If you're studying High Ground for VCE English, don't reduce the film to a list of themes and memorised quotations. Stephen Maxwell Johnson's film is built around competing ways of seeing Country, justice, violence and authority. The strongest essays explain those ideas through the film itself: its landscapes, perspectives, sound, recurring images and character choices.

High Ground appears on the official 2026 VCE English/EAL Text List. For Units 3 and 4, VCAA expects students to analyse ideas, concerns and values while considering how text structures and language features create meaning. For a film, that means your knowledge of camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scène needs to be part of the interpretation rather than tacked onto it afterwards.

What VCAA actually wants from a High Ground essay

The current Section A criteria reward knowledge of the text and its structure, coherent analysis of the topic, relevant textual evidence and fluent expression. In other words, knowing everything that happens in High Ground is not enough. You need to make an argument about what those events mean.

Looking at the 2025 exam, there were two very different topics given in High Ground: one about the resilience of Indigenous cultures despite colonisation, and another asking to what extent revenge constitutes justice. Neither prompt could be answered well with a character-by-character plot summary. Both require students to trace an idea across the film and recognise its complications.

That should shape how you revise.

Country, power and the meaning of the “high ground”

The title is one of the most useful starting points for analysing the film because “high ground” changes meaning depending on who occupies it.

Travis initially understands high ground in military terms. It is a tactical advantage: the person above can observe, control and shoot those below. Moran's worldview works similarly. Colonial authority gives him the institutional “high ground”, yet Johnson repeatedly exposes how limited that authority actually is.

Grandfather Därrpa offers a different model. He is repeatedly positioned physically above others among the escarpments, but his authority comes from his relationship with Country, law and generations of knowledge rather than the ability to dominate. The contrast matters. The colonisers treat land as territory to be controlled; the film presents Country as something to which people belong.

Cinematographer Andrew Commis has explained that the production deliberately used wide lenses, deep focus and a 1.66:1 aspect ratio to keep people connected visually with the earth and sky. Characters are rarely allowed to exist separately from the landscape. That makes the scenery more than an attractive backdrop. It carries the film's argument about belonging.

This is particularly clear in the image of Nimbuwa Rock. Johnson opens with it before moving into Gutjuk's community at the waterhole, then returns to it at the end of the film. The violence in between is devastating, but Nimbuwa Rock remains. The bookending structure gives Country a scale and continuity that colonial violence cannot erase.

Justice is much more complicated than revenge

One of the easiest mistakes with High Ground is to divide its characters neatly into people who want justice and people who want revenge.

Its opening massacre establishes why retaliation becomes imaginable in the first place. A Yolngu community is shown living beside the lagoon before the police patrol's arrival turns into indiscriminate killing. Travis is horrified and attempts to stop the violence, but the massacre is subsequently covered up. The legal system therefore fails before Baywara ever begins his campaign against the settlers.

Baywara's violence can consequently be understood without being presented as a satisfactory solution. His pursuit of vengeance grows from genuine atrocity, grief and the absence of accountability. Yet retaliatory violence reproduces the cycle that has already destroyed so much.

Grandfather Därrpa's commitment to Makarrata provides the film's clearest alternative. He seeks a form of justice based on the acknowledgement of wrongdoing, negotiation and the restoration of balance. During the Makarrata scene, Gutjuk translates for his grandfather while Moran remains unwilling to genuinely surrender colonial authority. The failure is significant: reconciliation cannot occur merely because the oppressed party is willing to negotiate. The party holding power also has to recognise the other's law and humanity.

A strong essay on justice should therefore avoid writing that “the film says revenge is bad”. Johnson instead asks what happens when institutional justice has already failed, and whether violence can ever repair the violence that produced it.

Gutjuk's story is about recovering a way of seeing

Gutjuk's development ties many of these ideas together.

After surviving the massacre as a child, he is raised at the mission and separated from much of his family and culture. His journey with Travis gradually returns him to Country, kinship and knowledge that colonial institutions have attempted to replace.

But Johnson doesn't make this a simple story in which Gutjuk chooses one mentor over another. Travis cares for him and wants to make amends, yet Travis still sees the world through assumptions shaped by military and colonial power. The rifle is the clearest example. Travis teaches Gutjuk how power can come from occupying the tactical high ground, but later Travis himself looks down from that position, misreads the encounter between Gutjuk and Baywara and shoots before understanding what is happening. The technique that supposedly gives him superior vision instead reveals how badly he can see.

By the conclusion, Gutjuk discards the bandolier and leaves with Gulwirri. Johnson cuts to the bird in flight and finally back to Nimbuwa Rock. The ending doesn't pretend that colonial violence has been solved. It does, however, align Gutjuk's future less with Travis's gun than with the cultural continuity represented by his grandfather, Country and the recurring image of flight.

High Ground film techniques: explain what they mean

Students regularly lose depth by writing sentences such as “Johnson uses a wide shot to show the landscape.” That identifies a technique but barely analyses it.

A better approach is to connect the choice to the film's argument:

• Cinematography: Wide lenses and deep focus keep characters visually situated within Country. By contrast, handheld close-range photography creates immediacy during human conflict. The movement between vastness and intimacy means individual violence is constantly placed inside a much longer history.
• Sound: Birds, water, wind, Yolngu songs, yidaki and language are prominent throughout the soundscape. The NFSA notes that the film does not use a conventional composed score. This gives the natural and cultural environment an unusually strong aural presence, while gunfire and colonial intrusion become especially disruptive.
• Perspective and framing: Moran's camera is a particularly useful motif. The photographic image viewed upside down through the camera's glass becomes a neat visual representation of a colonial perspective that believes it records reality while actually seeing it through a distorted frame.
• Structure and recurring imagery: Nimbuwa Rock, birds and elevated viewpoints recur across the film. Rather than analysing each appearance in isolation, track how their meaning develops. “High ground” moves from military strategy towards a broader question of who truly possesses knowledge, authority and perspective.
  Gutjuk’s movement through Country becomes inseparable from his recovery of family, culture and identity.

How to turn your High Ground knowledge into an essay

Start with the relationship inside the prompt rather than the broad theme.

Take the 2025 question about revenge and justice. A weak contention might argue that “revenge is different from justice”. It answers the topic, but it gives you almost nothing to develop.

A more useful argument would be:

Johnson presents revenge as an understandable response to colonial atrocity, but not as a sustainable form of justice; while Baywara's retaliation perpetuates violence, Därrpa's pursuit of Makarrata offers an alternative that colonial authority is unwilling to honour.

Now you have tensions to analyse. You can move from the massacre and cover-up, to Baywara, to Makarrata, and finally to Gutjuk's decision at the end. Each paragraph can use film technique as evidence for the interpretation instead of including a compulsory “camera sentence” after discussing plot.

For revision, I'd build a bank of around eight major scenes rather than trying to memorise the entire screenplay. For each scene, record what happens, two or three significant film choices, the ideas the scene complicates and several kinds of prompts it could answer. The massacre, Travis and Gutjuk's shooting lessons, Moran's photography, Gutjuk's reunion with his family, the Makarrata negotiation, Travis shooting Baywara, the destruction around the mission and the final return to Nimbuwa Rock give you a strong starting set.

VCAA asks for close reference and textual evidence. It does not require you to turn a film into a collection of fifty memorised dialogue quotations. Precise knowledge of scenes, character decisions and filmmaking choices is far more useful than inserting a quotation you can't analyse.

If you can explain not just what High Ground depicts but how Johnson positions us to see it, you're much closer to the kind of analysis the subject actually rewards.

If you'd like more structured help turning that knowledge into topic-specific essays and improving your analytical writing, you can have a look at VCE English tuition with English with Ish.

Essay Prompts for Revision

• ‘High Ground shows that violence causes lasting damage to individuals and communities.’ Discuss.
• ‘In High Ground, connection to Country is a source of strength.’ Discuss.
• How does High Ground explore the importance of cultural identity?
• ‘The characters in High Ground are shaped by the consequences of the past.’ Discuss.
• ‘High Ground shows that justice is difficult to achieve when power is unequal.’ Discuss.
• To what extent does High Ground suggest that revenge can ever bring justice?
• ‘Although Travis rejects the brutality of colonial violence, he remains part of the system that enables it.’ Discuss.
• ‘In High Ground, the ability to understand others is more valuable than the ability to control them.’ Discuss.
• ‘Those who believe they hold the “high ground” are often the characters who understand the least.’ Discuss.
• ‘High Ground suggests that reconciliation is impossible without a genuine recognition of Indigenous law, culture and sovereignty.’ Discuss.