Kate Grenville is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, books about the writing process. The Lieutenant was inspired by a real story that took place in the colony of New South Wales in the last years of the eighteenth century. The story has been hidden for two hundred years between the lines of two shabby blue notebooks stored in a London manuscript library. They record the extraordinary friendship between Lieutenant William Dawes, a soldier with the First Fleet to New South Wales, and a young Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang. Dawes – a scholar more than a soldier – set out to learn the language of the people of Sydney Cove, the Gadigal. The notebooks begin with lists of nouns and verbs and grammatical forms, but gradually abandon that approach for a more human one: Dawes recorded entire conversations that took place between him and Patyagarang. Between the lines of the converstations it's clear that they developed a relationship that was mutually respectful, playful, and warmly affectionate. It was almost certainly not a sexual relationship, but one of those friendships that can arise between a clever young person and an adult.

1. Kate Grenville’s
Annotation
guide

2. • Learning intention: to understand thematic and
symbolic aspects of the text.
• Success Criteria: for you to record the themes,
symbols and motifs into the inside cover of your
novel and annotate accordingly.

3. Friendship
Language
Shared history
culture
Themes

4. • Guns (loaded)
• Jacket (red coat)
• Putuwa (warm fingers)
• Warraburra (sweet tea)
• Axe
• Cat-o-nine tails
• Exile
• Language
• Kaadianed (glued-on)
symbols

5. • The cosmos
• Astronomy
• Abundance
• Bread and salt beef
• Fear
• A.s.d. (autism spectrum disorder)
• Machinery
• The empire
• Belonging
• Colonialism
• ideals
motifs

6. •Rooke = allusions to the chess piece, only
progress in straight lines.
•Silke = Silk, slick, can turn a ‘sows ear into
a silk purse’, silky.
Characterisation