WRIGHT, Judith (Arundell)

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Nationality: Australian. Born: Armidale, New South Wales, 31 May 1915. Education: Blackfriar Correspondence School, New South Wales; New England Girls School, Armidale; University of Sydney. Family: Married J.P. McKinney (died 1966); one daughter. Career: Secretary and clerk, 1938–42; clerk, Universities Commission, 1943–44; university statistician, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 1945–48. Commonwealth Literary Fund Lecturer, Australia, 1949, 1962; honors tutor in English, University of Queensland, 1967. Member, Australia Council, 1973–74. Awards: Grace Leven prize, 1950, 1972; Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship, 1964; Australia Britannica award, 1964; Australian Academy of the Humanities fellowship, 1970; Australian National University Creative Arts fellowship, 1974; Senior Writers fellowship, 1977; Fellowship of Australian Writers Robert Frost memorial award, 1977; Asan World prize, 1984. D.Litt.: University of Queensland, 1962; University of New England, Armidale, 1963; Sydney University, 1977; Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 1977; Australian National University, Canberra, 1981; Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, 1988; University of Melbourne, 1988; Premier's prize, New South Wales, 1987; The Queen's prize for poetry, 1992. Address: "Yven," Little River Road, Braidwood, New South Wales 2622, Australia. Died: 25 June 2000.

Publications

Poetry

The Moving Image. Melbourne, Meanjin Press, 1946.

Woman to Man. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1949.

The Gateway. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1953.

The Two Fires. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955.

Australian Bird Poems. Adelaide, Australian Letters, 1961.

Birds. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1962.

(Poems), selected and introduced by the author. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1963.

Five Senses: Selected Poems. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1963.

City Sunrise. Brisbane, Shapcott Press, 1964.

The Other Half. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1966.

Poetry from Australia: Pergamon Poets 6, with Randolph Stow and William Hart-Smith, edited by Howard Sergeant. Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1969.

Collected Poems 1942–1970. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1971.

Alive: Poems 1971–72. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1973.

Fourth Quarter and Other Poems. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1976; London, Angus and Robertson, 1977.

The Double Tree: Selected Poems 1942–1976. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1978.

Journeys, with others, edited by Fay Zwicky. Melbourne, Sisters, 1982.

Phantom Dwelling. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1985; London, Virago Press, 1986.

A Human Pattern (selected poems). Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1990; Manchester, Carcanet, 1992.

Collected Poems. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, and Manchester, Carcanet, 1994.

Recording: Judith Wright Reads from Her Own Work, University of Queensland Press, 1973.

Short Stories

The Nature of Love. Melbourne, Sun, 1966.

Other

Australian Poetry (lecture). Armidale, New South Wales, University of New England, 1955 (?).

King of the Dingoes (for children). Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1958; London, Angus and Robertson, 1959.

The Generations of Men. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1959.

The Day the Mountains Played (for children). Brisbane, Jacaranda Press, 1960; London, Angus and Robertson, 1963.

Range the Mountains High (for children). Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, and London, Angus and Robertson, 1962; revised edition, Lansdowne Press, 1971.

Country Towns (for children). Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1963; London, Oxford University Press, 1964.

Charles Harpur. Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1963; revised edition, Melbourne and London, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Shaw Neilson (biography and selected verse). Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1963.

Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne and London, Oxford University Press, 1965.

The River and the Road (for children). Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1966; London, Angus and Robertson, 1967; revised edition, Lansdowne Press, 1971.

Henry Lawson. Melbourne, London, and New York, Oxford University Press, 1967.

Conservation As an Emerging Concept. Sydney, Australian Conservation Foundation, 1970.

Because I Was Invited (essays). Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975; London, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Charles Harpur. Melbourne and London, Oxford University Press, 1977.

The Coral Battleground. Melbourne, Nelson, 1977.

The Cry for the Dead. Melbourne, Oxford, and New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.

We Call for a Treaty. Sydney, Collins/Fontana, 1985.

Born of the Conquerors (essays). Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991.

Going on Talking (essays). Springwood, New South Wales, Butterfly Books, 1992.

Editor, Australian Poetry 1948. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1949.

Editor, A Book of Australian Verse. Melbourne and London, Oxford University Press, 1956; revised edition, 1968.

Editor, New Land, New Language: An Anthology of Australian Verse. Melbourne and London, Oxford University Press, 1957.

Editor, with A.K. Thomson, The Poet's Pen. Brisbane, Jacaranda Press, 1965.

Editor, with Val Vallis, Witnesses of Spring: Unpublished Poems, by Shaw Neilson. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1970.

Editor, with others, Report of the National Estate. Canberra, Government Publishing Service, 1974.

Editor, with others, Reef, Rainforest, Mangroves, Man. Cairns, Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, 1980.

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Bibliography: Judith Wright: A Bibliography, Adelaide, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1968; Judith Wright by Shirley Walker, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Critical Studies: Focus on Judith Wright by W.N. Scott, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1967; Critical Essays on Judith Wright edited by A.K. Thomson, Brisbane, Jacaranda Press, 1968; Judith Wright by A.D. Hope, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975; Judith Wright: An Appreciation edited by N. Simms, Hamilton, New Zealand, Outrigger Press, 1976; The Poetry of Judith Wright: A Search for Unity, Melbourne, Arnold, 1980, and "The Cry for the Dead—Judith Wright and the Aborigines," in The Writer's Sense of the Past: Essays on Southeast Asian and Australian Literature, edited by Kirpal Singh, Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1987, both by Shirley Walker; "The Australianness of Judith Wright: Landscape: Metaphor and Analogy" by Anne Godschalk, in Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters (Amsterdam), 12(4), 1982; "The Poetry of Judith Wright: An Attempt at Interpretation" by Dilip Kumar Sen, in Journal of the Department of English (Calcutta), 18(1), 1982–83; "Judith Wright and the Colonial Experience" by Alur Janakiram, in The Colonial and the Neo-Colonial Encounters in Commonwealth Literature, edited by H.H. Anniah Gowda, Mysore, Prasaragana University, 1983; "Judith Wright's Most Famous Poem: An Explication" by Ralf Norman, in Three Lectures on Literature in English, edited by Roger D. Sell, Abo, Abo Akademie, 1983; "The Sense of Reality in Judith Wright's Poetry" by Maryvonne Nedeljkovic, in Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France), 8(2), spring 1986; "Another Side of Paradise: A.D. Hope and Judith Wright" by Fay Zwicky, in Southerly (Southerly, Australia), 48(1), March 1988; "Setting Her Signature on the Land: The Poetry of Judith Wright" by Nancy Potter, in Antipodes (Brooklyn, New York), 3(1), spring 1989; "Re-Reading Judith Wright" by John Salter, in New Literatures Review (Wollongong, NSW, Australia), 18, winter 1989; "Time and Change in Judith Wright" by Radharani Chakravarty, in Commonwealth Review (New Delhi), 2(1–2), 1990–91; "An Ecological Vision," in International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, edited by Robert L. Ross, New York, Garland, 1991, and "Place and Moral Commitment: Judith Wright and Christina Stead," in Perceiving Other Worlds, edited by Edwin Thumboo, Singapore, Times Academy, 1991, both by Bruce Bennett; "Ulysses in New England: A Tribute to Judith Wright" by Peter Skrzynecki, in Southerly (Southerly, Australia), 52(3), September 1992; "Within the Bounds of Feminine Sensibility? The Poetry of Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood, and Judith Wright" by Jennifer Strauss, in Still the Frame Holds: Essays on Women Poets and Writers, edited by Sheila Roberts and Yvonne Pacheco Tevis, San Bernardino, Borgo, 1993; "The Poetry of Judith Wright: Inventing Australia, Inventing the Self" by Nela Bureu, in Miscelanea (Saragossa, Spain), 16, 1995; "Judith Wright's Nature Poetry—The Problem of Living 'Through a Web of Language'" by Robert Zeller, in Antipodes (Austin, Texas), 12(1), June 1998.

Judith Wright commented:

The background of my work lies in my main life concerns, as an Australian whose family on both sides were early comers to a country that was one of the last to be settled by the whites and were from the beginning farmers and pastoralists. Brought up in a landscape once of extraordinary beauty, but despised by its settlers because of its unfamiliarity, I have I suppose been trying to expiate a deep sense of guilt over what we have done to the country, to its first inhabitants of all kinds, and are still and increasingly doing. This is one aspect of the sources of my work. I have never for long been an urban dweller, and the images I use and also my methods no doubt reflect my ties to the landscape I live in. I tend to use "traditional"—i.e., biological—rhythms more than free or new forms, which I see as better adapted to urban living and urban tensions and problems.

Another strong influence on my work has been my relationship with my husband, whose philosophical investigation of the sources and development of Western thought I shared in till his death. As a woman poet, the biological aspect of feminine experience has naturally been of importance in my work also. I expect my poetry is of a kind that no urban technological society will produce again, but I have tried to remain faithful to my own experience and outlook rather than engage in experimental verse for which it does not fit me.

Over the years since 1970 I have been increasingly concerned with questions of conservation and the situation of Australian Aborigines, and my participation in active organizations on both issues is reflected in my work during this time.

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Judith Wright, one of Australia's most distinguished and best-loved poets and an ardent conservationist, unites in her poetry a vision of wholeness, a synthesis of body, mind, and spirit that stands counter to the alienation of modern life. Ever aware of the "link between the decline of our inner and of our outer worlds," she continually seeks to forge this lost unity against "our decaying capacities for imagination, vision and creation," our separation from the natural world. In poems on untouched nature she pursues this quest to "name and know / beyond the flowers I gather / the one that does not wither— / the truth from which they grow" ("The Forest," Five Senses). Wright evokes the spontaneity of nature in the personification that takes place in "The Wattle-Tree" when the tree breaks "into the truth I had no voice to speak: / into a million images of the Sun, my God" (The Two Fires). She also credits this spontaneity to an earlier Australian poet, seeking like him to "live … fed on by unseen poetry … [and] give these heavy words away" ("For John Shaw Neilson," The Other Half). The search for the essence of a reality implicit in the everyday reaches an epiphany of loving communion with the landscape and its "ravelled shore" and "contours of dunes" when, in "Jet Flight over Derby,"

I lost my foreign words
and spoke in tongues like birds.

The desire to go beyond language resulted in a new form of expression in Phantom Dwelling. In "Brevity" Wright heralds a change to pared-down forms in the two concluding sections of the volume, confiding that "these days I don't draw / very deep breaths":

I used to love Keats, Blake.
Now I try haiku
for its honed brevities,
its inclusive silences.
 
Issa. Shiki. Buson. Bash
Few words and with no rhetoric.
Enclosed by silence
as is the thrush's call.

In the minimalist poems that follow Wright achieves her contact with that "unseen poetry," as in "Caddis-Fly" ("Small twilight helicopter") or "Fox" ("Fox, fox! / Behind him follows the crackle of his name").

But while nature, and in particular the landscape of the Australian bush, is a loved and constant subject of Wright's poetry, so too are human feelings and actions. Though rarely particularizing its subjects, her poems of human love can capture tenderness and wonder in their universal aspects, as in one of her best-known poems, "Woman to Man," a moving meditation on an unborn child:

This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.
This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.

The poetic control and precision of language in this and its companion poems counterpoise the two acts of creation, producing some of Wright's most successful work.

In "Bullocky" and "Brother and Sisters" Wright captures the world of the pioneers. In other poems, among them early "Nigger's Leap, New England" and "The Bora Ring," the spirits of the Aborigines haunt their land and its settlers, "the tribal story / lost in an alien tale." Those living in "Dark Ones" also haunt:

On the other side of the road
the dark ones stand.
Something leaks in our blood
like the ooze from a wound.

These "night ghosts of a land / only by day possessed," silently watching as "faces of pale stone" turn aside, and the association of the Aborigines with the land describe one of the other symptoms of alienation that Wright often confronts. In her poetry, as in her prose, she reminds white Australians that their refusal to acknowledge the Aborigines' spiritual rights to land lies at the heart of their own loss of contact with the natural world. Her own love of the "unseen poetry" of nature, and its significance as a creative, spiritual force, gives her particular respect for those who sustained and nurtured it as a spiritual force of their own.

It is appropriate that "Patterns," the final poem of Phantom Dwelling—the last of a sequence entitled "The Shadow of Fire (Ghazals)"—should bring together in a series of couplets the renewing and destructive forms of fire, Wright's recurrent image of the spirit. While the dual aspects have been opposed in earlier poems, here the emphasis is on reconciling these opposites. Even the "thousand suns" of nuclear explosion are contained in the Heraclitean philosophy of flux, itself not a stranger in her work:

All's fire, said Heraclitus; measures of it
kindle as others fade. All changes yet all's one.
 
We are born of ethereal fire and we return there.
Understand the Logos; reconcile opposing principles...
 
'Twisted are the hearts of men—dark powers possess them.
Burn the distant evildoer, the unseen sinner.'
 
That prayer to Agni, fire-god, cannot be prayed.
We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness.

Here the word (Logos) has been absorbed into the principle of reconciliation, as the poem balances light and dark, destruction and salvation, evil and good; fire is the "ethereal" source of life as well as the apocalypse. "Patterns" includes and transcends all of the earlier images of fire, that of the wattle tree, of the creative fire that derives from homely images ("Cleaning Day"), of the napalm of Vietnam, of "the contained argument of the bomb" ("The Precipice"). It is entirely consistent that Wright should forge the broken links of outer and inner worlds by combining these oppositions in a poem of Christian symbolism, classical philosophy, and modern science ("Strontium in the bones … is said to be 'a good conductor of electricity'") and in a form that is based on the Persian verse form of the ghazal. From a poet whose life work has been the definition of light and darkness, the fusion of the broken, this is a poem that brings the universe itself into an embracing and forgiving whole.

—Nan Bowman Albinski