Essay question: 'Change forces people to decide what they will hold on to.' Analyse how the composer represents the relationship between change and belonging in 'High Water'.

'High Water' (original short text, approx. 330 words)

The water had gone down a week ago but the line stayed. It ran around the inside of the house at the height of my shoulder, a brown tide-mark on every wall, through the kitchen, along the hall, across the photographs we had not got down in time.

Mum said we would paint over it when the walls dried. Dad said nothing, which was what he said about most things now. He spent the days at the shed with the pump, and the nights on the verandah with the radio, listening for the river the way other people listen for a baby.

I was the one who found the measuring. Every morning Mum took the tape to the lounge-room wall, to the line, and measured from the floor. One hundred and forty-one centimetres. She wrote it on the back of an envelope with the date, as if the line might be getting taller in the night, or shorter, as if the house were a child she was keeping track of.

'It's not going anywhere,' I told her.

'No,' she said. 'That's the point.'

I did not understand that then. I think I do now. In the weeks when everything moved, the furniture, the neighbours, the ground itself, she found the one thing in the house that would stay where it was, and she measured it, and it held.

We painted the walls in March. Two coats. You cannot see the line now unless you know where to look, and all of us know where to look, and none of us say so. Sometimes I see Mum rest her hand there, at shoulder height, passing through the hall, the way you would steady yourself on a wall in the dark.

How to use this workshop: work through the tasks in order. Each one produces a piece of the plan; by the end you will have a thesis, three topic sentences, selected evidence, a conclusion plan and a full introduction. If your teacher prefers, apply the same tasks to your prescribed text and a question from a past paper.