Judith Wright: Selected Writings

Judith Wright (1915–2000) is one of the best-known Australian poets of her generation. Born into a pioneering bush family, her commitments to environmental protection, history writing and obtaining recognition for First Nations people drew her in new directions and assumed a major role in her life. She was the first president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, a founder of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a member of the Aboriginal Treaty Commission.
This selection of her nonfiction, the first of its kind, brings together essays, speeches, family history, correspondence, memoir and criticism to reveal the personal and philosophical threads that bind together her work and life. It makes plain the shifts and transformations in her thinking, and the female friendships – in particular, with writer and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal – that opened her to new perspectives and connections.
This addition to the Australian Thinkers series shows what happens when a poet talks about a nation. It reveals a way of thinking about Australia – its land, history and culture – that draws on the best of human possibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781743822234

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Georgina Arnott

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, JUDITH Wright (1915–2000) was among a handful of Australian poets who became household names. Without the simultaneous expansion of Australian publishing and Australian content on education syllabuses, this may never have happened. Judith Wright, poetess, as she jokingly referred to her public self, became a canonical figure in the 1960s, with her work achieving significant sales in Australia and abroad, and regularly anthologised. She garnered the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1991, along with a string of prizes, fellowships and honorary degrees. In 1998 she was declared a National Living Treasure – recognition, two years before her passing, of her central place within Australian twentieth-century life.

In the quarter-century since, Wright’s contribution to public life beyond the world of poetry has become a subject of great interest. The reissue of her non-fiction, the publication of volumes of selected letters and biographical studies, and the inauguration of festivals and prizes in her honour all attest to this. If leveraging her literary profile to discuss threats to native wildflowers or halt drilling for oil in the Great Barrier Reef was a cause for criticism during her lifetime, increasingly it resembles a model that writers can look towards, and learn from. The so-called distinction between poetry and politics that Wright promoted in her early career, and which she spent many years wrestling with, has finally crumbled. For Wright, this dissolution began in the 1950s, when she became so acutely aware of threats to the environment; by the mid-1960s the best part of her days were taken up with activities to combat them. Poetry might have been an early and enduring love – and poems were still made in the twilight hours – but it became far from her only commitment. These commitments expanded such that by the age of fifty, her daughter, Meredith McKinney, later recalled, ‘she no longer felt herself to be primarily a poet’.¹

How to characterise what Wright was? What these commitments amounted to? Conservationist? Activist? Such labels reflect the great (unpaid) swathes of time, and mental energy, that she spent on ‘battles’, as she thought of them, to protect the environment and generate respect for the experiences, cultures and ambitions of First Nations Australians. She considered her roles as the inaugural president and co-founder of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, founding council member of the Australian Conservation Foundation and member of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee among the most important in her life.

Yet the writing of Australian colonial, pre-colonial and environmental history, as well as Wright’s literary criticism and poetry curatorship, are not captured by these labels. All helped shaped public conceptions of Australian history and culture. Might Wright be properly thought of as a public intellectual? ‘She would never have thought of herself like that,’ her half-sister, Pollyanne, said less than a decade after her death.² The title would have sounded rarefied, metropolitan, maybe even arrogant, to Wright’s ears.

Perhaps one reason it is hard to find the language for Wright’s life work is that her non-fiction has not been catalogued, arranged and narrated as her poetry has. Over more than half a century she generated a voluminous output of prose, amounting to somewhere between 600 and 800 articles, essays, speeches, reviews, lectures, conference papers, books, forewords, biographies, family histories and works of memoir. Added to this was a veritable literature of correspondence, a small sample of which is included here, representing another outlet for deep thought and engagement with the world.³ This book represents the first selection from that total output, and attempts to capture Wright’s contribution to Australian public life from World War II until her death at the turn of the millennium.

In this volume, perhaps more than any other in the Australian Thinkers series, the non-fiction category is a turnstile, ushering through such variety that the reader might wonder: to what end do we place, side by side, the introduction to an Oxford anthology of poetry, a Woman’s Day article, a letter to a daughter, a speech on land management and a slice of memoir? Was there any internal consistency to this output, a unifying thread? Wright’s body of work is distinguished, perhaps principally, by its range – in form, style, length, topic and even quality. It is hard to think of a compatriot writer who used the written word to such variety of effect. Over time, this versatility produced, in Wright’s best work, an agile prose style that moved nimbly from personal aside to scientific exposition to poetry. She wrote many eloquent pieces that were the product of multiple drafts and long periods of thinking and research. Numerous others, however, were utilitarian deployments of argument and fact. Some were speeches, meant only for airing to a particular audience on a particular day.

In short, we do well to consider each piece in the context of its unique ambitions. I have tried to briefly animate these in introductory notes. To bring a poet’s nuance and imaginative dexterity to the account of an environmental campaign, or a Native Title claim, was never Wright’s ambition. There was always another missive to be written – in fact, a great list of them – and her aim in such pieces was to communicate clearly to a wide audience. Even so, in those rushed articles and speeches, as in her thirteenth letter for the night, Wright was often a wordsmith: there are moments of language play and wit and articulations of thought that elevate, not simply by their meaning, but by their meaning being so precisely born. Her non-fiction shows that writerly craft is both infinitely versatile and infinitely valuable in allowing us to see things anew.

What we capture here, when we survey Judith Wright’s non-fiction, is the poet thinking through how Australia had arrived in this moment. Her writing was often focused on the knot of a problem, not uncommonly conceived of as a crisis – whether that was air pollution or nineteenth-century poetry. It tended to be shaped by the drive of an argument, marshalling evidence and anticipating counterpoints. Untangling the knot, she reached back into Australian and European deep history and into new developments in agriculture, linguistics, biology, quantum physics. There was always an urgency in her writing but, as the decades advanced, this was exacerbated by the sense that her years might not be enough to make the kind of contribution that would satisfy her ambitions. Like many great thinkers, age generated deeper knowledge and greater clarity. In Wright’s case, it also brought a sense of futility and pessimism as the environmental crisis worsened.

The aims of this selection are threefold. First, this book is intended to showcase the quality, range and dynamism of Wright’s non-fiction. No claims are made for representativeness – on form, topic or quality. I generally shied from the most hurried of her written thoughts, having had the sense that if she had done less, said ‘no’ more often, perhaps cared less deeply, she might have left a more polished and cohesive body of work. But the messiness itself is eloquent, in its way, for it was produced by the radicalism of a poet subverting language’s elevating capacity for its communicative force. These are important dimensions of Wright’s life and legacy, and so are not ignored here.

The second and third aims of selection exist in tension. This book aims to make visible the gradual evolution of thought that marked Wright’s life. Changing one’s mind – on everything from the nature of the British colonisation of Australia, the role of the environmental movement in land management, the merits of the Australian Labor Party and the value of loosely stylised poetry – is another aspect of Wright’s legacy that we might profitably contemplate today, when communication silos, social media and ‘us and them’ cultural politics make adjustment, compromise and reconsideration especially difficult.

As with any of us, these shifts were uncomfortable for Wright, and she did not always acknowledge, let alone embrace, them. There was an important biographical context to this. As a high-profile Queensland environmentalist in the 1960s and an advocate for Indigenous land rights in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations, anything that could be used to undermine her was – and a public confession of changing one’s mind was easily spun as hypocrisy. With time and distance, Wright’s reconsiderations make for a nuanced portrait of an Australian navigating competing truths against the backdrop of an Australian culture that was itself slowly deepening. Like the messiness, the evolutions reflect valuable, sometimes undervalued, intellectual characteristics: an openness to the world, constant thought and learning, logical consistency, courage.

The third aim is to prompt an understanding of Wright’s intellectual contribution so that we might better repurpose for the here and now her knowledge, experience and, crucially, those connections she made between disparate facts about our world; to learn from her anew. By collecting a diverse range of Wright’s writing, its defining outlines and concentric circles become clearer. What I see when I look at Wright’s body of work is a mind restless with questions about Australia’s colonial condition. The force of Wright’s analysis, and the state of the world, suggest these questions continue to matter. Capturing the progression in her thought is important, but so is illuminating the consistency of language, imagery and even style; to find the straight, still line through the movement.

[. . .]

Non-fiction came to mean different things for Wright. In the 1940s it was a vehicle to forge a career as a literary critic, the pinnacle of which came with the landmark Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965). As celebratory reviews of her debut poetry collection, The Moving Image (1946), mounted, Australian Books asked Wright to review a major new anthology of modern Australian verse. Commending that pioneering scholar of Australian literature, H.M. Green, for making landscapes from poems, she wrote like an established critic. Within the year, she was landscaping herself, as editor of Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poetry 1948; within the decade, she was editor of Oxford University Press’s A Book of Australian Verse (1956). In so very little time Wright had become a principal curator of Australian poetry, elevating and relegating poetic reputations formed over 150 years of British colonisation. But it was an awkward fit for a writer who abhorred the literary critic’s desire to shape a reader’s experience. In her Oxford anthology, she insisted that an anthology can act as a map does, showing the course of rivers and the positions of mountains; it was for the reader to choose where to go.

Becoming an anthologist meant contending with structural questions, such as why there were so few women poets. Wright’s mid-century anthologies were dominated by men. Years later, she told poet Rosemary Dobson that she had included as many poems by women as she dared. Remember, she wrote to Dobson in 1991, when poetry wasn’t supposed to be for women? Remember, she wrote, when they saw each other at a Sydney party (probably in the 1950s) given by Angus & Robertson editor Beatrice Davis, and agreed that poetry and babies came from the same place? She remembered the clear-water and white-wine joys of reading Dobson’s poems as they were delivered.⁴ As the pieces in ‘Women, Writing and Holding Life Together’ show, Wright had a complicated relationship with feminism when it exploded in Australia during the late 1960s, believing there were higher-order problems.

Nonetheless, Wright recognised the problems that being a woman caused a writer. For Wright, women held a grab-bag of responsibilities and emotional roles that in her review of Ruby Langford’s work she labelled holding life together. These responsibilities she registered with force at the age of twelve, when her mother died, as an extract from her memoir Half a Lifetime (1999) shows. Wright praised Langford for doing the holding in the toughest of circumstances. Wright’s letters to her friends in the 1950s and 1960s, when she was in the thick of mothering and housekeeping, convey the impact these had on her writing. By the 1980s, with fewer familial responsibilities, she contemplated in a letter to her daughter the strange experience of being a canonical woman poet in a country with so few of them – wheeled out for breakfast television and horseraces.

In the main, Wright made strong distinctions between poetry and politics during the 1940s and 1950s; between the act of writing and the social act of being a woman. Too often, anthologists of Australian verse included pieces whose interest is historical rather than immediately poetic, she felt.⁵ The best poetry had a universal quality, accessible to anyone, producible anywhere. This literary philosophy was bulwarked by her three years of Arts at the University of Sydney in the 1930s, where intellectual sophistication was marked by constant critique and displays of political, cultural and emotional detachment. It also aligned with her position on Australian party politics and notions of right and left during this period. By the 1950s, when communism was a divisive topic of public debate in Australia, Wright asserted her neutrality, telling Meanjin editor Clem Christesen: I do not regard the modern techniques of ‘charge and counter-charge’ and complicated political manoeuvring by whatever ‘side’ as likely to reach any solution to the world’s problems.⁶ Although she retained a scepticism towards political parties all her life, Wright would, with time, reluctantly accept that appealing to a voting mass was necessary when trying to solve the world’s problems.

The success of The Moving Image and her early critical career were built on years of writing and thinking.⁷ Together, these gave her the confidence to commit to writing fulltime. By 1948, Wright had resigned from her job as a statistician at the University of Queensland and moved to a small cottage on Tamborine Mountain, in the southern Queensland hinterland. Sparsely populated and somewhat inaccessible, the mountain offered space apart from society, to live simply and write. In Brisbane, Wright had met Jack McKinney, gardener by day and philosopher by night. She attributed the force of her early poetry, if not the form, to McKinney, such was the intensity of their bond. Life with McKinney presented challenges that Tamborine helped solve. He was twenty-three years her senior and married, though separated. On the mountain, Wright became Mrs McKinney, one half of a writing partnership. So began that time I remember as so happy.

In 1949, Wright commenced a biographical account of her pioneering family, with the support of a Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship, setting in motion a major theme of her non-fiction. Her grandfather’s diaries constituted the foreground, she recalled in her memoir, to those great pastoral movements (I would soon learn to call them invasions) which had, as the term was, ‘opened up’ the inland. But the family papers prompted questions too. It was not long before this ostensibly literary project took a historical turn, as Wright sifted through gap-ridden and partial records at the John Oxley Library in Brisbane. Soon I realised the magnitude of what I had undertaken . . . [W]hat I thought I knew . . . was increasingly contradicted.⁸ One year’s labour became two. Wright stitched together a work that blended the characteristics of fiction – dialogue, characterisation, vivid description – with broad historical currents and detail. Shortly after finishing, she gave birth to a daughter, Meredith McKinney (who as an adult would become a world-renowned translator of Japanese literature).

The Generations of Men (1959) not only had public impact, selling well once it was eventually published and energising an already burgeoning family-history movement, but it presented Wright with a set of concerns that were difficult to convey in poetry. Europeans who had settled in Australia were plunged suddenly, after centuries of growth inside traditions, into a totally new situation where traditions went ludicrously astray. We have to discover what has happened to us, she wrote in a London magazine in 1962.⁹ During the 1950s and 1960s, in a series of Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures, in essays and book chapters, she began asking new questions of Australian writers. How had the conditions of British migration and settlement shaped their inner lives and work? Was it possible for the poet to write from a still-foreign land, an upside-down hut? In the work of Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Barcroft Boake and John Shaw Neilson, she enquired how the poet’s task – to articulate their world – related to the historical contingency of that world. She meditated on the psychology of displacement. So often these ruminations would finish on an upbeat note. We are beginning to write, no longer as transplanted Europeans, nor as rootless men who reject the past and put their hopes only in the future, but as men with a present to be lived in and a past to nourish us, she wrote in her 1965 book Preoccupations in Australian Poetry.

[. . .]

A past to nourish us. Two years earlier, in ‘What It Means to Be a Descendant of Pioneers’, that prospect had already begun to look shaky. The essay was her first explicit enunciation of her role within a broader invasion history, published in the somewhat inapposite Hemisphere: an Asian-Australian Magazine. Part of the Australian government’s contribution to the Colombo Plan, Hemisphere was created to foster discussion between Asian students in Australia and Australian expatriates in Asia. For this Asian audience, the editor explained: ‘Judith Wright (Mrs J. W. McKinney) . . . has a deep affection for her country.’ He continued: ‘[H]er observation in the accompanying article that Australians may now be beginning to feel that they belong to this country rather than that the country belongs to them cannot be applied to her: she has always belonged to the country.’ Her pastoral family history made it so. In any number of publications during this period, from women’s magazines to literary journals, this pastoral background – and the somewhat mistaken perception that she was an uncritical bard of it – was the basis on which she was asked to speak about Australian culture.¹⁰

Indeed this pastoral family history, when she came to examine it in 1963, had a dizzying quality. For me, as a child, she wrote, the house where my grandmother lived, sixteen miles away, could be described in three words: absolute, important, authoritative. Wright’s grandmother May had fought against social expectations to build a pastoral empire. She embodied – in Wright’s childhood world – permanence, achieved as surely and organically as the season’s change. Who knows how far the ripples of her influence may travel, Wright had asked in The Generations of Men. And yet, now that she thought about it, there had been a time, not very long ago, when in fact none of these things had been there at all . . . what seemed to me so everlasting, so permanent, had all been planned. By contrast, the Aboriginal bora ring, testifying to an intricately rippled social order and sitting just ten miles from the house, had been there perhaps for many centuries. The logic of it defied her felt experience. Now she tried to consider what she vaguely knew: the epidemics, the spearings, the reprisals.¹¹

The turn towards a more critical interpretation of British colonisation in Wright’s non-fiction is marked by this 1963 piece; and the turn was profound, opening up new lines of enquiry (perhaps the motives behind Australia’s century-and-a-half of struggle . . . are worth a good deal of historical examination) and reformulating, again, the questions she asked of Australian writers and culture.

Today’s reader might be struck by a lexicon of newness, birth and origins in Wright’s early writing about Australia that seemed to brush aside its ancient and complex human history. In the titles New Land, New Language (1957) and ‘Poetry in a Young Country’ (1971), and in casual asides (a country without a past and a past to nourish us), the erasure of First Nations histories and experience was, in part, the deleterious effect of the headlong rush to identify a unique Australian language and culture, separate to Britain. The erasure was also the working of language itself, for in the same 1955 Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture in which she referred to a country without a past, she recalled its white invaders.¹² But certainly, the changing shape of the Australian mind in Wright’s oeuvre reflects the changing of her own mind.

In another article for Hemisphere, written in 1965, Wright retreated from her usual themes of exile and hope in Australian literature. Now her thoughts turned to economic and social structures. Few settlers came here in any Utopian mood . . . The settlement of this continent, in fact, has been to a large extent an exploitative adventure based rather on economic expansion than on the impulse to establish a free and creative community. She still allowed that George Wyndham, her first male Australian ancestor, had come in a utopian mood, as told to us in The Generations of Men, but the squattocracy of which he was part was undeniably a play for material advantage. Australia was riven by the unopposed ascendency of material and exploitative attitudes; this had distracted it from the deeper issues and made any art it produced audience-less.

The changing story of Australia, within Wright’s thinking, was seeded further back in time; perhaps in 1949, in the John Oxley Library, or in 1945, when she wrote ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’, or even in the childhood experience she relates in ‘You Can’t Play with Her. She’s Black’ (1983). But like most shifts of the mind, it was gradual. And it pivoted on intersecting questions and commitments. During the 1950s, Wright became friends with wildlife painter and author Kathleen McArthur, who introduced her to the vulnerability of Queensland wildflowers and coastal regions from her base in Caloundra, not far from Tamborine Mountain. Wright knew that in Australia, mining, drilling, pasturing and bulldozing were a fait accompli, unless they were fought against; from the 1920s, her pastoralist father, Phillip, had led a push to establish the New England National Park in their neighbourhood.

In 1962, Wright and McArthur formed the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, today the oldest conservation group in Australia, with Jacaranda Press publisher Brian Clouston (for whom Wright worked as a part-time poetry assessor) and scientist and author David Fleay. Their first meeting attracted 120 participants and voted Wright president, an office she held until 1976. During the 1960s they campaigned to stop limestone mining at Ellison Reef, off Innisfail; sand mining at Cooloola, in the Upper Noosa River; and oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef. These battles brought Wright up against utilitarian approaches to land in Queensland, galvanised by Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen between 1968 and 1987. As early as 1966, she was in conversation with ecologists Francis Ratcliffe and Leonard Webb about establishing a national body to coordinate and strengthen their campaigns. That same year, the Australian Conservation Foundation was launched, with Wright on its provisional council. The battles grew. They put the history of British occupation in a new light. Thus, she began her account of the Great Barrier Reef campaign, The Coral Battleground (1977), from the premise that James Cook’s Endeavour voyage – so nearly undone by its scrapes with the reef – exposed it to all the dangers of a civilisation that lives by exploiting everything in land and sea.¹³

By what authority did the poet declare it? My qualification for writing this book is that I . . . fought the battle for the Reef.

[. . .]

From the late 1960s, Wright began to write about conservation as a value system, a truth, a moral necessity – the kinds of things that a poet might reasonably be expected to know about. Conservation was a concept, she wrote in her first extended essay on the topic, published in 1968 in the literary journal Quadrant. Australia, that nightmarish realisation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fearful vision of man and nature divided; a place ruled by valueless technological innovation: ours, she wrote, half-knowing it was not. Scientists provided the conservation movement with knowledge and credibility, and their recruitment to the Wildlife Preservation Society was received as a lucky hit, she would recall in The Coral Battleground. But scientists could not stop conservationists being dismissed as anti-progressive visionaries, ratbags, cranks. The attacks raised questions that have no place in the laboratory. Conservation would not be achieved until the modern psyche grappled with self-knowledge and self-control. Our minds were harder to shift than the science, a truth illustrated by her 1968 diagnosis: at present we are vacillating wildly between the one extreme, where we look on ourselves as the triumphant conquerors of ‘nature’, and the other, where we lapse into despair and seem to have no future at all. At present, she wrote in 1968, as if this might have been about to change.¹⁴

How could these attitudes to nature be traced back to the moment of conquest? The family story illustrated it in ‘Trees and Australians’ (1970). Four generations of my forebears spent a lot of their time battling against Australian trees . . . the landscape is a mute tribute to that. Australia’s laissez faire land management showed it too. A history of private ownership without responsibility meant there were no easy answers: I have not wanted to imply that farmers, pastoralists and developers are the villains of the piece . . . the real problem lies in the system under which they operate, she wrote in ‘Conservation: Choice or Compulsion?’ (1975). These values, this system, Wright increasingly came to see, had its origins in a deep Pan-European history, which encompassed the emergence of agriculture: When the English settlement of convicts, warders and officials arrived on the eastern shore of Australia, they brought with them the inheritance of English law, which included the interesting notion of ‘waste land’ . . . it is against these very deep-seated revulsions that those who want to see the Wilderness continue to live have to battle.¹⁵

During the 1970s, these battles assumed a different quality in Wright’s life and changed the way she wrote about them. In 1966 she suffered the death of McKinney, becoming the single mother of a teenager. In writing a slim biography of Henry Lawson, published in 1967, she perhaps saw some similarities in the brilliance of their words and the tragedy of their fates, for McKinney’s work did not reach the audience she always believed it should.

With the 1972 election of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, Wright entered Canberra. Behind closed doors she was considered for the position of Australian governor-general.¹⁶ How different history might have been. Instead, she was appointed to the government panel of the first inquiry into Australia’s national estate. It was a momentous shift from lobbying government as president of the Wildlife Preservation Society. It was also a position for which Wright was uniquely qualified. Now her knowledge of Australia’s pastoral settlement history, its flora and fauna, and its mind, as well as of pastoralism itself, could provide a rich context for considering how Australia could protect and preserve its natural heritage. ‘The Loss of the National Estate’ (1976) carries in its tone the disappointment and alarm that followed the governor-general’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam, and the demise of the broad social agenda this entailed. Her claim that ‘balance’ was a word used by politicians to maintain the status quo has the clarity of birdsong more than fifty years later.

[. . .]

If shifts of the mind are generally gradual, there are times when chance events speed things up. In the early 1960s, Wright encountered the poetry of Kath Walker, an event from which four decades of consequence flowed. Walker was a Noonuccal woman, from Minjerribah, or North Stradbroke Island. In the late 1980s, while protesting the Bicentenary celebrations, she would change her name to Oodgeroo, which in Noonuccal language means ‘paperbark tree’. When Wright came across her poems as a reader for Jacaranda Press, finely honed conceptions of poetry came unstuck. Oodgeroo’s work, she recalled in a 1994 essay, carried verbal weaponry; merciless accusations: it blazed. But its directness, succinctness and overtly political message made her wonder: was it poetry?

For a writer who had lamented the celebration of poetry on grounds historic, rather than immediately poetic, Oodgeroo’s work represented a challenge. In ‘The Koori Voice: a New Literature’ (1973), she thought it through. Non-Indigenous Australians needed to listen to First Nations artistic expression, even if at the expense of our critical judgement about the way in which it is said. Why did they need to listen? By what authority did First Nations peoples write, if not the authority bestowed by poetry anthologies, publishing houses, universities? These bodies drew on conceptions of literature that had been broadly entwined with her own. Now she saw them as one element of the standards and acceptances of white society that functioned to maintain power. In ‘Colonialism and Criticism’ (1988), her thoughts crystallised: Dispossession and centuries of silencing have robbed the people . . . of their proper voices . . . to hell with critical standards.

Wright’s mind had come full circle. In the foreword to Because I Was Invited (1975), she acknowledged the whole bloody mess that thinking created: there will be some repetition, even perhaps some self-contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, she stated, invoking Walt Whitman. This volume treats contradiction (and even modest quantities of repetition) as an opportunity for witnessing the mental shifts that marked Wright’s life. Indeed, that 1975 collection of essays would produce yet more arguments and assertions from which she would later retreat. It was in ‘The Koori Voice: A New Literature’ that Wright first elaborated the place of First Nations peoples in contemporary Australia. The article contained the key assertion that the Aboriginal ‘problem’ is in truth really a white ‘problem’ – some of these problems she inadvertently demonstrated. By the end of her life, she would no longer assume that the reader was, like her, non-Indigenous; would not describe First Nations peoples as ‘crushed’ by colonialism, and would not use the terms ‘part’ and ‘full’ Aboriginal. She listened, she learnt: she changed her mind.

[. . .]

Wright later recalled that it was Oodgeroo who educated her about the realities of Aboriginal life. Once again, a shared bond of feeling and thought set her alight. This education made her more aware, and ashamed, of the gaps in The Generations of Men. In the late 1970s, Wright spent three years trying to fill them, reading, learning, making a small mountain from her notes.¹⁷ She wanted to reveal the experiences of the peoples who had been dispossessed by what she called the almost unchronicled pastoral migrations of Australia, migrations in which her ancestors had been leading participants.¹⁸ That research came together in The Cry for the Dead (1981). Not many writers could claim to have written a revisionist history of their own work.

This selection of Wright’s non-fiction contains a section from The Cry for the Dead that tells the story of Wright’s ancestors George and Margaret Wyndham’s migration northwards from Wonnarua land, a place they called the Hunter Valley. The Wyndhams claimed thousands of acres and established a pastoral dynasty across what would become two states. In The Generations of Men, the same story had been touched on enigmatically, in little detail. Now she brought to the family papers the context provided by archived colonial documentation. Alas, new gaps emerged. Here the poet exerted her imagination, tentatively, sketching life before 1788 and ‘behind the frontier’.

The problem of Australia could not be solved by poetry or history, by works of scholarship or even by the imagination. All this she knew from environmental campaigns. In 1978, H.C. (Nugget) Coombs, former chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, governor of the Reserve Bank and governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, gathered a group of high-profile non-Indigenous friends, including Wright, to establish the Aboriginal Treaty Committee (ATC). It would lobby the Australian government to forge a treaty with First Nations peoples. Wright and Coombs had become partners in life after they met in the early 1970s, though this fact was kept out of the public eye for fear it would undermine their work. Not long after the ATC disbanded, in 1983, Wright and Coombs wrote We Call for a Treaty (1985) to tell a history of First Nations resistance and how the ATC’s activities related to it. Though no treaty eventuated, Wright and Coombs reflected that the ATC had done much in its four years to supplement and inform the work of Aborigines themselves towards justice.¹⁹

If those years of battle drained her, Wright was rejuvenated by her contact with the natural world. In ‘Australia – Landscape Ancient and Modern’ (1984), she told the story of the nation through its land. At work was a mind seven decades into learning, reflecting, distilling. The result