Short Story; The Hills

Title; The Hills
Author; Patricia Grace
Type; Short Story

The Hills by Patricia Grace is a short story about a young teenage boy who talks about what being a "boy" is or what it means to himself and other individuals around him. Also this short story has a main idea of Racism where the cops say to the little boy that he is black.

One idea in this Short Story was the conflict between cops and the boy. I thought it was interesting because the boy was at the pub with his friends and his friend tells him that Steve was talking with the cops so he wonders off looking for him. The boy then comes to a point where the cops are telling him off then arrests him for nothing he then wonders to himself why he is being arrested because all he was doing was looking for his friend that had been missing while after he had been talking to the cops. This made me feel and understand that this sort of based in the dawn raids in the early 1970's where racism was occurred in New Zealand like the White New Zealanders arresting the Pacific Islanders and the Maoris for no reason and giving them no freedom.

The most important event in this text was when the boy gets taken into the the station. I thought it was important because this is where he changes from a "boy" to a "man" after he experiences what its like to be in jail. An example of where he changes from a boy to a man is where in the short story it says "Later that day i went outside and walked up the street, and when i got to the top of the road i wouldn't look out at the hills. I turned and went back home. I remember wondering if i would ever look their again". This means that he does not want to be put up at the stage where he was before when he was at the hills and everything around him changed like his perspectives about the hills.

After reading this Short Story by Patricia Grace it made me think about how when he was a boy he was a smartarse, dirty with a filthy mind also is a servant and a slave but when he became a man after that little incident that happened at the pub he realized that being a boy puts him into bad situations just like getting end up in jail and he has to learn from what happened when he was a teenage boy.