The bush
The bush is the dominant imagery of the play, because the bush is the source of the snake, a representative from nature of the chaos and the threat of death. The bush is also the setting for the recent drought, so that the play's setting in the bush is dynamic; the bush is changing. Each day without rain, the brush gets drier and more like to combust. The trees around the home are typically an oasis from the bush, but the apples have gotten no rain, and now the trees are just tinder waiting to burn. The bush is a threatening wilderness.
The snake against the family
The imagery of the plot is the time-old story of human versus snake. The mother is experiencing the archetypal battle against poisonous vipers for the sake of her offspring. This is natural imagery, because the dynamics of nature are make evident in the plot. Although these are the meta-physical realities that underpin modern life, the modern person faces a much more abstract snake. The threat of cancer and car crashes is the same threat, but in this play, the imagery becomes more concrete. The wilderness brings the threat of the snake into focus, into its archetypal shape.
Love imagery
There is a response to the battle of life and death. The mother's love for her children, and for her family more broadly, is an imagery all its own. What is the abstract concept which is described in these concrete images? A mother mourning the loss of life in her family; a mother interjecting herself between a snake and her child; a mother fighting a poisonous serpent to prevent it from harming her family? The imagery is love. Love is that which motivates someone to face their fear and interpose themselves as a willing victim of death, to save someone else's life.
Death and survival
As suggested above, death is a serious imagery in the play. What separates the children's innocence from the mother's experience is the experience of death. The mother knew death was coming for her husband, and she tried to save him but failed, we learn from her late night monologues. She attempts survival herself, but there is death all around her. She once became so ill that her child died, and she was lucky to survive herself. They are far from medical attention, so the threat of death is much more multifaceted and immediate in the play. Her monologued meditations are always close to death.
