The Napalm Girl

Lawson vividly recreates the experience of life in the outback in and throughout his texts, which provides different perspectives on how we might view it. These descriptions give the responder a clear and descriptive insight into the hardships of the landscape and the strength and determination of its people resulting in renewed perspectives on the world. These distinctively vivid images are created through figurative and linguistic devices, and are most evident in Lawson’s texts "The Drover's Wife" and "In a Dry Season” and the photograph “The Napalm girl” by Nick Ut.

In “The Drover’s Wife” Lawson creates powerful images by employing distinctive visual language that enables the responder to visualise the isolation that people feels in the …show more content…
The use of Alliteration in, “No undergrowth, nothing to relieve the eye.. nineteen miles to the nearest.. civilisation” clearly emphasises how isolated the drover’s wife is and her alienation from the rest of the world. In addition, the experience of the drover’s wife reflects the harsh and the infertile nature of the bush. Due to the fact that living in the bush has stifled and thwarted her development as she has “no time to show” her children love. The effect of the alliteration exposes the responder to a story about the mother’s hardship which instantly makes the responder dislike the bush due to it’s desolation and sameness. Furthermore, the use of descriptive language in the short and truncated sentences “no horizon”, “no ranges in the distance” and “no undergrowth” emphasises the lack of any aspect of the picturesque in the Australian outback. This is further exemplified by the repetition of “No” which exaggerates this negative image. Through this Lawson is trying to convey the harshness and hardships that people face when living in the bush to illustrate the unpredictability of the isolated outback