How we cite our quotes: (Section Break.Paragraph)
Quote #1
You were beautiful in a rough sort of way, but you were older than I'd realized […] From a distance, when I'd seen you at the check-in line, your body had looked thin and small, like the eighteen-year-olds at my school, but up close, really looking, I could see that your arms were hard and tanned, and the skin on your face was weathered. You were as brown as a stretch of dirt. (1.23)
Clearly Ty isn't someone who spends a lot of time in conventional society. We eventually learn this, but from the point when we first meet him, it's pretty obvious from his appearance that nature is his primary environment.
Quote #2
I glanced at you. "How did you get here?"
"Walked. It took about a week. When I got here, I collapsed."
"All by yourself?"
"Just me. The rocks gave me dreams … and water, of course. It's special, this place. I stayed here about two weeks, camping in the middle, living off those rocks. When I got home, everything had changed." (7.40-43)
From the time he was a child, Ty has learned to rely on the land as his primary source of pretty much everything. His connection to it is almost mystical—he connects dreams with physical resources like water and sees rocks as something off which he can live.
Quote #3
"You're a new person now, Gem," you murmured. "That old you's been left behind. There's a chance out here to start again." (8.55)
Ty sees nature as more than just his habitat; it's a place where someone can shed his skin, let go of the past, and become a new person. We imagine this is what it must have felt like when Ty returned to Australia after being taken to the children's home in the city.
Quote #4
"Anyway, we've got chickens," you said. "And when you're—" You stopped to look at me before choosing the right word. "When you're acclimatized, we can go walkabout, pick up some bush foods. And we should catch a camel, too, sometime, maybe a couple. We can keep them in the boulders, stick a fence around." (10.24)
One of Ty's goals in bringing Gemma to Australia is to initiate her into a more natural way of living—to "acclimatize" her to the wilderness and distill the city from her system. At this point, though, stuff like going "walkabout" and catching camels has to sound pretty ridiculous.
Quote #5
I stared at you. You could have been joking, or saying something to scare me. But I don't think you were. You had that faraway look in your eye, the look when your eyes went a bit misty and it seemed as if you were looking out even further than the horizon. Just at that moment, I wasn't scared of you. Right then you looked like a kind of explorer, looking out over the land, planning where to go. (13.42)
It's interesting how Ty's connection to the land makes him less frightening to Gemma. Where Gemma only sees endless sand, he seems to see life and speak a language with nature that she can't understand.
Quote #6
"This sand is the oldest in the world," you said. "Even the land I sit on now has taken billions of years to form, worn down from the mountains."
"Mountains?"
"Once there was a range near here higher than the Andes. This is ancient land, sacred, it's seen everything there is to see." (13.49-51)
Ty doesn't just see the wilderness of Australia as a cool place to spend some time—he actually seems to see it as part of his heritage. The land has evolved and eroded to the point where it is today so he can live within it.
Quote #7
"The sand's like a womb," you said. "Warm and soft and safe."
You buried your other hand, too. Your shoulders relaxed, and your body went still […] After a few moments you slipped off your boots, and stuck your feet under the sand, too. With all your limbs buried in like that, it was as if the sand had sprouted you. (13.54-55)
Ty's analogy of the sand being a womb fits in an interesting way with his notion that the land can make Gemma into a new person. The image of him growing out of the sand seems to back this up, with the wilderness creating new life from below the surface.
Quote #8
For the first time, I wondered how you'd found that place. Were there really no other people anywhere? Was it really just us? Perhaps any explorers had given up halfway, or died. There was something astonishing about being able to survive in that land. It seemed more like another planet than earth. (18.6)
Gemma seems to grasp here that it's Ty's intimate knowledge of the land and love for it that makes it possible for him to survive. He's able to see below a surface of sand and emptiness to the life underneath and connect with it.
Quote #9
"The land wants you here. I want you here," you called. "Don't you care about that at all?" (69.34)
Ty's connection with the land is so tight that he can speak for what it wants—and in this case, it wants Gemma. Or maybe he does. Of course, there's the possibility that he's delusional and trying to make an excuse to keep her there, but as a human, he definitely seems to connect with the desert in a way that people typically can't.
Quote #10
"This is what I want to show you," you explained. "The beauty of this land. You need to see how you're a part of it." Your eyes were shining blue amid the orange. They seemed out of place, too, much like the sea. (76.3)
Ultimately, Ty's kidnapping plot seems to be for the purpose of showing Gemma that there's more to life than Josh, Ben, London, and her parents' meaningless jobs. The natural beauty he exposes her to leaves Gemma changed to the point where she longs for it even after she returns to her normal life.