A physical journey which involves the movement from one place to another can have lasting effects on an individual or group which can be mental, emotional, physical, or a combination. The effects and overall impact of a journey will depend on the characteristics of the particular journey undertaken. The composers of different texts all employ a number of different techniques to convey, to the reader, their ideas about a journey and the impact that the journey being taken may have on an individual or group. We see the different techniques employed by composers through Peter Skrzynecki’s Crossing the Red Sea and Immigrants at Central Station, Shirley Geok-lin Lims The Town Where Time Stands Still and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.
Peter Skrzynecki wrote his poems in order to educate others on the effects and impact that a physical journey can have on other people using his own experience and experience of his family as an example. In peter Crossing the Red Sea many techniques are employed to represent his ideas about the journey taken the war torn country to a new land and the impact it has on the travelers. In the first stanza Skrzynecki begins to describe the poor physical discomfort that the people ‘crossing the red sea’ are enduring. “Many slept on deck because of the day’s heat or to watch a sunset they would never see again” this is describing the physical discomfort of the travelers as well as an emotional wrench as the people from the war torn countries break off from there old lives and leave behind the sunset. The poor physical conditions and qualities are emphasised in alliteration “shirtless in shorts, barefooted” a metaphor is used to describe what the people are in “themselves a landscape”. “Milk white” is an adjective to describe the people’s flesh which