Little Plastic Shipwreck Study Guide

Cate Kennedy was born in Louth, Lincolnshire, England, where her father was on a posting with the air force. She returned to Australia in her childhood and lived in several states around the country with her family. After graduating with a BA in literature from the University of Canberra, she worked a wide variety of jobs, including for the Australian Customs Service, as a tutor, waitress, life model, kitchenhand, community arts worker, theatre director, and for a microcredit cooperative for peasant farmers in Mexico. These experiences have fed into her writing: in 2005, she published the travel memoir Sing and Don’t Cry about her time in Mexico, and her short story Habit (2001), which tells the story of a woman who dies while smuggling Cocaine across the border, is inspired by her time working for the Customs service. Kennedy’s writing has spanned a variety of genres, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry, but she is best known for her short fiction. In 2001, she published her first collection of short stories, Dark Roots, to critical acclaim. Her latest collection of short stories, Like a House on Fire, was shortlisted for the prestigious Stella prize in 2013. Cate Kennedy teaches creative writing in schools and Universities across Australia. She lives on a farm on the Broken River in North-East Victoria.

“Little Plastic Shipwreck” broaches the topic of the mistreatment of intelligent animals in marine parks. This reflects the mounting controversy around Seaworld (in Orlando, Florida), where a captive orca named Tilikum was involved in the death of three people between 1991 and 2010, sparking discussions about the conditions of marine parks and the ethics of keeping large intelligent animals, such as orcas and dolphins, in captivity. This may have influenced Kennedy’s decision to make Declan’s callous attitude towards Samson central to her story. In addition, Little Plastic Shipwreck addresses some of the issues associated with contemporary capitalism, including consumerism and job insecurity. The story’s publication coincided with a period of general economic decline between the late 2000s and early 2010s, known as the Great Recession. Kennedy’s portrait of a dilapidated business struggling to keep afloat, as well as of a protagonist working a job he hates in order to support himself and his wife through a medical catastrophe, reflects this economic and social climate in subtle ways.

In a 2006 interview, Cate Kennedy cites two other Australian authors whose work has had an influence on her own: Peter Carey and Tim Winton. Peter Carey is a novelist and the author of two short story collections, The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979). Tim Winton is a novelist, playwright and author of six short story collections, including On Her Knees (2004) and The Turning (2005). Like Winton and Carey, Kennedy’s works often reflect a contemporary Australian cultural context. In the same interview, she also mentions authors of American fiction between the early and mid-twentieth century, including John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939), Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960) and Ray Bradbury (Farenheit 451, 1953). Like Kennedy, these writers all created fiction that reflected and commented on aspects of the world around them: for John Steinbeck, the Great Depression; for Harper Lee, racism in the deep south; and for Ray Bradbury, the horror of World War II. American fiction during this period was also largely characterized by a restrained, observational writing style and realistic dialogue, the influence of which is noticeable in Kennedy’s own writing