by Fiona Capp
In her early to middle phase, when she was in the first flush of love and more intent on celebrating life than thinking deeply about death, Judith often invoked death as an abstract state of non-being, the necessary darkness out of which life springs, part of an on-going cycle. Later, the idea of death served as an occasion to reflect, in a very Buddhist fashion, on how fiercely we cling to notions of ‘self’ or the ‘I’ and thus live in terror of our own end. But as her husband, Jack, grew more fragile in the years before his death, Judith once again became preoccupied with death as a pressing reality.
After his death, at her most despairing, she felt that ‘since through you I lived / I begin to die’. If she believed in any form of immortality, it was in the afterlife of his work. In her elegy, ‘The Vision’, she celebrated Jack’s life’s work as a philosopher and presented his death as a kind of apotheosis in which he achieved the absolute truth he had always sought. Two decades later, as her generation was dying and she was facing up to her own death, her thoughts about it were less exalted, more earthy. Life and death were defined by the flow and transformation of energy. Each individual life was a kind of pathway along which energy flowed. Each followed ‘unguessable routes’ but all ended at the same point: ‘like the wood on the fire, / the wine in the belly.’ This, in the end, was what her observations of the natural world had taught her.
New England
ONE
Train Journey
A few hours out of Newcastle, I began looking for signs: outcrops of rocky granite, the bones of an ancient land poking through the surface, the earth splitting open in mighty gorges. ‘Clean, lean, hungry country.’ There must be a moment, I thought, when you sense that you have entered the New England Tablelands, when the elevation is such that there’s no mistaking it: you’re in the highest part of the whole country after the Southern Alps. I had inhabited this terrain in my head for thirty years, surely I would know when we had arrived there. ‘High delicate outline / of bony slopes wincing under the winter.’
The Hunter River valley undulated lazily until, as we approached Muswellbrook, the land began to shrug its shoulders more often. Only after Scone did these individual hills begin to coalesce into a rolling upland. Small rocky outcrops appeared as the hills grew sharper with substantial eucalypts on the upper slopes, the lower cleared for pasture. The climb, however, was gradual and it was hard to believe that we had reached any great height. I kept willing the landscape to be more dramatic, more like a mountain range. Explorer John Oxley, who had viewed the tableland from the coast, had a similar problem when he ascended the plateau from the west in 1818: how to reconcile his vision of a Great Escarpment—as seen from the coast—with the reality of gentle inland slopes and the upside-down world of the plateaux he discovered.
Slowly, the hills started to gather, hill after hill crowding in to create the impression of a spine, if not a range. Even so, I still felt removed, like a spectator watching it all roll by on a film. This was not my landscape but, having absorbed it through Judith’s many poems about New England, I felt that I knew it. And now I was waiting for that flash of recognition when the imagined and the real would come together. ‘There it is!’ I would say. ‘The harsh scarp of the tableland, just as I had imagined it.’
In the seat opposite, my old school friend Cheryl was reading from Judith’s Collected Poems. Almost thirty years before, Cheryl and I had sat in a large auditorium in East Melbourne listening to Judith give the formal address at our final year speech night. I asked Cheryl whether she remembered much about that night and, in particular, what Judith had talked about.
She laughed sheepishly, ‘Not really.’
‘Neither do I.’
All I knew (prompted by an article I’d written for the school magazine) was that she’d talked about the dispute at Noonkanbah with the Year 12 Literature class a few weeks before. Cheryl and I agreed that the topic would have probably been this issue, or the environment, or both. It was understandable that Cheryl struggled to remember. For her, Judith had been just another public figure doing what guest speakers do. But I had no excuse for drawing a blank.
I was the one who was supposed to be mad on her poetry. What’s more, I’d had dinner with her only hours before she addressed the school, and ought to have been more alert. Dinner had been a small affair in the principal’s house next door to the school. As I took my seat, I glanced nervously across at Judith, afraid to open my mouth yet longing to say something that might impress her. If she felt the strain of making conversation, she did not show it. While the occasion seemed to demand high seriousness, her impulse was to use dry humour to lighten the mood and avoid topics that were too complex or controversial to be reduced to dinner-party chat. To one of my earnest questions she gave a knowing half-laugh, half-sigh. ‘Ah, yes, well, that’s a big one, isn’t it?’
Later that evening, as she addressed the whole school, I struggled to reconcile the detached, unemotional demeanour of the white-haired woman up there on the podium with the passionate, lyrical intensity of her poetry. Progressive hearing loss had affected the tone of her voice and I worried that people would find her speech a bit dry, her voice lacking in inflection, her manner gruff. What she was saying made the audience uncomfortable, that much I do remember. She wouldn’t let anyone off the hook. I sat there willing them to warm to her, to understand that to be a great poet you did not have to be a great performer; that it was the words that mattered not their delivery. Maybe this is why I took in little of what she actually said. I was too busy fretting over the discrepancy between the poet and her poems. Too busy wanting people to appreciate the importance of her presence.
I wasn’t aware, then, how the principal, John Shilliday, had stuck his neck out by asking Judith to give the address that night. His instincts were, as it turned out, more progressive than those of many parents who later made it clear they did not approve of his choice. Judith had warned him, when he asked her to come, that she wanted to talk about the work of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee. She suspected, however, that it might be too controversial for an occasion where parents, in her experience, tended to prefer something ‘bland and unchallenging’. But, if he were willing to take the risk that her speech may be regarded as ‘fire-raising’ and ‘indoctrination of the young’ she would do it. Afterwards, she mentioned the occasion in a letter to Meredith. In typical fashion, she described herself as the ‘human sacrifice’. She thought it went well enough: ‘A huge important audience of parents as well as girls, song, dance, prayer and all the fixings, and at least I put the story over, so maybe it is not all wasted.’
Sitting on the train as it climbed the imperceptible slope of the New England plateau, I could still see Judith on the stage, could still hear her gravelly voice. The words were gone but they were not wasted. Soon after, the train slipped into a long, dark tunnel and, when we came out the other side, it seemed that we were no longer looking at the hills from a distance but were finally amongst them. Even the sky felt closer. Gigantic cumulus hovered over hills dotted with outcrops of granite. To my surprise, the higher we climbed, the more heavily grazed and cleared the land seemed to become. And the more frequent the white skeletons of trees. Whole paddocks like graveyards. I knew from her juvenile poetry that Judith had been haunted by dead trees since childhood. In her memoir, she reflected on the sight I was now witnessing. Perhaps, she wrote, these dead trees had lost the will to live after what the pastoralists had done to the land. ‘They may have given up trying to return and are dying, or dying back, as we call it.’
Since the 1950s, millions of eucalypts have died in the lower parts of central and southern New England because of pasture improvement methods which have led to increased numbers of defoliating insects. When Judith wrote ‘Train Journey’—a homecoming poem in which she is returning to New England to visit her family—she may have witnessed the beginnings of dieback. The ‘small trees on their uncoloured slope’ that flash by her train window are not dead but you sense that th
ey are struggling. Like poetry, they are ‘articulate and sharp’. She urges the trees to hold on, to extract all they can from the rocky earth, in the same way that poetry brings the ‘unliving’ to life through language. The urgency of the poem is a measure of the helplessness she felt. She had no control over what was done to the land she loved—only her brothers inherited the family properties. All she could offer were her words. As she wrote in another poem from this early to middle period called ‘Eroded Hills’: ‘When the last leaf and bird go / let my thoughts stand like trees here.’
The train climbed higher, beyond Walcha Road, and I noticed that even the tops of the hills were now cleared for grazing and the hillsides looked more thinly clothed. Yet hard as I searched for the landscape I had conjured out of words on the page, the one I had inhabited all these years while reading her poetry, the difficulty— perhaps the impossibility—of finding it was beginning to dawn on me. Poet and critic Jennifer Strauss has remarked that especially in her earlier poems, Judith often seems to be ‘yearning for the moment of infinity when parallel lines will meet without trace of separation.’ The parallel lines of nature, human desire and poetry. A train journey, with its separate tracks, is a powerful reminder of that impossibility. To think that I might find myself stepping off the train and into my imagined landscape was perhaps a similar yearning and a similar folly. The imagined terrain, the real place and the psychological landscape of the poems could illuminate each other, but could they ever meet?
TWO
Jeogla
Caroline was waiting for us on the platform at Armidale station. She put up a hand to catch our attention. A small smiling woman, not much taller than Cheryl and I, in a neat cotton shirt, pressed trousers and sensible shoes. I had met Caroline once before when she and her sister Pip were in Melbourne. The resemblance between Pip, who was Judith’s oldest niece, and Judith was striking. To be with her was to experience flashes of Judith as she spoke. The same deep-set eyes, strong jaw and prominent teeth; the same droll, no nonsense take on the world. The resemblance between Caroline, Judith’s second niece, and Judith was less obvious but would become more apparent as our week together passed. Whereas Pip, like Judith before her, had fled New England (despite her deep love for it) as soon as she could—had gone into voluntary exile to escape the conservatism of the New England pastoral ‘aristocracy’, the weight of being one of the Wright clan and the family’s traditional expectations of women—Caroline was the one who had stayed behind.
‘Are you all right now?’ I asked after we embraced. Only weeks before we arrived, Caroline had been seriously ill in hospital with a partially collapsed lung. When I’d emailed her about postponing our visit, she wouldn’t hear of it. She had everything organised. She would show us around all the major Wright family properties: Wallamumbi, where Judith grew up; Wongwibinda, where the matriarch of the family, May, lived; Thalgarrah, where Judith’s mother grew up and Judith was born; and Jeogla, where Pip and Caroline grew up, the property that their father Bruce inherited from his and Judith’s father, Phillip.
On the way to her house on the outskirts of Armidale, Caroline took us for a quick tour of the town: through the university which Phillip had helped establish and of which he had been the first chancellor, past the memorial park dedicated to Judith, and past the red and clinkerbrick Edwardian buildings of the New England Girls School where Judith, Pip and Caroline had gone as boarders. Pip and Caroline were always being admonished to ‘Remember your aunt’ by their English teacher, who had also taught Judith. The Wrights were one of the oldest families in the district and, until the late 1990s, one of the wealthiest and most influential. The achievements of the family are a source of great pride for Caroline. Yet, like Pip and Judith, she remains deeply ambivalent about the family’s traditional attitudes towards its women.
When we visited Jeogla the next day, I began to appreciate the complexity of Caroline’s—and, by implication, Judith’s—relationship with these family properties. Judith did not write about this property but she spent a lot of time here while she was in New England during the war, doting on Pip and escaping from her stepmother, Dora, with whom she did not get along.
As we drove up the poplar-fringed road to Jeogla, Caroline pointed to the creek where she and Pip cultivated secret gardens when they were girls. The actual garden around the house—much expanded since Caroline lived here—is European with lime green lawns and garden beds and shady nooks, like a moat separating the inhabitants from the stark, open paddocks and clumps of native bushes and trees.
‘It’s lovely to see all the eucalypts looking so healthy,’ she beamed. A long drought had recently broken, making everything unexpectedly lush. ‘It hasn’t been like this for ages.’
We stopped to open the gate. When Judith was living in Queensland with Jack, she would occasionally come to visit. Pip and Caroline would be allowed to go and sit on this gatepost to wait.
‘It was always exciting when visitors came because we were so isolated. Judith and Jack always owned old cars. They never seemed to pack suitcases. They opened the back of the car and chucked everything in.’
Caroline had not been back to Jeogla in ten years, not since it passed out of Wright hands in 1998 after her younger brother Richard’s business went into receivership. The loss of Jeogla from the family marked the beginning of the end of one branch of the Wright pastoral dynasty. Our visit was, therefore, something of a homecoming for her. The people who now own the property were out but had told Caroline that we were free to roam about the garden. Above all, Caroline wanted to find the plaques where her parents’ ashes had been buried. She thought she remembered the spot but changes in the garden layout left her uncertain.
As I watched her searching for what remained of the garden of her childhood, I wondered what ghosts she was encountering. She seemed genuinely pleased about how well it had all been looked after and untroubled by the changes. But I knew that the loss of the property—rolling pasture in every direction giving violent way (as I would soon find out) to spectacular gorges and waterfalls—had been a source of deep sadness.
Her father once told Caroline, ‘We don’t own the land. We are custodians of it. We can’t bequeath it to you. You have a husband who should look after you.’ Judith’s response to this traditional rural approach to inheritance was to reclaim the land through her poetry. Caroline has maintained her connection by staying close to where she grew up, and now she and her husband, John Mitchell, have their own property.
‘I love this country. I get passionate about a tree. Something leaps out at me and I stop and get out of the car and drink it in.’
The growth in the garden was so abundant that Caroline had to give up on her search for the plaque. I was worried that she might be disappointed.
‘Does it bother you?’
She shook her head. While she was sick in hospital recently, she had done a lot of hard thinking about the past and about what really mattered. Somebody had asked her how it felt to know that her parents’ ashes were in a garden that no longer belonged to her family. She told them that it didn’t bother her as it didn’t change the past.
‘Nobody can take away from me my memories of this place and my love for it. Coming back hasn’t upset me at all. It helps to know that the family living here is a very delightful young family. Things move along and that’s how it should be.’
Pip had told me some months before that one of the reasons she couldn’t go back to Jeogla was she couldn’t bear to be reminded of ‘that beauty’. Our visit to the house and paddocks surrounding it had showed only one side of the property. The beauty that she spoke of only really made sense to me when we went to Wollomumbi Falls, the steep and dramatic precipice which Jeogla backs on to. The falls were once considered the tallest in Australia.
When driving along the main roads, all you can see are gentle hills and paddocks nursing granite boulders like prehistoric eggs. There are times when the granite outcrops look like something the earth is trying
to expel, some form of irritation or foreign object or shameful secret that it needs to be rid of. It is deceptive, mysterious terrain. You can think you have its measure only to suddenly find it falling away at your feet.
A short drive from Jeogla, we took a turn-off that ended at a small carpark. There, before us, the land cracked open in a massive granite gorge, a drop of two hundred and thirty metres that had been cut into the flat-topped plateau by millions of years of erosion. A thin white skein of water hung from the top of the precipice and fell in a multitude of continuous, invisible threads to end in a tangle of foam in the brown Wollomombi River below.
‘That’s Jeogla on the other side.’ Caroline pointed to the land behind the waterfall. I stood, gaping. What an incredible thing to have at the bottom of your backyard. I remembered what Pip had said about the times she had spent riding with her father around the top of the property and how thrilling it was to suddenly come upon the gorge.
While we stood there, Caroline told me the story of the woman who lived in a house on Jeogla near the gorge boundary—the ‘bottom end’, as it was always called. The woman, her husband and his brother spent their days fixing the fences and rarely ventured off the property. One day, the woman didn’t return to the house in the evening. Everyone was sure she must have fallen into the gorge or that she would die of exposure overnight. The next day, she wandered out of the bush having slept in a hollow log.
In this way, Caroline peopled the landscape for us with her tales, just as Judith had in her many early poems about the bullocky and the remittance man and the mad old girl who retreats behind her hawthorn hedge and the half-caste girl and Old Dan in ‘South of My Days’; poems in which the region’s colonial history is brought to life, always exploring the tension between the individual and the land.
