Judith Wright (1915 – 2000)

Judith Arundell Wright was born on 31 May 1915, at Thalgarrah Station, near Armidale, New South Wales, the first of three children of Phillip Arundell Wright, pastoralist, and his wife Ethel Mabel Bigg Wright. The Wright family, of genteel English and Scottish ancestry, had been established as large-scale pastoral landowners in the New England region since the early nineteenth century, and the poet’s immediate family background was privileged and conservative. She was educated first at home, and developed solitary habits which intensified after the death of her mother in 1927. As a child she spent considerable time outdoors, and would later write about the important influence of the New England landscape on her early development. In 1928, she went to New England Girls’ Grammar School as a boarder. She struggled to fit in at school, becoming more withdrawn and isolated, but excelled in her studies, especially in English, and began to contemplate a career as a writer. Wright endured a setback in 1932, when a serious horse riding accident left her bedridden for months, so that she fell behind in her studies and was unable to matriculate to university. A legacy from her grandmother enabled her to attend university as a non-degree student, however, and in January 1934 she went to Sydney to enrol at the University of Sydney. Over the next three years she attended the University, reading widely and studying humanities and social sciences subjects. In 1937, with the last of her grandmother’s legacy, she went to Europe, visiting relatives and travelling in England and Scotland, and later travelling in Holland, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, where she witnessed the rise of Nazism and the approach of war first-hand, an experience which influenced her own increasingly leftwing views.

After returning to Australia in 1938, she found work at an advertising agency in Sydney, and began tentatively publishing poems in literary journals such as Australian National Review and Southerly. In 1942, with many men away at war, she returned to New England to help her father run the family properties. Wright’s return to her childhood home seems to have acted as a catalyst for her poetry, and she began regularly publishing her work in important national journals like the Bulletin and the newly-established Meanjin Papers. The Australian landscape, a central preoccupation in Wright’s work, was already an important theme in her early poems. In late 1943, Wright went to Brisbane, working as a clerk at the Universities Commission, and assisting the founding editor of Meanjin, Clem Christesen, with unpaid secretarial work. In Brisbane in 1945 she met Jack McKinney, who would become her partner and later husband. After Christesen and Meanjin moved to Melbourne in 1945, Wright remained in Brisbane with McKinney. Her first collection of poems, The Moving Image, was published by the Meanjin Press in 1946, and immediately announced her as an important new voice in Australian poetry. Her next collection, Woman to Man (1949), broke new ground in its depiction of aspects of women’s lives – desire and erotic experience, childbirth and pregnancy – which had rarely been broached by female poets in Australia to that point. The collection won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize for 1949, the first of Wright’s significant literary awards, and in the same year she was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship.

In the 1950s Wright settled with McKinney and their daughter Meredith (b. 1950) at Mount Tamborine, in Queensland’s Gold Coast hinterland. The couple began actively studying contemporary philosophy and even scientific and mathematical literature, and this wide reading and intellectual exchange brought a further depth and complexity to Wright’s poetry. She became particularly interested in examining the points of connection—language, myth, and so forth— between the human and the natural world, an interest reflected in her collections The Gateway (1952) and The Two Fires (1955), as well as in her search to express the a priori ‘language’ of the natural world itself. In this period, she became increasingly cognisant of and concerned about the long history of struggle and suffering endured by Aboriginal Australians since European settlement, fostered in particular by a close friendship with Queensland poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Wright henceforth became an active campaigner for Aboriginal rights. In 1959, she published her first significant volume of prose, a critical evaluation of her own settler heritage, The Generations of Men.

In the later 1950s and 1960s, Wright began to broaden her role as a writer and public intellectual beyond her poetry. She presented lectures and published literary and cultural criticism, including a collection of critical essays on Australian poetry, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), editing anthologies, including A Book of Australian Verse (1956, rev. ed. 1968), and New Land, New Language: An Anthology of Australian Verse (1957), and publishing and editing critical studies and selections of the work of Australian writers, including Charles Harpur (1963), Henry Lawson (1967), and John Shaw Neilson (1963, 1970). A selection of her lectures and public talks was published as Because I Was Invited (1975). She continued to write poems, publishing new collections Five Senses (1963) and The Other Half (1966), but she was also writing fiction, publishing two novels aimed at young readers, King of the Dingoes (1958) and Range the Mountains High (1962), the non-fiction children’s book Country Towns (1963), and a collection of short stories, The Nature of Love (1966). Her work continued to attract critical acclaim, and in 1964 she was awarded the prestigious Britannica-Australia Literary Award, followed in 1967 by the Poetry Society of Great Britain Award. From the early 1960s Wright became an active campaigner for the conservation movement, and she increasingly used her literary fame and public profile to aid environmentalist and social justice causes. Her role as an activist intensified after the death of Jack McKinney in 1966.

In 1971, Wright published her Collected Poems 1942–1970, which was awarded the Grace Leven Prize. In 1975, she moved to a property near Canberra, remaining in the area for the rest of her life. With her energies increasingly devoted to environmental and Aboriginal rights activism, her poetic output slowed, although she did publish new collections including Alive: Poems 1971–1972, and Fourth Quarter (1976). After the publication of Phantom Dwelling in 1985, Wright announced her retirement from poetry, in order to concentrate on the causes she was involved in, although selections of her work continued to be published, including A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (1990), and an extended edition of her Collected Poems (1942–1985) . Wright’s contribution to Australian literature continued to attract major honours, including the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry (1991), and the ASAL A.A. Phillips Award (1995). She was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Sydney (1976), Monash University (1977), Griffith University (1988) and the University of Melbourne (1988), and was declared an Australian National Living Treasure in 1997.

Judith Wright died at her home in Canberra on 25 June 2000. Her poetry, while generally locatable within the traditions of romantic poetry, brought a philosophical sophistication to the depiction of specifically Australian landscapes and communities. Her work broke new ground, transforming the romantic delineation of the Australian bush and the pioneer spirit which had previously dominated the bush verse tradition, moving towards a critical examination of the nature of belonging, a poetic questioning of the relationship between identity and place, and the nature of human relationships. She remains one of Australia’s best known and loved poets.

• The Moving Image: poems (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, [1960]).
• Birds: poems (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962).
• Judith Wright: selected poems (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963).
• Five Senses: Selected Poems (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963).
• The Other Half: poems (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1966).
• Judith Wright: collected poems, 1942–1970 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971).
• Alive: poems 1971–1972 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973).
• Fourth Quarter (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1976).
• The Double Tree: selected poems 1942–1976 (Boston, USA: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).
• Phantom Dwelling (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1985).
• Many Roads Meet Here (Adelaide: Dezsery Publications, 1985).
• Five Senses: selected poems (Canberra: [the author], 1989).
• A Human Pattern: selected poems (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1990).
• The Flame Tree (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1993).
• Collected Poems 1942–1985 (Pymble: Angus and Robertson, 1994).
• A human pattern: selected poems  (Sydney: ETT Imprint, 1996)
• Grace and other poems (Warners Bay, NSW: Picaro Press, 2009).

• Veronica Brady, ‘Judith Wright, Australia and the Politics of Place,’ Salt 17.1 (2003), pp. 216–29.
• Veronica Brady, ‘Judith Wright: The Politics of Poetics,’ Southerly 61.1 (2001), pp. 82–88.
• Veronica Brady, ‘Judith Wright (1915–2000),’ in Selina Samuels, ed., Australian Writers, 1915–1950 (Detroit, USA: Gale Research, 2002), pp. 416–28.
• Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright (Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 1998).
• Jennifer Bridge, ‘Landscape and Identity in Judith Wright’s Poetry: An Introduction,’ Australian Studies no. 4 (1990), pp. 1–19.
• David Brooks, ‘Judith Wright and the Image,’ in David Brooks and Brenda Walker, eds., Poetry and Gender: Statements and Essays in Australian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1989), pp. 93–104.
• Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney, eds., With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006).
• Sue King–Smith, ‘Ancestral Echoes: Spectres of the Past in Judith Wright’s Poetry,’ Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2007), pp. 117–29. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/313
• Elizabeth McMahon, ‘Judith Wright and the Temporality of Composition,’ Australian Literary Studies 23.2 (2007), pp. 15–26.
• Carolyn Masel and Michael Schmidt, ‘Judith Wright: A Written Interview,’ PN Review 19.1 (1992), pp. 311–30.
• Martin Mulligan, Yaso Nadarajah and Peter Phipps, eds., Local Global: Studies in Community Sustainability 3: Exploring the Legacy of Judith Wright (2007). http://www.communitysustainability.info/publications/local-global_v3.html
• Noel Rowe, ‘Just Poetry,’ in Bernadette Brennan, ed., Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2008), pp. 47–61.
• Gig Ryan, ‘Uncertain Possession: The Politics and Poetry of Judith Wright,’ Overland no.154 (1999), pp. 27–33.
• Jennifer Strauss, Judith Wright. Australian Writers (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Judith Wright, Because I was Invited (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975).
• Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999).
• Judith Wright, ‘Statements: Judith Wright,’ in David Brooks and Brenda Walker, eds., Poetry and Gender: Statements and Essays in Austrlalian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1989), pp. 70–71.
• Roger McDonald, ‘An Interview with Judith Wright.’ (Sydney: ABC, 1975). Sound cassette, 20 mins.
• Judith Wright Reads from Her Own Work, Poets on Record (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1973)