Tim Winton’s ‘Aquifer’ uses a metaphysical journey through the blurring of landscapes to awaken consciousness and encourage self-reflection. It is through the development of language techniques that both texts critique the importance of maintaining a transcendent connection with nature as a trigger for enlightenment.

Connections with the landscape can encourage reflection and revaluation of past injustices. Flame Tree in a Quarry explores the tenuous technological impact of man on nature that can create tension, highlighting the fragility of nature. The title creates a visual image of the lone ‘flame tree’ in a barren landscape ‘the Quarry’ triggering a metaphor about the powerful forces of nature and its fecundity following great destruction. …show more content…
Wright creates beautiful Australian symbolism transforming her land into an emotionally accepted background. In employing biblical imagery, Wright demonstrates how nature’s voice is ‘made flesh’ though ‘the singer dies’ referencing the wrecked landscape that forms the body through which the voice of the metaphoric flame tree comes. The poet uses Christian imagery ’the world’s delight/the world’s desire’ to draw on the parable of Christ’s birth as a visual representation on earth as an invisible God, the repeated words of praise becoming a religious experience. Through the synaesthesia of ’I drink/ my sight’, Wright highlights transcendence, devouring visually in a religious experience of nature and its power to transform individuals. Wright predicts the free reign given to miners resulting in violent destruction of the land. The use of the female voice of nature ‘filled with fire’ metaphorically connotes the spiritual potential rebirth of nature. The cyclic imagery of the ‘fountain of hot joy’ becomes a metaphor to reveal the escaping blood from damaged vessels, enabling a clean reawakening of nature after great technological damages. The oxymoronic paradox of ‘life/death’ attempts reconciliation with nature to encapsulate the fertility of the land, as life comes from death. Wright implies that nature has power and it is up to man how he chooses to harness …show more content…
In encapsulating haunting images of the landscape, the poet utilises a gothic trope for revaluation of self and society within the fragility of place. The ‘dry breast’ of the landscape is metaphorically connected to the persona’s ‘heart’, alluding to the lack of nourishment to acknowledge the fragile ‘country that built my heart’. Through descriptive language of the ‘uncoloured slope’, Wright affirms the crepuscular moonlight draining the colour from the landscape, only to be filled through the poetry. Nature is represented as a violent force and Wright is unsentimental. The image of the phallic ‘ironbark’ tree penetrating the ‘virgin rock’ is unabashed in its sexual reference. Wright’s strength of voice mirrors the call on nature to use its violence for survival in the harsh landscape. The paradox ‘unloving come to life’ becomes a connection of the elemental and impersonal forces of nature that enable the tree to give birth to itself. Wrights invocations is emulated in the rhyming couplet ‘dew/you’ as she admires nature’s strength in Australia’s harsh and unyielding landscape. The persona ‘woke’ to ‘flowers more lovely than the white moon’, the simile representing awe of her new insight into nature that is able to sustain and survive on this barren