Distinctively Visual

By way of a varied use of descriptive language the short stories of Lawson and poetry of Mackellar show that it is true that distinctively visual texts allow the reader to vividly imagine and gain insights into the characters, relationships and settings. Lonely drover’s wives, Bushmen and fettlers, as well as the setting of a sunburnt Australian landscape are brought to life and into unique relationship, in the visual imagery of Henry Lawson and Dorothea Mackellar’s compositions. Henry Lawson created a strong image of the uniquely Australian bush and the hardships of the people who have lived and worked there. The two important stories which reveal Lawson’s vision are, ‘In a Dry Season’ and ‘The Drover’s Wife’. He draws on the tradition of oral storytelling to make the bush come alive through colloquial language and idiom. Lawson uses a dry, sardonic humor to entertain and provoke empathy for his characters. His descriptions of the various settings are blunt but precise with illustrative adjectives and nouns of a “horrible” land. Contrastingly, the related text, Dorothea Mackellar’s poem, ‘My Country’, expresses a vivid and memorable panorama of place, drawing on a kaleidoscope palette of nouns, rhyme and first person perspective to ingrain in the reader’s imagination her passionate vision of the land and “love for her country, Australia.

For 'The Drover's Wife' Lawson uses the third-person present perspective and opens by setting the scene in "the two-roomed house" with "bush all around - bush with no horizon", taking the responder immediately into the setting and vividly bringing it to life in the mind's eye. Lawson's statements, "Nothing to relieve the eye" and "nothing to see" appeal directly to the responder's own imaginative sight and powerfully enhances the imagery of emptiness. The repetition of "bush" and its description with emotive adjectives such as "stunted", "rotten", "sighing", "waterless" give the landscape a distinctive life and a negative