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Finding Ways Home
by Evelyn AraluenPrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed Finding Ways Home is a short work of life-writing by Evelyn Araluen, a Bundjalung writer and poet, published in Anita Heiss's 2018 anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia.
Summary
Finding Ways Home is a short work of life-writing by Evelyn Araluen, a Bundjalung writer and poet, published in Anita Heiss's 2018 anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. A reckoning with identity, family silence and belonging, it is studied in HSC English Studies through Texts and Human Experiences.
Finding Ways Home is a short work of life-writing Evelyn Araluen contributed to Anita Heiss's 2018 anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, which gathers more than fifty First Nations writers answering one deceptively simple question: what was it like to grow up Aboriginal in this country? Araluen is a Bundjalung writer, poet and editor, born on Dharug country at the base of the Blue Mountains, and her answer is not a tidy story of pride or of pain. It is a reckoning with how hard it can be to know exactly who and where you are.
The essay moves by association rather than chronology, circling the one question of belonging from different angles: a loud, scrappy childhood; family knowledge broken by generations of silence, until her big sister finally tells her the story of their ancestry on an ordinary drive; the family farm up north on Bundjalung country; the racism of high school, where the word "Aboriginal" is turned into a schoolyard slur; and the present, where a young writer worries she is taking up too much space.
The piece does not end in grievance but turns toward humility and gratitude. The title names her answer: home is not a fixed address she arrives at but something she is still finding, a verb rather than a place.
Context
Evelyn Araluen is a Bundjalung writer, poet and editor, born on Dharug country at the base of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. She went on to win the 2022 Stella Prize for her first book, Dropbear, but Finding Ways Home is an earlier and more intimate piece, contributed to Anita Heiss's 2018 anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, which gathers more than fifty First Nations writers answering one deceptively simple question: what was it like to grow up Aboriginal in this country?
The essay is set across the western edge of Sydney and the country beyond it - Dharug and Eora, the Nepean and the Hawkesbury, a family farm up north on Bundjalung country. It is written from inside the long aftermath of colonisation, where removals, mission schools and generations of silence have cost the family exact knowledge of where they come from. Written for a general Australian readership, the piece lets readers sit inside an experience of identity that refuses neat categories.
Themes and Techniques
The founding experience of the essay is living between two worlds - Aboriginal and settler, ancient and suburban - that press in on each other. Araluen refuses to resolve them: she sets ancient river country beside a suburban fast-food outlet in a single phrase, declining to separate Aboriginal life from modern Australia, and describes herself as fair-skinned and a little outcast, away from Country yet still connected to it and still listening to her ancestors.
The essay is haunted by what colonisation has erased. Generations of silence and denial mean the family cannot trace itself with certainty, and it is the big sister, not an archive, who becomes the keeper of what can still be known. Her flat, loving realism - accepting that the family will never know everything - refuses both false hope and self-pity, and becomes the essay's model for holding loss without being undone by it.
Belonging, meanwhile, is drawn as practice rather than possession. Her father, who never spoke of place in possessive terms, taught his children humility and respect: an inheritance carried in habit and care rather than genealogy, alongside the family's storytellers, whose stories survive where the documented record has not.
The voice itself is the essay's craft. Its wry, unflattering memories of a smaller, sassier self earn trust before harder material arrives, and the adult writer's worry that she is becoming too big and loud shadows success with guilt. The title keeps the whole piece unfinished on purpose: belonging is an ongoing action, never a completed arrival.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which course is Finding Ways Home studied in for the HSC?
- Finding Ways Home is studied in HSC English Studies, framed through Texts and Human Experiences, which asks how a composer represents individual and collective experiences.
- Who wrote Finding Ways Home?
- Evelyn Araluen, a Bundjalung writer, poet and editor born on Dharug country, wrote the essay. She later won the 2022 Stella Prize for her first book, Dropbear.
- What type of text is Finding Ways Home?
- It is a short work of life-writing, published in Anita Heiss's 2018 anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, and it moves by association rather than chronology.
- What is Finding Ways Home about?
- The essay reckons with growing up Aboriginal and fair-skinned between two worlds, with family knowledge broken by generations of silence, and with belonging as something still being found rather than a fixed address.
- What should students focus on when studying Finding Ways Home?
- Focus on how the essay's voice earns trust through unflattering honesty, how juxtaposition and anaphora hold two worlds together, and how the title motif keeps belonging an ongoing action.
Studying Finding Ways Home for the HSC?
Finding Ways Home is studied in HSC English Studies, framed through Texts and Human Experiences, which asks students to explain how a composer represents individual and collective experiences and the emotions and paradoxes of human behaviour, argued through the way the text is built. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.
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