‘You have some explaining to do’: The taboo story that earned Anthony HSC top marks

There are plenty of ways to start a story. You can begin at the beginning, or start with a simple statement.

Anthony Parissis started his story with a demand.

“You have some explaining to do,” he wrote in the opening lines of his short story, The delicate art of a funeral zeibekiko.

It was selected from more than 1400 students’ stories as among the best examples of HSC English extension 2 major works last year, allowing him to join 17 other students whose work made the annual Young Writers publication.

Parissis’s demand for explanation is directed towards the Greek Australian community as he sought to grapple with some of its more taboo aspects – such as its tendency towards patriarchy and misogyny.

“In my head, I had all of these converging aspects of my cultural identity … things I was really proud of, and things that I was, maybe, a little bit more ashamed of, or things that were a little bit more taboo to speak about,” he said.

The story includes the traffic of Old Canterbury Road in the inner west and his father selling chicken or boxes of wrinkled peaches on the roadside.

The protagonist can see his dad works hard but notices he has a tendency to tell lies. Behind his father’s hardened Greek masculinity lies suggestions of domestic violence. So when his father dies, the family must juggle competing emotions of grief, shame and anger. (Zeibekiko in the title refers to a folk dance traditionally performed by a solo male to process sorrow and defeat.)

Parissis, who went to St Pius X College in Chatswood, can see many reasons to be proud of the Australian Greek community.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for my migrant grandparents and great‑grandparents,” he said.

His great-grandparents moved to Australia after World War II after his great-grandmother’s island of Lemnos was occupied by the Nazis. His great-grandfather served in the British Army in Egypt, where he saw his friends die.

The Greek diaspora in Australia moved across the other side of the world to start again, working every day of the week to provide for their children.

“It makes fathers, you know, distant from their children a little bit … because they’re so focused on creating a life for their children,” Parissis says.

Former The Ponds High School student Sarah Venayagam knew she wanted to start her work of creative non-fiction, The Subtle Cruelty of Remembering, with precision. It was inspired by psychology and the clinical style of Kafka.

“He also starts right in the thick of the plot,” she said.

Throughout her final year of school, Venayagam enjoyed the creative freedom and exploration that writing the short story offered. It also came with its own psychological turmoil.

“I would always kind of self-doubt whether what I wrote was good,” she said.

Isabella Huang, who attended Sydney Girls High School, wrote a series of poems to pay homage to her father’s experience as a refugee who arrived in Australia from Laos.

Visits to a temple in Edensor Park sparked her interest in exploring in greater depth her family’s story.

“It’s a family tradition on my dad’s side to visit the temple every year to honour my grandma, whose ashes are there,” she said.

She started her poems in rhyming verse. The best part of the subject was the ability to go beyond the strict prescription of the syllabus, she said.

“It gave me the personal freedom to write whatever I wanted, beyond just the essays in advanced and extension 1 English,” she said.

English extension 2 was introduced by Bob Carr in the 1990s to put English on a level playing field with four-unit mathematics in the HSC, allowing students to create a work of their choosing and hand it in along with a reflection statement.

Under changes being introduced to the subject next year, the NSW Education Standards Authority has clipped the creative aspect of the subject, cutting the word count for short stories from 6000 to 3500. Students will do more theory, study the “role of the author” and sit an exam.

Get the day’s breaking news, entertainment ideas and a long read to enjoy. Sign up to receive our Evening Edition newsletter.