2026 HSC English — Paper 1: Texts and Human Experiences — Intuition Education Predicted Paper (COMMON PAPER)

Stone Fruit

The ladder always leaned where the bark had worn it a paler grey, and I went up into the apricot tree the way you enter a house you have lived in all your life — without looking, hands knowing the door.

My grandmother stood below with her apron held out, a hammock for the summer to fall into. Gently, she said, they bruise — and I learnt the weight of a thing by how carefully it must be given away.

The kitchen that afternoon smelled of sugar scorched a little on purpose. Jars in rows on the sill caught the light and held it the way I thought we would hold every summer after.

The tree is still there. The house is sold. Somewhere a stranger's child climbs through those same slow rooms of leaves and does not know she is climbing through the middle of my life.

I own nothing of it now but the knowing: how to cup a ripe thing in the palm, how to lower it down without falling, how sweetness is a kind of grief that has learnt to keep.

— Alira Wenden (fictional author; original work)

from The Long Table

By one o'clock the backyard was full, and Nadia had been hugged by eleven people whose faces she loved and whose lives she no longer knew. She carried the salads out. She carried the chairs out. If she kept carrying things, she had discovered, nobody asked her anything.

Her aunties had annexed the kitchen, as they always did, and were conducting three arguments at once in two languages, as they always were. It should have been simple to step in among them. It had been simple once. She stood in the doorway holding a bowl of beans and understood that she was performing the entrance the way an actor performs a room she has only seen in photographs — every gesture correct, nothing true.

And whose fault was that? Nobody had sent her away. She had wanted the scholarship, the city, the small bright flat with her name alone on the lease. She had wanted it fiercely; she wanted it still. That was the thing no one warned you about wanting: it was not a door you walked through but a tide you swam out on, and when you turned around, the shore was still there, still golden, still calling you in for lunch — only further, every year a little further.

'Nadia! Sit, sit. You remember how to sit?' Her uncle patted the bench beside him, laughing at his own joke, and the whole table laughed with him, and she did too, because it was funny, and because it wasn't.

She sat. The talk closed over her head like water. Under the long table, her grandmother's hand found hers and pressed it — one firm, unhurried pulse, the way you press a seam flat, the way you say I know without saying anything — and Nadia held on, belonging and not belonging, both at once, all afternoon.

— S. J. Marrick (fictional author; original work)

from 'The Full Room', a weekend magazine essay

There are one hundred and forty-three people in my pocket. I counted. Friends, colleagues, a plumber, a man I met once at a conference in 2019 who sends me articles about productivity. At any moment of any day, I can reach more human beings than my great-grandmother met in her entire life.

So why did I stand in my kitchen last Tuesday, phone glowing in my hand like a small hearth, and feel that the house had never been so quiet?

We have mistaken access for company. A message is not a conversation; a conversation is not a presence; and presence — the old, inefficient kind, where somebody's whole afternoon is spent in the same room as your whole afternoon — is the one thing the technology of connection cannot deliver. It can deliver everything else: the update, the reaction, the thumbs-up rising like a small balloon and vanishing. It is astonishing. It is not enough.

Here is the paradox we have built for ourselves: the fuller the room, the lonelier the standing in it. We scroll through other people's dinners while ours goes cold. We are never out of touch and rarely in it.

I am not proposing we throw the phones in the river. I am proposing something harder: that we notice what the full room is emptying us of, and begin — awkwardly, inefficiently, one unscheduled hour at a time — to be somewhere, wholly, with someone, again.

— Tomas Ellery (fictional author; original work)

from Mudlines: A Year on the Estuary

Low tide, first light, and the flats have laid the river's diary open again. You can read the night in it if you go slowly: the drag-line of a crab, commas of bird-print, the long deliberate sentence of an eel making for deeper water. Every six hours the tide wipes the page and the estuary begins its patient writing again.

My father taught me to walk here the way his mother taught him: barefoot, unhurried, weight back on the heels so the mud accepts you rather than swallows you. The flats don't belong to you, he'd say. You belong to them, or you sink. I thought for years this was a warning. I understand now it was an instruction for happiness.

Cities had me for two decades, and in all that time some part of me kept the tide chart running. I would be in a meeting, in traffic, in the fluorescent nowhere of an airport, and know without knowing that the water was drawing back off the flats at home, that the diary lay open and unread.

When I finally came back, the mud remembered my weight before I did. Ten steps out from the mangroves the old balance returned — heels back, hurry gone — and the place resumed writing me as if I were a line it had left unfinished. We speak of reading landscape. We speak less of the reverse: that a landscape reads its people, keeps its own record of us, and misses us, in its tidal fashion, when we go.

— Dana Okafor-Hale (fictional author; original work)

— photographer: R. Amaya (fictional; original described image)