Nostalgia and Memory ("South of My Days")
"South of My Days" is often viewed as a poem that is nostalgic for, and valorizes, the past. The poet is looking back at a place familiar to her, remembering sights and sensations like trees and the tableland silhouette. The figure of old Dan is ensconced in the past, spending his days reminiscing about his life as a drover and the various adventures he and his companions had. But things are more complicated than a simple, straightforward desire to be back in the early days, for these early days are those of colonial conquest. Wright spent her life wrestling with what Europeans did to the aboriginal people and to the landscape, and, in her desire to stop privileging voices like Dan's, she tells the old man "No-one is listening" to him. Instead, she wants to to give precedence to the aboriginal people's stories, the ones that "go walking in my sleep."
Australia's Past ("The Old Prison," "South of My Days")
Wright evokes Australia's past in her poetry, but it is not an uncomplicated one. In "The Old Prison" she reflects on convict labor, and in "South of My Days" she considers both the romanticized colonial past as well as the aboriginal past (the two intertwining, of course, with colonial conquest). She asks whose stories are told and heard, who is remembered and who does the remembering. She seeks truth in history, not just romance, myth, and legend.
Man's Inhumanity to Man ("Metho Drinker")
In this bleak poem, Wright suggests that man is often indifferent to the suffering of one's fellow man, which is a moral failing. She asks the reader to sympathize with the drunk of the poem and to understand why his addiction pains him but why it is so hard to relinquish. She then asks us to reflect on why we treat those on the margins of society with indifference or callousness, as we are all human beings and worthy of regard.
The Wondrousness of the Natural World ("Magpie," "Five Senses")
Wright has often been deemed a "nature poet," and while the term is rather reductive, it does indicate that she is a poet profoundly concerned with nature. She writes of Australia's harsh but mesmerizing landscape, its birds and trees and animals, and its wild weather. No creature is too small to escape her keen eye; no natural phenomenon too strange or too familiar to be wrapped up in verse. She looks on nature with reverence, awe, and amusement; she also knows what man has done to destroy it, so there is a tone of nostalgia, despair, and anger mixed with the wonder.
Art ("Request to a Year")
The narrator of this poem admires her great-great-grandmother for not becoming hysterical when her son almost drowns; rather, the woman, a "legendary devotee of the arts," knows that she cannot change what is happening and thus paints the scene as it occurs. As a wife and mother to eight children, painting may be a love of hers but not something she can do as much as she likes. Her art, it is implied, usually comes second to her other concerns. Thus in this moment she allows art to take precedence, sloughing off useless emotions and letting her aesthetic vision consume her.
The Harshness of Nature ("South of My Days," "The Old Prison," "Legend")
The Australian landscape is a harsh, often inhospitable one. Numerous poems feature cold winter winds, deadly dust storms, or jagged mountains and other features that get in man's way. Though man may try to dominate nature, and may sometimes succeed, the outback reminds its inhabitants that it is not to be taken lightly. Living there requires a tenacity of will, which Euro-Australians sometimes have, but it also requires a respect for the land, which is sometimes lacking.
Contemplativeness and Meditativeness
In all of her poems, Wright demonstrates a contemplative, meditative spirit. She looks keenly at the world around her, whether it is people in the city or the trees and birds in her backyard. She considers her place within the Australian landscape, probes collective and individual memory, addresses history, and lets herself be awed, charmed, perplexed, haunted, and frustrated by her interior and exterior worlds. She is trenchant and thoughtful, and her works, even the ones that seem simple, are evocative of a mind open to all that it perceives.
