In September 1969 Judith Wright – by then well established as Australia's leading poet, and soon to become equally celebrated as a resolute campaigner on behalf of its environment and indigenous peoples – gave a talk at a symposium in honour of the Nobel-Prize-winning Australian immunologist Macfarlane Burnet. Her title was ‘Science, Value and Meaning’. Beginning with C. P. Snow's famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, which had been published a decade earlier, Wright remarked that Snow had ‘over-simplified the problem’. ‘The real split’, she suggested, was ‘not […] so much between scientists and literary intellectuals as between two sides of our own human nature’:

Wright draws a clear distinction here between the act of imaginative creation, which she sees as common to science and the arts, and the instrumentalist worldview that appropriates the advances of science for its own ends. It is a distinction which not only draws parallels between the artist and the scientist, but binds the two together in a single and increasingly urgent project:

Artists, including poets, have a duty to attend to science. For Wright, the time has clearly come to fulfil Wordsworth's prophecy in the 1802 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads – echoed in her own words – that the poet should ‘be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, […] carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself’ (1984, 606–07). If artists do not transform science into ‘imaginative knowledge’, then the control of that knowledge is lost to the ‘merchants of death’.