Sandy in Bye Beautiful

1. Sandy in Bye Beautiful Significant passages that indicate her growth

2. Page 25 • Pg. 25 - On this occasion Sandy listens to Marianne talk with Carol when they visit the swimming pool. • Sandy is perceptive enough to know that Marianne is pretending to be more grown up and sure of herself than she actually is. • She is also aware that Marianne is competing with Carol to some degree. This is obvious when she hears Marianne explain why Peter gave her the engagement ring, before she left Perth and so ‘she wondered if it was only because Marianne wanted to show that she was at Carol’s level rather than because it was true’. • Carol has a boyfriend and a job and is planning on moving to Perth whereas Marianne has to do what her parents tell her.

3. Pg. 248 • In this incident Sandy starts to add up the pieces of the puzzle that contributed to Billy’s death. • She remembers: • watching her father and Constable Bates out the back of the police station, standing near the lock- up talking • watching her father furiously polishing his shoes on the evening Marianne left for Perth, ‘making the toes shine, as if he needed things to be clean, to be done right’. • watching him in the garden ‘digging over beds that had already been dug’ • seeing her father drinking more and whiskey instead of beer • her father speaking aggressively to the children if they did not go to bed quickly enough

4. Page 248 (continued) • hearing the police Falcon reversing out of the station, the night Billy died • that she and Marianne were awake and would have heard Billy had he gone past their window

5. Pg. 105-107 • When Sandy was nasty, she felt guilty like when she thought that what May said did not matter because she was part-Aborigine • “Sandy recognised that this act of diminishing May was a way to diminish Sandy’s own inadequacies” • When she finds out that May is Billy’s sister ‘now their colour signified something different than mere exposure to the sun’.

6. Pg. 132 • She starts to wonder if her father is always right. ‘Since arriving in the town something had changed in her, and now she saw things that she could not see before”. • ‘By speaking to Billy, she had broken something between herself and her sister, and she knew the same would eventually happen with her brother and her parents’. • She has her first period- symbolising the advent into adulthood.