12 (2024) syllabus. If you are sitting the 2026 HSC, use the older Literary Worlds pages and the 2026 elective pages instead. See what's changed.

What NESA says this elective is about

NESA's published description asks students to consider "the interplay between truth and reality in historical worlds" (NESA, English Extension 11-12 Syllabus 2024, Year 12 Extension 1). Paraphrased, you evaluate how historical worlds represent events, periods and people, and how they shape what we think we know about the past. Those representations can unsettle ideas of bias, authority, legitimacy and truth. You meet texts that represent the past and texts that use the past to make sense of the writer's own time and place. The description gives weight to memory and to the link between personal and collective experience, to shifting political, social and cultural values, and to students reconsidering their own assumptions about the past and the ways we come to know it. As with every elective, you also compose imaginative pieces in this world, but the exam question on the elective is a critical one.

Three working questions for any historical text

These are the questions that separate this elective from a general study of the past.

Who is entitled to tell it

Authority is the elective's recurring problem. A diary, a family archive, a scholar's reconstruction, a poem written in the middle of a crisis and a costume film all claim to know the past in different ways. Ask what gives each its right to speak, and where that right is weakest.

Which time is really speaking

A historical text is made at one moment about another. Gaskell wrote about industrial England while it was still unsettled; Byatt writes in the late twentieth century about invented Victorians; Coppola films an eighteenth-century court with a contemporary sensibility. The gap between the time depicted and the time of composition is where the argument lives.

What counts as evidence

Letters, objects, rumour, photographs and a narrator's memory all stand in for the past. Look at how each text handles uncertainty, silence and contradiction, rather than treating any source as solid.

Memory: private and shared

The elective's attention to memory means you should be able to say how a single life sits inside a larger story. Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World is told by a retired painter in postwar Japan who is looking back on what his art served. His memory is selective and self-protective, and the reader must read around it. Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes follows a collection of small Japanese carved objects through a family across Odessa, Paris, Vienna and later decades, so that the history of a family and of Europe is told through things that are passed on. Both texts ask how the personal is made to stand for the collective, and what is lost in the standing-in.

The past used to read the present

Some prescribed texts are less about the past than about now. Auden's set poems respond to public events as they unfold, from the Spanish Civil War to the outbreak of the Second World War to the Moon landing, and he later revised or distanced himself from some early public poems. That makes his work a case study in whether a poem can claim authority over events, and how a later reading changes it. Pair this with a text that looks back, and you can argue that the past is always a use made of it.

The six prescribed texts, and what each is good for

NESA's rule for every elective is that you study three texts, including at least two extended print texts, plus one related text of your own choosing. NESA fixes the six below for 2027 to 2030, with the set poems where a book is a collection. Check NESA's prescriptions page for full bibliographic details and any later change.

• W. H. Auden, Selected Poems (Faber, 2009). Set poems: Spain, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, September 1, 1939, Memorial for the City, The Shield of Achilles, Moon Landing, Archaeology. Best for poetry written close to events, authority and public voice, and the way meaning shifts with later readers.
• A. S. Byatt, Possession (Random House UK, 2009). Best for research as a plot, invented documents and pastiche, and two eras held in tension.
• Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (Vintage, 2011). Best for objects as archive, family memory, and non-fiction that reads like narrative.
• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Penguin Classics, 2003). Best for the industrial Victorian world written from within it, class, conflict, and what a novel can show about its own society.
• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (Faber, 2013). Best for retrospective narration, selective memory and complicity.
• Film: Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette (2007). Best for how a film can make the past feel present through anachronism, costume, colour and music.

How this shows up in Question 2

The Extension 1 paper is online, 50 marks, with 2 hours plus 10 minutes of reading. Question 2 is the elective: a single sustained critical response worth 25 marks on your prescribed texts and related text. For Historical worlds, expect a claim about truth, authority, memory or the use of the past, which you test against your texts. Creative writing is not set in this question, but your own imaginative compositions in class help you see how a historical voice is made.

Traps specific to Historical worlds

• Giving a history lesson. Marks go to construction, not to facts about the period.
• Treating a text as a window on the past instead of a made version of it.
• Ignoring the date and circumstances of composition when you discuss a text's view of its own subject.
• Overlooking the film. A related text in any form can carry the argument about anachronism and authority.
• Calling every narrator biased without saying how a reader can tell.

What to do next

Move on to composing a Historical worlds response, which gives a method and original practice questions. For the common focus area, see what the Literary worlds focus area asks.