What the Natural 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 relationship between literature and the natural environment" (NESA, English Extension 11-12 Syllabus 2024, Year 12 Extension 1). You evaluate natural worlds that celebrate nature, wilderness and our place within it, and through them consider self-renewal and the pastoral. The description says you meet local and global authors who build literary worlds showing where culture and nature intersect, and that you consider natural worlds for their beauty and fragility and for the part they play in shaping culture, identity and purpose. Texts are read against a changing ecological context. As with every elective, you also write imaginative compositions of your own, but the exam question on the elective is a critical one.

The idea of a natural world

A natural world is a made thing, just as any literary world is. A poet or storyteller does not simply report a forest or a coastline; they choose what to see, whose eyes to see through, and what the place is for. The same river can be a blessing, a workplace, a boundary, a sacred relation or a warning, and the text decides. Ask three things of any natural world: what is it for, who is it for, and what is it vulnerable to.

The pastoral and its undoing

The pastoral is an old tradition that sets a simple, renewing countryside against a troubled court or city. The syllabus names it, and one prescribed play is its best-known English comic example: in Shakespeare's As You Like It, characters flee a hostile court for the Forest of Arden, where disguise, love and talk restore them, and the play keeps asking how far the forest is real and how far it is a fantasy of escape. Use this as a standard against which other texts can be measured. Some celebrate nature as renewal, some quietly show the work and loss behind the idyll. In Alistair MacLeod's stories of Cape Breton, the sea and land are not scenery but the means by which families live, and the cost of that living is generational. Where a text refuses the pastoral, ask what it puts in its place.

Beauty and fragility

The two words in the description belong together. Beauty is how a text makes attention pleasurable (image, rhythm, sound, scale); fragility is what that attention knows it may lose (death, extinction, a changing climate, a culture under pressure). Mary Oliver's poems train close attention on small things such as an animal, a morning or a hillside, and make beauty an ethic of paying attention, while holding the knowledge of death near. Coleridge's poems move between a person at rest in a garden or cottage and a world that surprises and sometimes punishes, and in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner the natural world becomes a moral and supernatural force. In Ali Smith's Autumn, the season names a cycle of decay and renewal at the same time as a country is divided and someone old fades.

Whose knowledge of nature?

NESA's emphasis on local and global authors, and on culture and nature intersecting, invites you to ask whose way of knowing a text assumes. Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk presents Aboriginal ways of thinking about patterns, kinship and relationship with place, using conversation, diagrams and story rather than the usual structure of an argument. It is a prescribed text of ideas, not a novel, and reading it well means attending to its form as well as its claims. Set beside a Romantic poem or a pastoral comedy, it lets you ask how different traditions understand people in relation to the natural world. Approach it with care, and with respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge, as NESA's protocols require.

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 lists six extended print texts for Natural worlds and no film or media text, so your related text is where you can bring in a film, documentary or other medium if you wish. The six are fixed for 2027 to 2030, with the set poems or stories where a book is a collection. Check NESA's prescriptions page for full bibliographic details and any later change.

• S. T. Coleridge, The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 1997). Set poems: The Eolian Harp, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834 version), Frost at Midnight. Best for Romantic nature, the mind and landscape, and the sublime and the supernatural.
• Alistair MacLeod, Island (Vintage, 2002). Set stories: The Boat, In the Fall, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, The Road to Rankin's Point, Winter Dog, The Tuning of Perfection, Clearances. Best for nature as livelihood and inheritance, and for place as shaping culture and identity.
• Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon, 2004). Set poems: When Death Comes, The Waterfall, The Sun, The Swan, Morning Poem, Wild Geese, Sleeping in the Forest, Aunt Leaf. Best for close attention, plain diction and the ethics of looking.
• Shakespeare, As You Like It (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Best for the pastoral, disguise and exile, and the stage as a forest.
• Ali Smith, Autumn. NESA's listing gives the edition as Beacon Press, 2004 (ISBN 9780241973318). That publisher and year look inconsistent for this novel, so treat the edition detail as unconfirmed and check NESA's prescriptions page. Best for seasons and cycles in a novel, and nature in a divided present.
• Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk (Text, 2023). Best for Indigenous knowledge systems, pattern thinking and non-Western ways of relating to place.

How this shows up in Question 2

The Extension 1 paper is online, 50 marks, with 2 hours plus 10 minutes of reading time. Question 2 is the elective: one sustained critical response worth 25 marks on your prescribed texts and related text. For Natural worlds, expect a claim about nature, such as that texts use nature to reflect human feeling, that beauty and fragility cannot be separated, that the pastoral is an escape, or that humans appear as part of nature or apart from it. The question is not a creative task, so your own nature writing in class is best used to learn what image, scale and rhythm do.

Traps specific to Natural worlds

• Describing scenery. The marks are for analysing how nature is represented and what it is for.
• Assuming nature means one thing (peace, danger, truth) in every text.
• Writing a general essay on climate change. Anchor every point in a construction choice.
• Treating nature as a mirror for human feeling and forgetting texts that give nature its own agency.
• Ignoring the form of Sand Talk, Island or the Coleridge poems and reading them only for ideas.

What to do next

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