Answer: A row of broken teeth.

Answer: 'Just the old girls.'

The entry for 3 March says: ''Just the old girls,' Dad kept saying.'

Answer: The ants, because Mum's grandmother believed ants build their nests up high before rain.

Answer: 'Beautifully controlled, but what are you not telling me?'

Answer: four days

The entry begins: 'The ute has had its bonnet up for four days.'

Answer: Twelve millimetres.

Answer: Laughter or a telling-off would be a normal family reaction. The silence shows the family is too worried to respond at all, which the narrator finds more frightening than anger.

Answer: The agent is not really negotiating; he has already decided what the sheep are worth and expects Dad to accept it. Dad's repetition of 'for now' is hope the agent does not share.

Answer: Because the ants have not brought rain, so the saying has failed. Telling Jack would take away the one hopeful thing he has, and the narrator is protecting him in the same way the adults protect the children.

Answer: They care for each other but cannot talk about what is happening. Holding the torch is the only way she can offer support, and 'Hold it steady' is the only way he can accept it. The narrator's calling it 'the longest conversation we've had in a month' shows how much is communicated without words.

Answer: dark purple-grey and heavy with rain

A bruise is dark purple or grey; the image suggests heavy, dark-bottomed rain clouds, and also hints at the pain the family has been through.

Answer: On the surface it praises the essay's careful writing. Underneath, it points to the narrator's emotional control: she is holding back what she really feels, just as she keeps the paddocks out of her writing.

Answer: Rustling suggests living, soft grass; ticking suggests something dry, brittle and mechanical, like a clock. It conveys how dead the landscape has become and a sense of time running out.

Model answer: The diary form gives the reader access to everything the narrator will not say to her family, and the gap between the two is where the text's meaning lies. Her voice is dry and observant, recording facts such as 'Forty-one degrees by ten o'clock' and 'Twelve millimetres in the gauge' while avoiding the word that nobody in the house will use. This control mirrors her mother's 'bright voice' on the phone and her father's silent counting, and Mrs Halloran's comment, 'what are you not telling me?', names the technique the whole family shares. The recurring motifs carry the emotion the dialogue withholds. The dam, measured only as 'a third', is the family's fortune made visible, and the 'broken teeth' of the exposed fence turn it into something wounded. The ants are a hope the narrator protects for Jack even though she knows it has failed, revealing that she has joined the adults in shielding others. The torch in the shed is the clearest image of the family's way of loving: she cannot fix anything, but she can hold the light steady. The final entry re-reads all of this. Dad turning the tap 'on and off, listening to it', then standing bare-headed in the rain, shows a man allowing himself feeling for the first time, and the narrator's closing sentence does not change the facts but changes her relationship to them. The dam is 'still a third full', yet 'the third looked bigger', so the diary ends not with rescue but with the return of hope, which the form has shown us is the thing the family had most carefully kept hidden.