Both poets, Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, were aware of man's propensity toward evil. Both of them lived through the Second World War and were aware of the impact that war had on society. In many cases their writing was anti-war and had pacifist and often feminist undertones.
Both poets also wrote extensively about their homeland, Australia. In Wright's poem "South of My Days" she celebrates the landscape by including rich details and imagery, such as:
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.
The imagery isn't always positive, but it does capture the haunting beauty of the wilderness. This happens as well in "Brother and Sisters," where the bush is a bad thing, an enemy...
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creeping closer and closer to the cul-de-sac where the siblings live.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal doesn't address the scenery, but she does write about the freedoms that it offered. She contrasts Aboriginal customs and traditions with the replacement that colonization brought, and does so in a way that shows how bloodthirsty people can be and how much worse much of the new technology is.
Both poets have a negative reaction to colonization, even as they look at it from two different sides. They show the tension that exists between the two cultures and environments and encourage the reader to think through why that tension exists and what can be done about it.
Wrights' "Brothers and Sisters" and "South of My Days," as well as Noonuccal's "No More Boomerang," all speak about the changes that occurred in Australia after British settlement. However, Wright's poems speak from the British point of view, and Noonuccal speaks from the Aboriginal point of view.
"Brothers and Sisters" is about a British family that settled in Australia in a place where "The road turned out to be a cul-de-sac." The dead-end street is a metaphor for the family's lost dreams, as the bridge they had hoped for is never built. Their dreams are deferred as "now their orchards never would be planted." They spend their time listening to an old pianola that doesn't work properly, and "the bush moved one step nearer." The bush is a reference to the Australian wilderness, which is encroaching on the family. Their dreams of turning their property into a western-style orchard fail, as Australia reverts back to its natural landscape. In "South of My Days," the narrator of the poem recalls the tableland of her youth. The tableland is also a feature of the Australian landscape. In the poem, the narrator recalls the stories of Dan, who told stories about the drought in 1901. Again in this poem, the landscape of Australia is harsh and unforgiving, and the tableland of the narrator's childhood has changed.
"No More Boomerang" by the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal is also about the changes that modernity has brought to Australia. Unlike Wright's poems, this poem is written from the Aboriginal point of view. In each stanza, the poet speaks about what has changed and poses questions about whether the changes are for the better. For example, she writes, "Now we track bosses/To catch a few bob/Now we go walkabout/On bus to the job." This means that the Aboriginals have given up hunting to work for a few dollars, and they go on "walkabout," or on a traditional Aboriginal journey, not in the outback but on buses. Later, she writes, "Black hunted wallaby/White hunt dollar." Wallaby are animals that are hunted by the Aboriginals, but now the Aboriginals have been forced to hunt for money, like white people. Their landscape has been forever changed, but not necessarily for the better. They face the same sense of decay and decline from a more hopeful and freer past that the characters in Wright's poems do.