Wright, Judith (1915–2000)

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Wright, Judith (1915–2000)

Australian writer, conservationist, and campaigner for Aboriginal rights, who is considered the doyenne of Australia's women poets . Born Judith Arundell Wright on May 31, 1915, in Armidale, New South Wales (NSW), Australia; died of a heart attack on June 26 (some sources cite June 25), 2000, in Canberra; daughter of Phillip Arundell Wright (a pastoralist and businessman) and Ethel (Bigg) Wright; had two brothers Bruce (b. 1917) and Peter (b. 1919); educated at the New England Girls School, 1929–33, and University of Sydney, 1934–36, as a non-matriculating student in English honors; married Jack McKinney, 1944 (died 1966 or 1967); children: one daughter, Meredith McKinney (b. April 21, 1950).

Moved to Tambourine Mountain in Queensland (1948); awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund Scholarship to write a novel and the Grace Leven Poetry prize (1949); edited a book of Australian verse and gave Commonwealth Literary Fund Lectures at the University of Queensland (1956); co-founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ, 1962) and held the post of president (1962–76); awarded honorary doctorates from the University of New England and the University of Queensland (1963); given the Encyclopaedia Britannica award (1964); appointed a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (1970); granted an Australian National University creative fellowship (1973); appointed a member of the Commonwealth Government Committee of Enquiry into the National Estate (1973); awarded a Creative Arts fellowship from the Australian NationalUniversity and appointed to the University Council (1974); awarded the Robert Frost Medallion of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (1975); awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Sydney and an ANZAC fellowship to visit New Zealand (1976); awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Monash University and a Senior Writer's fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council (1977); awarded the Order of Golden Ark: Degree of Ridder (1980); became an honorary life member of the Australian Conservation Foundation (1981); awarded the ASAN World Prize for Poetry (1984); lived in Braidwood, NSW.

Selected works:

The Moving Image (1946); Woman to Man (1949); The Gateway (1953); The Two Fires (1955); The Generations of Men (history, 1959); Australian Bird Poems (1961); Birds (1962); Judith Wright (1963); Five Senses (1963); City Sunrise (1964); The Nature of Love (short stories, 1966); The Other Half (1966); Collected Poems, 1942–1970 (1971); Alive (1973); Because I Was Invited (1975); Fourth Quarter and Other Poems (1976); The Coral Battleground (1977); The Double Tree: Selected Poems, 1942–1976 (1978); Reef, Rainforest, Mangroves, Man (1980); Phantom Dwelling (1985); We Call for a Treaty (1985); A Human Pattern (1990); as well as various children's books and literary criticism.

Both the work and activism of Judith Wright, who is considered one of Australia's greatest poets, were marked by her relationship with her country's landscapes, from the bush and farming land to the rainforests of Queensland. While these settings were perhaps intrinsically linked to her poetic development, it was also via the land, which she sought to protect as a conservationist, that she came to her support for Aboriginal rights, penning lines like: "Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers/and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?" On her death in 2000, fellow poet Robert Gray spoke the thoughts of many when he called Wright "the conscience of this country."

She was born Judith Arundell Wright during 1915 in Armidale, New South Wales (NSW), into a family which still maintains a strong presence in the district. From the time of their move to Australia in 1828, her ancestors were pastoralists and landowners in this fertile area; she would later say of them: "They were those who chose to adapt themselves to the new environment rather than superimpose their class values of Englishness upon it." Wright lived with her family on a remote sheep and cattle station, "Wollomombi," and her enduring connection with the Australian landscape was encouraged early. In the introduction to The Double Tree (1978), she would write that it was her father, a wealthy pastoralist, who "taught me to look at the country with seeing eyes."

Her mother encouraged the children to work outside, establishing in Wright a love and respect for the work of her family, and encouraged her daughter's poetic tastes by reading to her children from classic English and Australian poets—Tennyson, Burns, Shelley, Henry Lawson, and A.B. Patterson. Wright's grandmother, May , recited nursery rhymes to the children, and Wright would later acknowledge that she was never able to write successfully without such rhythm.

Although she had two younger brothers, Wright led a solitary youth. The station, now the home of the University of New England, is still sparsely, though diversely populated. While Wright's biographer Bill Scott has noted that she started composing poems as soon as she could put pen to paper, the young Wright was not confined to study. Her father believed in the freedom of youth and let his children range over the property, doing as they wished, an experience Wright found "confidence producing."

Her mother died when Judith was 12 as a result of the 1919 influenza pandemic. Wright was educated by governesses, not an uncommon practice for families living on the land, especially due to the availability of correspondence courses by the New South Wales department of education. Writer Alec Derwent Hope maintains that this was a fortunate arrangement for Wright. As a member of a literate family, she was encouraged to read and—without the time constraints of school attendance—was able to follow her own interests. The children were taught in the morning, leaving the rest of the day for reading, then roaming on foot or horseback (Wright was riding by age two). Particularly lonely after her mother's death, Wright visited with the nearest girl of her own age, a cousin who lived about 20 miles away. Often they rode and met halfway, sharing lunch and talk before their rides back home.

Following her father's remarriage, at age 14 Wright was sent to boarding school at the New England Girls School in Armidale (the area around Armidale is known as New England). She was by this time already a published writer, having had six letters and six poems published in the Sydney Mail sometime between 1927 and 1929. In Armidale, her work was published in the school's Chronicle. Wright, however, was "miserable" by her own account, later noting that the "only thing I had to treasure was poetry and the knowledge that I was going to be a poet." If this desire deviated from the path her family might have laid out for her, Wright was not to be deterred. Her biographer Veronica Brady would later note: "She was born into a pastoral family who expected her to become a grazier's wife and just bear children, but she was determined to become a writer. She was a woman who simply went her own way. Nobody was going to stop her and she did what she wanted to." Away from her own family of strong personalities and ideas, she could not have been accustomed to the regimentation imposed by school life. One positive influence at the time was an English teacher who fostered her interest in, and talent for, poetic composition.

From 1934 to 1936, Wright followed an unconventional course of study at the University of Sydney, where she did not enroll in classes for any particular degree, despite the university's disapproval of such a choice. Rather, she studied in a wide range of areas. She read widely in English, participating in the Honors stream under Professor Waldock, and sources indicate that she learned French and Italian independently and read poetry in these languages. Her further studies included anthropology, in order to gain greater understanding of the native Aboriginals of Australia; philosophy and psychology, because of an interest in people's motives, thoughts and emotions; and history with particular emphasis on Oriental history (under Professor Salder who entertained a number of students at his home). Wright's reading was directed by the Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound who along with modernist poet T.S. Eliot impacted her work (although A.D. Hope would note them to be ambiguous influences). Wright would take her dislike of academics ("ackers")—for their inclination to anatomize poetry—into later life. Jim McIlroy would note: "Wright was critical of the way poetry was taught in schools, but like so many others I recall Judith's poems as the soul of Australian poetry from my school days."

Scott maintains that a more formal university training would not have been much use to Wright,

who by this age not only was determined to be a writer but also possessed a clear sense of the sort of writer she would be. Wright would later remark that she had hoped her diverse studies "might offer a useful insight into society and its mysterious failures and achievements." While at the university, she was involved with the student newspaper Honi Soit, a publication which still serves as an early stomping ground for Australian writers.

What the hell are people doing, and why are they doing it?
—Judith Wright

Following her time at the University of Sydney, Wright embarked on a year's travel in Europe with a cousin, a not uncommon choice for young people of families able to fund such expeditions. Nonetheless, she had little money with which to manage day to day. With her cousin, she took walking tours in Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Scotland, feeling a personal connection to the latter, as Rob Roy (immortalized in the novel by Sir Walter Scott) was related through family tradition (the Wright family was part of the Macgregor clan). Whereas many young Australian writers undertook such journeys as apprenticeship to English literary culture, creating almost a literary genre in Australia of the expatriate, Wright was not subject to the same influences, and her admiration for the European landscape seems to have only intensified the poet's connection with her own native land. Likely reminded of home, she was much taken with Hungary's wide plains, brown summer grass and grazing herds of horses. The country also provided a safe haven after the nervousness of events in Germany and Austria; Wright had witnessed one of Hitler's Nuremberg rallies and had her first experience with what she termed "the military-industrial complex." Additional travels included Switzerland and France, and she also stayed with a relative for a few months on a tea plantation in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

After her return from Europe, knowing that she had to support herself, Wright enrolled in a secretarial course for six months. She took positions in commercial firms at various office jobs, invariably choosing employment that would allow her to put in overtime, though she deplored the work. She would work in a position until she could fund a period of writing; when the money ran out, she would take up a new position. Wright also worked as an assistant to the professor of geography at the University of Sydney who undertook some field work on the Wright property with respect to soil erosion.

With the outbreak of World War II, Wright returned to help run the family station in her brothers' absence. The return was a defining moment in her life:

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.

Here, she heard from the older workers on her family's property of the part the pioneers had played in violently dispossessing the Aboriginal people. Wright took the crimes of her fathers onto her own back, and would bear what she likely regarded as her own responsibility through her writings and activism. She would write in the Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar in 1981: "The love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion have become part of me."

In 1943, she took up a newly created post at the University of Queensland, in the Universities Commission as a statistician. At this time, she established contact with C.B. Christensen, editor of Meanijin. Wright spent much time helping Christensen with various aspects of the magazine, and it was to become one of the most influential and respected literary periodicals in Australia, a status it has held to the present. In 1943 or early 1944, at Christensen's home, Wright met Jack McKinney, a philosopher who was 23 years her senior. They married in 1944 and would have a daughter Meredith McKinney five years later. Wright told Glover that it was Jack who gave her hope and enabled her to become a poet.

Christensen was not only influential in Wright's personal life. He was responsible for the publication in 1946 of her first volume of poetry The Moving Image. Writes A.D. Hope, this book "marked a dividing line and an important change in Australian poetry and in Australian life." The work included "South of My Day's Circle," which would count among Wright's well-known poems. The year The Moving Image was published brought the beginnings of her next project when she read the 25 diaries of her grandfather Albert Wright. The resulting work, the three-part The Generations of Men, was a history of her family on the land in New South Wales and would be published in 1959.

In 1948, Wright moved to Mount Tambourine in Queensland, a remarkably beautiful area covered in rainforests. Her second published book, Woman to Man, appeared the following year. Later in her career, she would grow tired of comparisons between her new works and her acclaimed early efforts: "I had turned away from the simple nationalistic poems of the 1940s and was entering fields where no one wanted to follow."

In addition to poetry, Wright authored fiction and literary essays. Over the years, her work was to address the issues of the day, including subjects like the Vietnam War, as well as ecological causes and the fight for Aboriginal rights. Notes Brady: "Her poems were not descriptive eulogies of nature or heritage buildings, but took sides and put the blame for neglect, ignorance or destruction where it belonged." She was a conservationist before the word was even in common parlance in Australia. Co-founder of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1962, Wright served as president until she moved to Mongarlowe Near Braidwood in NSW during 1976. Her 1977 work The Coral Battleground addressed the issues regarding the Great Barrier Reef. "If the Great Barrier Reef could think, it would fear us," she wrote to a friend. "Slowly but surely we are destroying those great water-gardens, lovely indeed as cherry boughs and flowers under the once clear sea."

Wright's husband died in 1966 (some sources cite 1967). Her energies turned from writing poetry to promoting poetry in the schools, and to protest for the causes she believed passionately in, including the land rights of Aboriginals. She was good friends with Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker ), to whom Wright wrote: "I am born of the conquerors,/ you of the persecuted." After Wright's death, Joan Williams would write in The Guardian: "To the end she refused to give up and continued her public commitment to reconciliation with the indigenous people by leading the historic walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which could be seen as endorsement of her efforts over three decades for Aboriginal land rights, a Makarrata (treaty), preservation of our indigenous heritage and reconciliation."

In the month before her death, Wright, by now a deaf woman in her mid-80s, made another public appearance when her friend, poet Barbara Blackman , presented a portrait of Wright's family to the National Portrait Gallery. She had stopped writing poetry at age 70, going on to tell Richard Glover that poetry requires emotional energy, that it is a compulsion that springs from physical passions which she no longer felt. "I've also stopped," she continued, "because … [t]he fact of the matter is that the world is in such a bloody awful state that I cannot find words for it."

She died of a heart attack in June 2000, having been twice nominated for a Nobel Prize. Australia's Judith Wright Prize, valued at $10,000, was created with funds from private benefactors to honor the poet's life, poetry, and convictions.

sources:

Glover, Richard. "World Without Words," in Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend supplement, June 26, 1993, pp. 34–39.

Hope, Alec Derwent. Judith Wright. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Scott, Bill. Focus on Judith Wright. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1967.

Strauss, Jennifer. Judith Wright. "Oxford Australian Writers series." Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Walker, Shirley. Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wright's Poetry. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991.

Williams, Joan. "Judith Wright," in The Guardian. July 5, 2000.

"Wright, Judith," in The Australian Encyclopedia. Vol 11. 4th ed. Sydney: Grolier Society of Australia, 1983.

collections:

Extensive archival material including book reviews, biographical clippings, personal papers, letters and photographs held at the National Library of Australia.