Judith Wright was more than a poet. She was, as fellow poet Robert Gray exclaimed, “the conscience of the nation“, raising environmental and social issues with a voice filled with love and fury.
This is her story.
Born in 1915 on a wealthy pastoral farm set in the countryside of Armadale, New South Wales, Wright first experimented with poetry at the age of six to please her sickly mother, Edith.
Edith died when Wright was 12, and she moved to Queensland to live with a relative (sources claim either her aunt or grandmother), who would provide guidance and direct the eager teenager’s education. At 14, she was enrolled in her first school – New England Girls School. Such strict education, coupled with the dislocation she felt with her family after her father remarried, left Wright miserable. “(The) only thing I had to treasure was poetry and the knowledge that I was going to be a poet.”
After graduating, Wright was admitted to Sydney University in 1934. There, she pursued a knowledge of “…a useful insight into society and its mysterious failures and achievements”. She studied philosophy, history, psychology, and English, all without taking a degree.
Five years later, a shortage of manpower saw Wright return to her homestead to work for her father. Having been so unknowingly privileged and sheltered all her life, the experience turned out to be life changing. She developed a powerful bond with the land and its people; a love which would set the stage for her poetry, and activism.
“As the train panted up the foothills of the Moonbis and the haze of dust and eucalypt vapour dimmed the drought-stricken landscape, I found myself suddenly and sharply aware of it as ‘my country’. These hills and valleys were—not mine, but me; the threat of Japanese invasion hung over them as over me; I felt it under my own ribs. Whatever other blood I held, this was the country I loved and knew.”
The fear she felt for her land allowed her to empathise with the Aboriginal people who shared stories of their terrible past, at the time completely unknown to her.
The fortuitous life Wright had lived until now suddenly felt like a mark of shame. She travelled to Europe, where she worked as a clerk while continuing to explore her identity.
At age 29, Wright returned to Australia, and took a job as a statistician (a role she had no knowledge of or experience in) at the University of Queensland.
Two years later, Wright made her debut, with a collection of poems entitled The Moving Image.
Of our inheritance time and fear are made.
Promise and legend fail us and lose power.
Words are rubbed smooth and faceless as old coins
and any story is only word upon word.
Each of us, solitary on his tower,
speaks and dares not listen to what he has said
for fear it lose all meaning as it is heard,
turning to a strange language like the leaves of a flower,
to a question put in the babble of a bird.
–The Moving Image, Part III, Verse I.
The following year, she met and fell in love with novelist and philosopher Jack McKinney. The two moved to the quiet and secluded Mount Tamborine, where Wright gave birth to their daughter, Meredith.
Wright wrote most of her best work at this tropical abode, and quickly gained a passionate following and the respect of her peers. In the post-war years, Australia was in the process of defining its identity as something more than an arid British colony at the bottom of the world, and it was Wright who was giving this change a voice. Up until then, poetry had been a boys club. Not anymore.
It was during this period that Wright first began expanding her influence beyond the written word. Along with naturalists David Fleay and Kathleen McArthur, as well as architect Brian Clouston, Wright founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. It was one of the country’s first conservation movements. Wright reigned as President from 1964 to 1976, fighting for the protection of such iconic places as Cooloolah, Fraser Island, and the Great Barrier Reef. She would write to a friend, “If the Great Barrier Reef could think, it would fear us … Slowly but surely we are destroying those great water-gardens, lovely indeed as cherry boughs and flowers under the once clear sea”.
In 1964, Wright met definitive Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then known as Kath Walker), after being given the manuscript to her first collection of work. The intimate friendship they would share became integral to much of Wright’s later work.
McKinney died in 1966, the same year that Wright realised her first collection of short stories, entitled The Nature of Love.
Shortly after, she relocated to Braidwood in New South Wales, a small community where she focused on her most environmentally focused poems. It would be the land on which she lived the last three decades of her life.
To support her income, Wright wrote school plays and children’s books, and lectured part-time at several Australian Universities. In 1975, she collected her speeches and published them as Because I Was Invited.
The following year, Wright received the Christopher Brennan Award for a lifetime achievement in poetry, and was selected as a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an emeritus professor of the Literature Board of the Arts Council of Australia.
After slowly losing her hearing since her early 20s, Wright went completely deaf in 1992, but continued her work. Her last collection of poetry, The Flame Tree, was released in 1993.
How to live, I said, as the flame tree lives?
– to know what the flame tree knows: to be
prodigal of my life as that wild tree
and wear my passion so.
That lover’s knot of water and earth and sun,
that easy answer to the question baffling reason,
branches out of my heart, this sudden season.
I know what I would know.
How shall I thank you, who teach me how to wait
in quietness for the hour to ask or give:
to take and in taking bestow, in bestowing live:
in the loss of myself, to find?
This is the flame-tree; look how gloriously
That careless blossomer scatters, and more, and more.
What the earth takes of her, it will restore.
These are the thanks of lovers who share one mind.
–The Flame Tree.
Wright’s work was as important to her as her own identity, leading to her requesting that anything she’d written be removed from school syllabus. They were for a time, but being a constant favourite of teachers and students alike, they were soon returned.
In 1992, Wright was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and her Collected Poems book resulted in Wright receiving the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s poetry award.
Judith Wright died on June 25, 2000, but not before one last protest march in Canberra, at which she called for the reconciliation between the Aboriginal people and non-indigenous Australians.
“It’s very sad in a sense; with someone like Judith Wright, the spirit doesn’t die,” said Wright’s biographer, Dr Veronica Brady. She was right.
An expanded edition of her work, entitled Birds, was printed by the National Library of Australia in 2003. This was followed in 2007 by With Love and Fury, a collection of selected letters written by Wright in regards, primarily, to her support of the Aboriginal land rights movement. One particular letter to then-Prime Minister John Howard was deemed “almost brutal in its scorn”.
In 2001, the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts was opened in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, about an hour from where Wright had lived on Mount Tamborine.
The Australian Electoral Committee also acted to honour her, announcing a new federal electorate would be established in Queensland called Wright.
Judith Wright was a revolution unto herself. Not only did she define Australia’s identity at a time when the nation needed it most, but she brought to attention social and environmental issues that are as important today as they were 50 years ago.