Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels is a timeless classic that has been read by generations. This version has been developed as an abridged version for younger readers. Cleverly crafted by C. White who kept close to the original story. The story was written for low-level literacy requirements. This version is accurate to the original story hence making it meaningful to a broader audience. It is beautifully illustrated and written to engage as a HiLo reader.

There are many opportunities to discuss the way the people reacted to the unknown. Finding this colossal person washed ashore would be terrifying to most people. How do people react to differences in people and unknown information? This story can be used to describe the historical times when Swift wrote this satirical story and how the little people reacted to the foreign intruder. The map in the story shows the distant place of Lilliput in the Indian Ocean. This would have been considered a very remote and unknown country.

Australia’s East Coast had not been charted at this stage. It was written nearly 50 years before Cook sailed into the Pacific to chart the east coast of Australia.

Jonathan Swift wrote about egg-cracking differences between two countries – Lilliput and Blefuscu. The countries were ready to go to war over how eggs were cracked. This is a very ridiculous reason for creating a war. The author was making a satirical comment about 17th-century England's wars with France and Spain.

Literacy is the prime objective of this version of the classic but there are plenty of other discussion points. It has many opportunities for discussion about the early explorers of the Pacific and the developing colonies in S.E. Asia and the Pacific. The warring nations of Europe had started their empires, and the maps of the world were changing as new areas of the world were explored.