Observing and describing in Storm Boy 1: Describing a place

Putting it all together

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Let’s pull all these fragments back together and see what we have. Here’s the original snippet.

Storm Boy lived between the Coorong and the sea. His home was the long, long snout of sandhill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murray mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the South Australian Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other. They call it the Ninety Mile Beach. From thousands of miles round the cold, wet underbelly of the world the waves come sweeping in towards the shore and pitch down in a terrible ruin of white water and spray. All day and all night they tumble and thunder. And when the wind rises it whips the sand up the beach and the white spray darts and writhes in the air like snakes of salt.

Storm Boy(1963)

Here are the examples we've been building:

Amelia lived at the edge of the city in the middle of a disused industrial zone. She slept on her favourite mattress in an empty factory in a tiny dead end street almost directly beneath the Southern Downs bypass. ‘Bypass’ was a good name to call the place, avoided and forgotten, surrounded by old, broken buildings and an angry freeway of people desperately trying to be somewhere else. But people didn’t call it anything. They barely noticed it. From the high rises, the working factories, and the endless supply of swarming vehicles came a putrid mix of smoke and fumes that settled on the neighbourhood and covered everything in a thick coat of grime. It was 24 hours of horns and congestion. And when Summer came even the wind had somewhere else it wanted to be and the smoke and grime clung to you like an unwanted coat of paint.

Xavier lived between the train tracks and the wide blue ocean. His family home backed onto the marshland along the north side of the creek where the Boondall wetlands drain into the sea. A patchwork place it is, elegant and wild, with refined streets and manicured parks broken by eruptions of dark swamp, industrial rail and wind-blasted bay. The sign on the road into the town says Sandgate. From the flanks of western mountains the rainwaters come, gathering into streams that meet the headland, stop, and then soak into the earth, only to spread and rise beneath the town beyond. All year round the ground is sponged and muddy underfoot. And when the rains and tides meet in a dangerous way, the bay washes into the streets from the east and the wetlands ooze into the freight yards from the west, and the town sinks like a broken barge. 

And below is your version, joined together. You'll need to delete the line breaks to create a continuous paragraph.

Is there anything you want to edit? This is your last chance to make improvements before we conclude the lesson!

  • How do you want the reader to feel about this place?
  • Have you included some features of the surrounding world?
  • Does the place have a name?
  • Have you described the effects of an environmental force?
Delete excess paragraph breaks and polish your scene.
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