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Judith Wright (1915-2000) |
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Prolific Australian poet, critic, and short-story writer, who published more than 56 volumes of poetry and short stories. Judith Wright, whose work was deeply rooted in the landscape of her native Australia, was an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. At the age of 85, just before her death, she attended in Canberra a march for reconciliation with Aboriginal people. Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk, Judith Arundell Wright was born near Armidale, New South
Wales, into an old and wealthy pastoral family. Wright
was raised on her family's sheep station. "The lives of the houses I
remember as a child centered round sheep, cattle and horses," she
recalled in an autobiographical fragment, "and much of my childhood was
spent on horseback behind mobs of sheep or Herefords (not wholly to my
own pleasure, since it was books I preferred); at any rate, the country
was deep in my bones, and I loved to look at it." ('Wright, Judith (Arundell),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 1571) After the death of her mother in 1927, Wright was educated under the supervision of her relatives. At the age of 14, after her father remarried, she was sent to New England Girls' Scool, where she found consolation in poetry, publishing in 1933 her first poem. In 1934 she entered Sydney University. Wright studied philosophy, history, psychology and English, without taking a degree. When Wright was in her 20s, she became progressively deaf.
Between the years 1937 and 1938, she travelled in Britain and Europe.
She then worked as a secretary-stenographer and clerk until 1944. From
1944 to 1948 she was a university statistician at the University of
Queensland, St. Lucia. At the age of 30 Wright met her lifelong
partner, the unorthodox self-taught philosopher J.P. McKinney, 23 years
her senior. Their marriage was happy, the union between two creative
minds. Officially they were married only a five years before McKinney
died. He was a writer, too. He had fought in World War I and published
a prize-winning novel, Crucible (1935), about a young Australian soldier on the Western Front. He wrote also a radio serial, The Noonan Family. Most
of Wright's poetry was written in the mountains of
southern Queensland. Her husband's thought was central to Wright's
poetry, but McKinney himself found little response to his
ideas in professional philosophical journals. After his death Wright
stopped publishing poetry for a period but channeled her energy into
activism. Protesting the policy of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland, Wright left her home state in the mid-1970s, and settled in a remote property (she called it 'Edge') near the heritage town of Braidwood, south of Canberra, where she wrote many of her later nature poems. Later in life she lived in a one-room flat in Canberra. At that time all her hearing was gone, and she suffered from poor eyesight and heart problems, but she led an active life, made new friends among local member of the Aboriginal Reconcilation movement, and gave occasional talks and poetry readings. During her career as a writer, Wright did not reject hack work, school plays for Australian Broadcasting Comission or children's books, as a means of livlihood. She lectured part-time at various Australian universities. In 1975 she published a collection of her addresses and speeches in Because I Was Invited. Wright was appointed a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an emeritus professor of the Literature Board of the Arts Council of Australia. Wright's memoir, Half a Lifetime (2000), covered her life until the 1960s. She wrote of her family affectionally in The Generations of Men (1959). Judith Wright died of a heart attack in Canberra on June 26, at the age of 85. Her ashes were scattered around the mountain cemetery of Tamborine Mountain. Wright had owned a strip of rainforest nearby, which she donated to the state so it could be preserved as a national park. Her daughter Meredith McKinney edited with Patricia Clarke a selection of letters by the author and Jack McKinney, entitled The Equal Heart and Mind (2004). Wright started to publish poems in the late 1930s in literary
journals, such as Sydney Morning Herald, Bulletin, and Meanjin
Papers. She made her debut in 1946 with The Moving Image, in
which she showed her technical excellence free from the burden of
fashionable trends. Most of the poems were written in wartime – in 'The Trains' Wright took the threat of the
war in the Pacific as her subject. The main theme was the poet's
awareness of time, death, and evil on a universal scale. With the
following collections Wright gained a reputation as a wholly new voice
in literature, with a distinctly female perspective. The title poem from Woman to Man (1949) dealt with the sexual act from a woman's point of view. 'The Maker' paralleled the creation of a poem and the creation of a child. Several of her early works such as 'Bullocky' and 'Woman to Man' became standard anthology pieces. Wright also wrote love poems to her husband. His death in 1966 and her increasing anxiety over the destruction of the natural environment introduced more pessimistic undercurrents in her work. Wright's lover for 25 years was Dr H.C. "Nugget" Coombs, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank, political adviser, and advocate for Aborigines. Coombs was trapped in an unhappy marriage and only close friends and family members knew of the relationship. Wright's
lyrical work was inspired by the various regions in
which she lived: New England, New South Wales, the subtropical
rainforests of Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, and the plains of the
southern highlands near Braidwood. "South of my days' circle, part of
my blood's country, / rises that tableland, high delicate outline". ('South of My Days,' The Moving Image: Poems by Judith Wright, Melbourne: The Meanjin Press, 1953, p. 28; first published in the Bulletin in 1945)
However, Wright did consider herself a "nature poet" – the natural
world, like in the poems
of Pablo Neruda, was the canvas to which she projected her relationship
to her country and the relationship between nature and humans. T.S. Eliot's influence can be seen in Phantom
Dwelling (1985); other poets that influenced her were Wallace
Stevens and W.B. Yeats. With MccKinney she shared an interest in Jung's theories. A new period in Wright's life started in the mid-1950s: "The
two threads of my life, the love of the land itself and the deep unease
over the fate of its original people, were beginning to twine together,
and the rest of my life would be influenced by that connection." (Half a Lifetime, edited by Patricia Clarke, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999, p. 284) In The
Two Faces (1955) she took Hiroshima as an example of man's power to
destroy even the cycles of nature. Wright's activism on conservation
issues led her to focus on the interaction between land and the
language. Realistically, she also expressed doubts about the power of
poetry to change the scheme of things. She started to see that her mission was to
find words and poetic forms to bridge the human experience and the
natural world, man and earth. Alienation from the land meant
for Wright crisis of the language. She criticized the education system
for failing to teach students the pleasures of poetry, and promoted the
reading and writing of poetry in schools. "I think one of the best
disciplines I know of, for young Australians brought up on a diet of
English poetry, is to study Chinese and Japanese poems," she adviced an
aspiring writer, Fiona Capp. (My Blood's Country: A Journey Through the Landscape that Inspired Judith Wright's Poetry by Fiona Capp, Crows Nest NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2010, p. 5) In the early 1960s, Wright helped to found Wildlife
Preservation Society of Queensland. The passionate poem 'Australia 1970'
expressed Wright's feelings of disappointment and anger, seeing
her wild country die. "For we are conquerors and self-poisoners / more
than scorpion or snake / and dying of the venoms that we make / even
while you die of us." Wright fought to conserve the Great
Barrier Reef, when its ecology was threatened by oil drilling, and
campaigned against sand mining on Fraser Island. A the time
she expressed her concern about the secrecy surrounding
the Australian Labor Party's uranium mining policy, she began to
believe that her mail was interceped. As Wright wrote in Born
of the Conquerors: Selected Essays
(1991), "our politicians now merely want to sell as much iron, coal and
uranium as possible from the still untamed north and west of the
continent, regardless of the wastelands which will follow. The concept
behind this ambition is of course still the same—the Wilderness must be
turned to account even if in the process it becomes an even more
unproductive Waste". (Ibid., p. 23) "I am born of the conquerors, you of the persecuted," Wright said in 'Two Dreamtimes' (1973). While firmly believing that humankind is on the wrong path, she saw poetry as a tool to promote awakening and healing. "Old man, go easy with me. / The truth I am trying to tell is a kind of waterhole / never dried in any drought." (from 'Unknown Water,' Collected Poems, p. 111; first published in The Gateway, 1953) The Coral Battleground (1977) was her account of the campaign to protect the "great water-gardens". In The Cry for the Dead (1981) Wright examined the treatment of Aborigines and destruction of the environment by settlers in Central Queensland from the 1840s to the 1920s. In 1991 she resigned as patron of the Wildlife Preservation Society because of its failure to support Aboriginal land rights. As
a literary critic Wright enjoyed a high reputation, and
edited several collections of Australian verse. She was a friend of the
Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly known as Kath Walker),
whose work Wright helped to get
published. Her poems were sent to Wright
by her Brisbane publisher, Jacaranda Press, in the early 1960s, when
Wright worked there as a part-time reader. "We want hope, not racialism, /
Brotherhood, not ostracism, / Black advance, not white ascendance: /
Make us equals, not dependents." (Oodgeroo Noonuccal in 'Aboriginal Charter of Rights,' My People: A Kath Walker Collection, Milton, Queensland: Jacaranda, 1970, p. 36) Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965) was Wright's pioneering effort to reread such early Australian poets as Charles Harpur, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Henry Kendall. Wright received several awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1950), the Australia-Britannica Award (1964), the Robert Frost Memorial Award (1977), the Australian World Prize (1984), the Queen's Medal for Poetry (1992). She had honorary degrees from several universities. In 1973-74 she was a member of the Australia Council. For further reading: The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry, edited by Ann Vickery and Philip Mead (2026); 'High Delicate Outline: The Poetry of Judith Wright' by Nicholas Birns, in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, edited by Ann Vickery (2024); Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing, edited by Devaleena Das, Sanjukta Dasgupta (2017); The Unknown Judith Wright by Georgina Arnott (2016); My Blood's Country: A Journey Through the Landscape that Inspired Judith Wright's Poetry by Fiona Capp (2010); 'Singing up Country in the Poetry of Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda' by S. Cooke, in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 23, Numb. 4 (2008); 'Two Dreamtimes: Representation of Indigeneity in the Work of Australian Poet Judith Wright and Canadian Artist Emily Carr', in Kunapipi, Volume 26, Issue 2 (2004); South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright by Veronica Brady (1998); Bridgings: Readings in Australian Women's Poetry by Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden (1996); Judith Wright by Jennifer Strauss (1995); Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wright's Poetry by Shirley Walker (1991); The Poetry of Judith Wright by Shirley Walker (1980); Critical Essays on Judith Wright, ed. by A.K. Thomson (1968) Selected works:
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