In Wright's poetry, the observer and the landscape – "man as part of nature" (Wright interview, 1965) – serve to share important messages about the way we have interacted and continue to interact with our environment. Wright's understanding of the relationship between humans and the land reflects her own past growing up in a pastoralist family and later work as an environmental activist. In her poetry the landscape often becomes a metaphor for the passing of a distinctively Australian time with explicit references to Australian historical events and situations. But paradoxically her poems do not remain in the past, instead using landscape as a bridge to the present, offering support for conservation, a movement she embraced wholeheartedly in her lifetime.
Perhaps the most traditional of her poems is the well-known "South of My Days" with its nostalgia for an idealized Australian past. The title metaphorically refers to a time outside the present, but part of the persona's "circle". Circularity is a feature of Wright's poetry, symbolizing generational change. European and Australian images come together in this poem, capturing the struggle between the two cultures. Her own strong relationship to this past is evident in the first person possessive pronoun of the title and the metaphor "part of my blood's country" but this also imitates an Aboriginal phrasing about the connection to land, suggesting an indigenous presence which is absent from the rest of the poem. .
The fragility of the landscape with its "delicate outline" is evoked through the personification of the tableland as "wincing", "lean" and "hungry" with "bony slopes". In the midst of this landscape is the European "old cottage" surrounded by imported species of trees "willow", "medlar" "crabapple" which casts a destructive presence over the native vegetation by choking the creek which is "leaf-silenced".
