Sticks and Stones and Such-Like

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'Sticks and Stones and Such-like' written by Sunil Badami is an autobiographical event that explains how he was an innocent Indian boy who couldn't fit into Australian society because of his name, Sunil. This short story is comparable with a previous print text we studied 'We look after our Own' by Kath Walker, as it highlights similar and different language and narrative conventions. These similarities and differences can be channelled through conventions such as are characters (racism issue), setting (Australian rural, city and suburbia) and representation of tone. In 'Sticks and Stones and Such-like' it is interesting to see Sunil ashamed of his name for majority of the story and until his mother’s influence helped find his belonging within himself and the community. Sunil begins his story with names he would be called just because of his race, for instance curry muncher, towel-head, darkie and nig-nog. It would then be followed up with another insult, e.g. “Chinese burn or a dead-leg.” He would tell his mother about these racist insults and she would just reply "Stones and sticks and such-like can only shake your skeleton. Just rise over it!" This upset him even more because it wasn’t even said right. Sunil had everything going against him, he was Indian and had dark skin and he had an Indian name which people would mock him about because they couldn’t pronounce it. After a while he got used to the names and dead legs. He took the verbal assault like a good sport. The only thing that would upset him now was his name because no one could pronounce it properly. This shows us that the group of people at that time were extremely racist and that it would have been very hard for Sunil to fit in, which led him to change his name to Neil. Neil found a false sense of belonging with his name change. This stopped majority of people making fun of his name, “I could feel
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