Immigrant Chronicle with Two Related Texts

Belonging is essential to achieving a sense of security and fulfilment in society and is a fundamental need for all of us. The relationships we develop with people, places and things are important in the construction of our own personal identity. These relationships and the importance of them are evident in Peter Skrzynecki’s Immigrant Chronicle – particularly St. Patrick’s College and Migrant Hostel. By recounting his experiences as a young person and a migrant who struggled to involve himself in both his school community and Australian society, Skrzynecki effectively conveys the effects of not belonging and the importance of these relationships. Similarly, the short film Be My Brother by Genevieve Clay portrays the notion of not belonging by providing us with an insight into the issues of isolation surrounding the lives of mentally disabled Australians, while Shaun Tan’s picture book The Red Tree depicts the notion of not belonging through isolation and despair.

Skrzynecki’s St Patrick’s College explores the effects of schooling on an individual’s sense of self. It is a personal recollection of Skrzynecki’s schoolboy life and the disconnection and lack of affiliation he felt with his school – St Patrick’s College. The resigned,critical tone present in St Patrick’s College is evident in the first line through a criticism of the persona’s mother for her motives for sending him to the school – so he could be just like her “employer’s sons”. From the persona’s first day at school he feels oppressed by the watching eye of “our lady”, despite her “outstretched arms”, and contempt for the school motto “Luceat Lux Vestra” (Let Your Light Shine), which he “thought was a brand of soap”. This is also evident in the line “stuck pine needles into the motto on my breast”, emphasising his lack of respect for the school and ignorance of its values. The repetition of the line “for eight years” in the second and third stanzas creates a sense of a confinement about the...