My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  She created her first garden when she was almost four years old. It was a small patch of wildflowers just beyond the garden fence at a drain outlet. In her memoir, she recalls planting the little garden just before she, Bruce and her mother fell ill during the devastating outbreak of influenza in 1919. Although complications from this illness would eventually kill Ethel Wright, Bruce and Judith recovered unscathed. As Judith felt better, she began fretting about her wildflower garden. When she was finally able to get up, she ran out to check on it and found that it had been demolished by the cows. In another piece of autobiographical writing, she remembers the incident slightly differently. Upon running down to see if the garden had survived, she found a violet there. Her short story, ‘The Colour of Death’, she says, draws on ‘that time of my mother’s illness.’

  The story comes from the only collection of short stories Judith ever published, The Nature of Love, which was first released in 1966. It is about a young girl called Isa who makes a ‘secret garden’ during a severe drought. She finds a small leak in the house pipeline through the calf paddock, a spot protected from the cows by a growth of sassafras. Her garden consists of wild violets because she is convinced that, without the violets, the spring won’t come. Like the young Judith, Isa believes in the magical power of words, and chants a phrase borrowed from their gardener to help the violets grow: ‘There ye are now, snug as a bug in a rug.’

  Isa’s relationship with her invalid mother is a strained one. When her mother is admitted to hospital, Isa goes to stay with her gran. Five weeks later, her mother dies and Isa returns home with her father, whose voice was ‘thin and bare, like the grassless ridges where the soil had washed from the clay and pebbles of the subsoil. Like the small half-dead trees that still stood there with roots exposed, he had no shelter to give her.’ As soon as she gets home, Isa rushes down to her secret garden. There are two large flowers, ‘large as garden violets’, and two seed heads swelling on the other stems. In a fit of rage at the world, Isa pulls the buds off and picks the two wild violets. Then she clears the sassafras away so that the cows will be able to see the plant and eat it.

  While the story is not simply autobiographical, Isa’s mother is clearly based on Ethel Wright, and Isa on Judith. Looking back on this little garden as an adult writing the story, Judith evidently saw a connection between her own urge to nurture the land, and her mother’s illness and eventual death. In the story, Isa nurtures her garden in the hope that, with the spring, her sickly mother will recover. Like Isa’s mother, Ethel died at the beginning of spring. And similarly, before her death, Judith became increasingly preoccupied with mother nature as something vulnerable that needed protecting:

  Have they dared to trample your breast mother, my

  mother?

  Have they dared to scorn blossoms bound in your hair?

  Oh Earth, my mother, my mother whose voice cries to

  the night

  Have comfort, I am the night of healing,

  I kiss your mouth that is fair.

  I hold your hands that are white.

  Judith’s biographer, Veronica Brady, has observed that ‘the land seems in some sense to have replaced her invalid mother fading away in the cold dark house.’ The short story shows how this happened by tracing Isa’s ‘fall’ from the garden of childhood into the land of adulthood and the knowledge of death.

  There is never one moment when we are expelled from the garden of childhood. It is a gradual exile. Alongside the child’s dawning adult consciousness, magical thinking can still persist. For the sake of dramatic unity, however, time is compressed in ‘The Colour of Death’. Isa’s chant of ‘snug as a bug in a rug’ over the wild violets she plants is an example of the persistence of magical thinking. Tellingly, it is the kind of thing a mother says to her child when tucking her up in bed. That Judith was keenly aware of the power of a mother’s bedside presence to dispel fears is reflected in a poem she wrote when she was ten:

  Isn’t it fun when mummy comes

  In the flickery candle-light?

  All the bogies fly when they hear her tread.

  She stoops and kisses the top of my head

  And tucks me up in the nice warm bed

  In the flickery candle-light.

  At the end of the story, Isa destroys the garden because her magical thinking fails her. It allowed her to believe that her mother would live if the violets survived until spring. Yet spring came and her mother died. The cycle of life goes on unrelentingly, despite our deepest wishes. After ripping the buds off her wild violets, Isa observes: ‘Large as they were, they did not look like garden flowers, real flowers; they had in them a secrecy, a wildness—a knowledge of things that did not happen in gardens, things as fenceless and unknown as death.’

  Late in her life, Judith lamented the ‘beauties’ that had been excluded from the garden of her youth because of the prevailing ‘contempt’ for native plants. She singled out the native violets as an example of the plants that ‘grew outside the garden fences’ and were not seen fit for cultivation. This tension between the European flora of the cultivated garden—the idealised garden of childhood— and the wider, wilder native landscape of adulthood is one that all Australians live with. Isa’s attempt to cultivate a garden with native violets represents what Judith spent her life trying to do through language and later, more literally, through environmental activism and in her own garden at Mount Tamborine and Edge. And it was in her little garden within the garden at Wallamumbi that this impulse first took root.

  Beyond the luminous green of the garden stretched the khaki and yellow of the paddocks. Rain was now falling over the Snowies. We could see it as a filmy ragged mist smudging the horizon, making the mountains appear even darker and bluer than before. It was time to leave Wallamumbi and move on.

  The early development of Judith’s relationship with this wider, wilder landscape can be traced in the poetry she wrote as a girl and in the few letters that remain from this period of her life. Most of her childhood poems confine themselves to her immediate garden, which almost perfectly replicates the typical garden found in the English literature she would have been reading. Not surprisingly, her poems are full of roses, forget-me-nots, poppies, marigolds, dahlias, larkspur, pear and apple trees, poplars, pines and willows. But it is also apparent that, from quite an early age, Judith was beginning to register the difference between the world of the garden and the world beyond. As well as occasional references to native plants such as wattles, gums and banksias, a few poems venture beyond the garden gate and out into the bush. These poems, which tend to be about the impact of drought and bushfires, are the first signs of the kind of poetry that would make her name as an adult; poetry which invests the landscape with meanings it lacked in the eyes of previous generations.

  Unlike the cultivated gardens she writes of, which have the quality of a timeless world untouched by the harsh conditions of life on the New England plateau, the indigenous landscape is seen as much more vulnerable. She knew that bushfires meant blackened gum trees and frightened creatures robbed of their homes. She describes how, after a fire dies down, it leaves a burning track through the ‘wounded’ bush. Another poem about bushfire and drought describes blue smoke rising from stunted, black trees in the gorges, ‘parched brown mosses’ panting on boulders, crackling dry grass and an empty creek. One of her few juvenile stories tells of a young wattle tree which admires the fire-blackened coat of an old wattle. The young wattle longs for a similar black coat, but after fire rages through the gorge and there is ‘nothing but black smouldering grasses and dying trees’, he regrets his wish. In all three cases, fire brings with it the knowledge of death and destruction, just as eating the apple gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil. This is the knowledge, as Isa puts it in ‘The Colour of Death’, of ‘things that did not happen in gardens’.

  After investigating the large shearing shed pungent with the smell of lanolin, we began the drive up Fairburn hill, heading for
Wongwibinda. During Judith’s childhood, Wongwibinda had been the home of her grandmother, the matriarch of the family, May Wright. Twice a week she rode her horse along this track when she was being schooled by her Aunt Weeta, May’s spinster daughter.

  Six months before her death, Judith wrote to one of her nieces, asking if she would gather a ‘pebble’ from the hill of Fairburn Road because ‘the top of that hill haunts my dreams’. As we were passing that way, we decided to stop to collect some rocks ourselves. It was gravelly, scrubby terrain with many dead trees on the upper slopes. The sun came out briefly and scalded the backs of our necks as we searched. While I toyed with small, quartz-like stones that looked conventionally attractive, Caroline knew exactly what Judith had in mind.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said, handing me two speckled granite rocks, each the size of my fist.

  Judith had wanted to be able to smell and hold and examine those granite rocks she so loved. As I write, those two rocks, which make perfect paperweights, sit on my desk and hold open books I am reading. One is made up of coarse, glittering flecks; the other of much finer, more uniform grains with a patch of pale green lichen. They speak to me strongly of that day at Wallamumbi and I can understand why Judith would have treasured them, given how ‘alive’ inanimate objects could be for her. Each one a miniature Council Rock.

  We took the cross-country, four-wheel drive route (now graded but once a narrow track) and, from this elevated vantage point, I began to register the scale of these properties and appreciate the isolation Judith had experienced. Apart from the general store and few houses at the nearby hamlet of Wollomombi, there were few signs of habitation. Pasture with scattered trees stretched in every direction. Away from the bitumen roads with their electrical wires and other signs of civilisation, the landscape ceased to be picturesque scenery viewed from the car window. Here, you could feel its ruggedness, its remoteness, its fragility.

  What this native landscape meant to Judith as a girl, and her growing urge to protect it, is strikingly recorded in the few surviving letters from her childhood. All are about an excursion or trip of some kind, to the beach or a favourite picnic spot in the countryside. They were written when she was between ten and twelve—the years immediately before and after her mother’s death—and sent (along with poems) to ‘Cinderella’, the editor of the children’s pages of the Sydney Mail. Rather than the formality I had expected from an introverted child of the New England pastoral aristocracy, the letters are chatty, full of touching enthusiasm for the natural world and address ‘Cinderella’ with a child’s absolute trust that her observations will be valued.

  One can only speculate on the role that ‘Cinderella’ played in Judith’s life as a distant mother figure, but there can be no doubt that she helped foster Judith’s dreams of becoming a writer. When ‘The Flickering Candle-Light’ was published, for instance, it was prefaced with the comment: ‘Cinderella considers these verses, which are by no means the first we have had from this little writer, show quite unusual ability. Let us all give Judith a cheer—“Hip, Hip, Hoorah!”’

  By the time Judith was nine, she and her mother had lost touch. ‘I was shamefully keeping away from the sight of her pain and the changes in her face,’ Judith wrote in her memoir. But she still ran to Ethel to show her new poems and letters because her mother had ‘ambitions for me as a poet’ and took great pleasure when her daughter’s work was praised by ‘Cinderella’. After Ethel’s death, ‘Cinderella’ was still there, offering praise and encouragement. When Judith won the ‘senior’ section of the children’s page poetry competition, ‘Cinderella’ declared that ‘she is one of the few young writers who have sufficient grasp of metre and those mysterious silent pauses that punctuate it to make use of muted syllables with pleasing effect.’

  While Judith thought of herself as an awkward, shy and asocial child, the letters reveal someone else. They bring to mind the half tadpole, half frog frozen in ice that she would describe over fifty years later in her poem ‘Halfway’. A creature caught in the process of transformation. One minute the chatty voice of the child, the next the eloquent, precocious voice of the emerging writer. This mix of childishness and maturity makes the letters particularly poignant, especially given the much more guarded quality of her mature correspondence.

  What is glaringly absent from the letters, however, is the story of the tragedy that was unfolding at home. Her mother is not mentioned at all and does not appear to have gone on these excursions— presumably she was too sick. In her absence, ‘mother nature’ fills the breach. Judith tells of a trip to South West Rocks, where the family had a holiday house, and rapturously describes the beauty of the changing landscape along the way: the ‘great blotches of purple’ false sarsaparilla, the road cut into the mountainside, the sharp bends, a house perched on a cliff top. ‘When we looked down there were only chalky white rocks, a few scattered trees, and the wide blue river sailing on sedately and calmly. Here it widened out, and there it narrowed; but it hardly ever changed its pace.’ When they got a puncture, her father ‘fixed it up in some wonderful way.’

  There is such command in her prose that you forget—until you reach the remarks about her father fixing the puncture—that this is the work of a ten year old. Her carefully crafted descriptions indicate she is beginning to comprehend the power that mastery of language gives her—as every writer does at some point—and how it allows her to dwell on life’s idyllic moments, recreate scenes of beauty and contentment, and edit out the painful bits.

  Two and a half years later, she wrote again to ‘Cinderella’. Her mother was now dead. The letter appears to be about another ‘happy’ excursion, this time to Georges Creek, a much-loved picnic spot at the bottom of a mountain called The Big Hill. She, and presumably her brothers and father, swam in the river and went to sit on a hill to watch the ‘mountains go slowly behind us and felt uncommonly pleased with ourselves and the world.’ What makes her so pleased, it becomes evident, is not simply the view and the afterglow of the day’s activities, but the fact that the ‘ferns and flowers and bushes and things down there are protected now.’ In the past, Judith had seen people stealing ferns and wildflowers by the car-load, but now that had stopped. Yet the letter ends plaintively, with a question that reverberates with inexpressible grief: ‘It is a disgrace the way beautiful things are torn up and then left to die, isn’t it?’ Here, clearly, is the emerging environmentalist. But here too is the memory of watching her mother fade away, and her feelings of helplessness and guilt. Feelings which were displaced into her writing and later into her work as a conservationist. Her father, Phillip, who campaigned to have the New England National Park established in the early 1930s, set a public example for what the environmentalist can achieve. But underscoring this conscious lesson was the much harder lesson her mother’s death taught her. When she gazed out over the countryside of New England, as we were doing now from the hill on the Fairburn Road, she saw not only much-loved countryside but a fragile motherland: ‘your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart.’

  Real gardens and landscapes are subject to change, they can die or flourish or be utterly transformed, but our lost gardens remain untouched and we can revisit them whenever we have the need. This was surely Judith’s consolation. She might be denied any claim on Wallamumbi itself, but she would always carry her lost garden with her and would continue to stake her claim to it through her poetry. And not simply to the properties she knew and loved but to the whole of New England. As A.D. Hope observed, ‘New England is an idea in the heart and mind. Judith Wright may be said to have created it in poetry as her forefathers helped to create it in fact and as her own father Phillip A. Wright did so much to create it politically.’ She made this claim most forcefully in her poem ‘For New England’ by audaciously erasing any distinction between herself and the land:

  All the hills’ gathered waters feed my seas

  who am the swimmer and the mountain river;

  and the long slopes
’ concurrence is my flesh

  who am the gazer and the land I stare on.

  On her return to New England from Sydney during the war, as the train ‘panted up the foothills’ she found herself ‘suddenly and sharply aware of it as “my country”. These hills and valleys were— not mine, but me . . .’

  In the face of a society that holds private property to be sacred, Judith swept aside questions of ownership with a claim more fundamental than any legal right. ‘These hill and valleys were—not mine, but me . . .’ The poetry that flowed from this insight did more than express her own identification with, and feelings for, the land. It staked out a landscape that could never be taken from her, could never be lost. And, by making this landscape part of the collective consciousness and culture of the nation, her poetry created a place that belongs to all of us.

  FIVE

  Generations of Women

  It came as a surprise to find Wongwibinda a hive of activity after the deserted air of Wallamumbi and the solitude of our cross-country drive through the properties that separated Judith’s old home from that of her grandmother. Sally Wright had a long table laid out for lunch in the light-filled, covered-in veranda at the front of the house. Tradesmen who had come to fix the roofing wandered through the garden. Edward Wright, the great grandson of May Wright and cousin of Judith, had just arrived from another part of the property to have lunch with us and show us around.