My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  Looking over the above paragraph, I am tempted to delete ‘hive of activity’ and find a less clichéd phrase. But ‘hive’ is too apt. Whenever Judith wrote about Wongwibinda, May was the queen bee around which everything revolved: ‘If she had wanted her children and grandchildren to remember their childhood as a sort of accompaniment to their grandmother’s garden, with her at its centre, she had certainly succeeded. Even now the scents of lavender, heliotrope and clove pinks seize my memory with the presence of those sunny days.’ By the time she wrote this, late in life, Judith’s feelings about May had become much more ambivalent and critical than they had once been. But, as a child and in the early decades of her writing career, she not only admired May without reservation but also identified with her.

  Her poem ‘The Garden’ imagines May wandering through the garden we were now standing in, ‘Walking slow along her garden ways, / a bee grown old at summer’s end’. The poem paints the garden with its flowers of red and purple, huge pines, sunlight through the apple tree and a ‘humming may-tree’. Even when May herself is not mentioned in these early poems, her totem may-tree stands in for her, invariably humming with bees and vibrant with life.

  It was summer’s end but I was not conscious of the bees that day. We had come up the driveway darkened by those massive pines and a few oak, walnut and chestnut trees. The pines, planted by May in the early 1890s, had many spiky dead and dying limbs amongst the living branches. When the house appeared at the top of the rise, I felt the satisfaction that comes of finding something just as you had expected, as though you have dreamed it up yourself. Here was the veranda with its crossed wooden rails. Here were the climbing roses and the colourful garden beds. Here was the heart-shaped lawn out the front that Albert had designed for May as a Valentine’s gift. It wasn’t until I stood back and examined the house and its surrounds more closely that I registered a subtle change: only half of the heart remained. One side of the driveway—which had circled the lawn and given it its distinctive shape—was gone.

  Tempting as it was to see some significance in the ‘broken’ heart of the ‘Wongwibinda’ front lawn, there was none. This property was, after all, one of the few that remained in Wright hands precisely because this side of the family had never risked the expansion embarked upon by Judith’s half-brother, David, when he had tried to follow in May’s ambitious footsteps.

  Over lunch, when I asked why half the heart-shaped lawn was gone, the weight of May’s legacy made itself felt. Edward explained that his mother wanted more space for lawn and trees and so had one side of the heart removed. ‘I would have liked to have kept it,’ he said wistfully. It was at this point in the conversation that Sally became exasperated. I could see that she and May would have made formidable antagonists. She turned to me, her grey bob framing her tanned face. ‘The Wrights are always worrying about family history. It’s fine to remember the past but you can’t live in it.’

  Sally was heavily involved in the local Landcare movement, helping with tree plantings, the introduction of dung beetles and the removal of noxious weeds along the highways. Both she and Edward were very mindful of the damage that had been done in the past when previous generations cleared and over-grazed the land. ‘In those days, if you had trees you didn’t have grass,’ Edward said. ‘That was the way they saw it.’

  After lunch, Edward drove us across the property to the hillside high above the homestead where there is a very small, overgrown graveyard. When we climbed out of the car, he strode forward into the chest high grass that almost completely hid the gravestones and flattened it with great swipes of his arm.

  ‘This is the longest I’ve ever let the grass grow,’ he muttered, slightly mortified that his great-grandparents’ graves should look neglected. The pressures of keeping the property going left little time to spare.

  On the way up the hill, he had talked about the difficulty of digging graves on this spot because of a granite reef three feet down. You had to bust your way through the rock with a crowbar, cursing the dead as you went. It was Caroline’s typically irreverent view that this particular location was chosen for the graveyard only because it was no good for grazing. In The Generations of Men, Judith speculates that May picked this spot because ‘even in death she must overlook what is being done on her beloved property.’ There was, indeed, a fine view over gently sloped pastures towards the homestead, which was little more than a flash of red roof amongst the brilliant green of the European trees that surrounded it.

  Once the grass and a large thistle with purple flowers had been pushed aside, we could see the headstone of Charlotte May Wright, flanked by her daughter Weeta on her right—at her side in death as she had always been in life. On her left is the grave of her husband Albert, who had died in Queensland, defeated by the overwhelming demands of keeping their distant cattle and sheep stations afloat. May’s stature in the family is reflected in the graves themselves. Hers is the most impressive: a tall headstone of white marble with an engraved dove swooping down toward the fading words. Beneath her birth and death dates is a quote from Corinthians. ‘And now abideth faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’ Weeta’s headstone is a squat block, while Albert’s grave has a prone slab (originally a headstone) that was brought here from Rockhampton where he was buried.

  The title of Judith’s fictionalised account of Charlotte May and Albert might refer to generations of men, but it ends with a eulogy to May, who established the Wright’s stronghold in the New England region in the late nineteenth century, and who continued to oversee the affairs of her family and its many properties until her death in 1929.

  As Judith researched the memoir in the late 1940s, the suppression of ‘the real story of the great pastoral invasions of inland Australia’ began to dawn on her. But very little had been written about the Aborigines’ side of the story, and lacking the time and resources to explore the black perspective, she focused on her immediate family’s history. What she did know was that Albert had considerable knowledge of the customs and languages of the Aborigines he dealt with. Her portrait of him is of a thoughtful and complex character, sensitive to his own role in their dispossession. Around the time of his fiftieth birthday, she imagines Albert reflecting on what the countryside will look like in another fifty years’ time and how Paddy, one of the blacks who works for him, will not know his own country because of the clearing of the land. ‘That would be partly Albert’s own work—his and that of his sons, perhaps, and of his neighbours and their sons. They spent their lives destroying one way of life to make way for another.’ It was not until the late 1970s that a three-year fellowship enabled Judith to return to this story and fill in what she saw as the historical, political and cultural gaps in her previous narrative. The Cry for the Dead, published in 1981, tells of the devastating impact of the great pastoral migrations (in which her grandparents played a part) on the Aboriginal people.

  In The Generations of Men, May is portrayed as a shrewd, strong-minded business woman, a loving if strict mother, and a charming, independent and indomitable matriarch without whom the family dynasty would not exist. When Albert died in 1890, leaving her in massive debt, she had been under great pressure to sell up the property and buy a cottage in town and concentrate on educating her four children. But she was determined not to give in. Drawing on her knowledge of the way the property was run, her natural business acumen and her capacity for hard work, she not only brought Wongwibinda through the depression of the 1890s but expanded the family’s holdings to include Wallamumbi and Jeogla and a number of other properties in the area. By the time of her death, the Wright family were fully entrenched as New England pastoral aristocracy.

  Judith’s pride in her grandmother’s achievements rings through the final paragraph of The Generations of Men:

  She is entitled to her triumph, then. No one can rob her of her conquests, of the awe that she is held in, of the love that is rendered to her by right. She may expect, perhaps she does ex
pect, that not only her children but her grandchildren and their children too—for who knows how far ahead the ripples of her influence may travel?—will all carry a certain stamp, a mark that singles out even the most distant or rebellious of them for her own.

  Judith obviously felt this stamp from an early age, rebellious though she would become. Even before she fully understood May’s stature and achievements as a pastoralist, she felt May’s profound influence as a beneficent presence, the tree upon which her children and grandchildren flowered and flourished. As a girl, she wrote a poem called ‘May Tree’:

  Bright tree, white tree, web of spider’s making,

  Tree of mist that the wind has kissed, mist that the dawn is waking.

  Your sky blooms are my blooms, frail as the new moon’s ray,

  Tiny blooms, like white silk from looms, children of laughing May.

  One of her most ecstatic mature poems about childhood describes a young child wandering off from a noisy gathering to hide amongst the leaves of the ‘enfolding, the exulting / may-tree’ through which she can feel the sap pulsing as if it were her own blood. Everything goes back to May: whether it is the may-tree as a symbol of spring, the origins of life, or May as the matriarch of the Wright family tree.

  Just how important May was to Judith is evident when she identifies May, in the poem ‘The Garden’, as her prototypical Eve. Not Eve the archetypal temptress, but Eve after the fall, an old woman enriched by her experience and knowledge of life. In this way, Judith constructed her own myth of origin, a myth she would later partly repudiate but which, in her youth and in the early phase of her poetic career, contributed to her profound sense of place, and of belonging. In ‘For New England’, Judith places May firmly at the centre of her struggle to reconcile her European heritage with her love of her native land.

  May also fed Judith’s innate interest in the rhythms of language. Whenever Judith and her brothers stayed with May at Wongwibinda when they were very young, she would read to them for half an hour every night. Judith recalled that her grandmother had a good memory for nursery rhymes and poems. Lear and Carroll were her favourites. ‘I remember listening to them with fascination because of the rhythms.’ One of the most striking aspects of Judith’s early poetry is the boldness of her voice, and the confidence with which she claims the land: ‘[I] am the gazer and the land I stare on.’ In The Generations of Men, when Judith wrote of the possessive love that burns in May when she contemplates Wongwibinda, she might well have been writing about herself and her own feelings for the land: ‘The place for her was alive, it breathed with her own breath; she would not give it up except in the last extremity.’ The bold voice of Judith’s early poetry, in which she stakes her claim to the land, owes much to the voice of authority she absorbed from May.

  As she grew older, however, Judith’s view of her grandmother began to change. In what must have been a slow and painful process, she became more conscious of May’s flaws and more ambivalent about her family heritage. Early signs of this change of heart are evident in her poem ‘Remembering an Aunt’, published in 1966, in which she reflects on how Weeta’s talents and hopes for the future were stifled by her domineering mother. Weeta’s bedroom, she recalls, was ‘supervised by her mother’s window’. Her hands were blackened from housework, her paintings, which spoke of her aspirations for another life—‘Rome / Florence, the galleries she saw at thirty’—were hung face to the wall. Now, it was Weeta whom Judith praised, not May:

  I praise her for her silence and her pride;

  art lay in both. Yet in her, all the same,

  sometimes there sprang a small unnoticed flame—

  grief too unseen, resentment too denied.

  What Judith sensed in her aunt is reinforced by a remarkable letter Weeta wrote to Phillip Wright when Judith fell pregnant with Meredith in 1949. Phillip and other members of the family were deeply distressed and shocked by the pregnancy because Judith wasn’t married. But Weeta rebuked her brother for calling Judith selfish:

  In reality, she is one of the most fortunate people in the world. Only one person in millions has the great happiness that has been given to her. While we are on earth we are like half-blind children groping about in the dark. The things that we think real and important are only shadows, and we cannot see the real things. Some day when we are in the light and can see clearly, we will know what we look on now as a sorry business is really the most wonderful and beautiful thing that could happen to Duda, and we ought to be most thankful for it.

  In Judith’s memoir, there is little sign of the awe and respect she had once felt for May. Knowing that Albert’s final illness was brought on by exhaustion and despair, Judith speculates about the pressure on him to meet the bank loan to pay for May’s dream house at Wongwibinda. ‘He may have worried himself literally to death in the face of his determination to give his pretty wife her way.’ She also concludes that May’s reputation as a good stock manager was the result of ‘the vagaries of the market’ rather than her skills and knowledge. This revised view is of a piece with her growing disenchantment with her pastoralist ancestors, particularly their treatment of the land and the Aboriginal people. As the focus of Judith’s activism switched from environmental to Aboriginal issues in the 1970s, May’s paternalistic attitude towards the Aborigines she encountered while living in Queensland would have become repugnant to her grand-daughter. While May’s own memoir reveals her to have been a sometimes sympathetic and keen observer of the Aborigines who camped near her homestead, she clearly thought them less than human.

  Another reason for the change in Judith’s feelings for her grandmother probably had to do with May’s contradictions as a role model. Her example showed the young Judith what a woman with brains and determination can achieve, despite the attitudes of the day. And yet May did not grant her daughters or grand-daughters the same opportunities that she herself had. It is one of the great ironies of this family saga that May, who took such pride defying prevailing expectations of her as a woman and in proving herself to be as capable as any man in managing the family properties, did not break with convention and allow her daughters to prove themselves in a similar manner. For all her strength of character, she remained a woman of her time in regard to matters of inheritance. Weeta might have denied her own needs and aspirations by devoting her life to her widowed mother and the household at Wongwibinda, but the Wright properties still went to May’s sons.

  The last place we visited that day was an outlying paddock of Wongwibinda, known in Judith’s day as ‘Bora Paddock’. Bora rings are earthen circles on the ground built by Aborigines as ceremonial places where boys of the clans were taken for their initiation into manhood. It was the bora ring in this paddock that inspired her poem of that name, one of her earliest and best-known about Aborigines, or more precisely, about their absence.

  Judith had little contact with the remaining Aborigines of New England when she was growing up. She remembers ‘only a few dark shadows’ visible occasionally on the fringes of their lives: itinerant station hands, stockmen and domestic staff. Her childhood anxiety about a ghostly Aboriginal elder with a spear that hovered in the corners of rooms probably had its origins in an experience of Albert’s in Queensland. He was riding in the bush far from their homestead when he came to an open plain with one dead tree in it. A tall black warrior in ‘war-paint’ standing near the tree beckoned to him. When Albert called out to him in his own language, the man vanished, ‘sank into bare plain, as now into time past’. Judith’s lack of contact with Aboriginal people and her sensitivity to stories like this would explain why, from her earliest days, she had a sense of Aborigines as ghostly, vanishing figures. As a result, physical traces of Aborigines at the various Wright properties—the bora ring here at Wongwibinda and the tree with Aboriginal carvings near the woolshed at Wallamumbi— would have been all the more haunting for her.

  Edward pulled the car over to a spot that looked indistinguishable from any other part of the pad
dock. We all climbed out and followed him to a featureless patch of grass, just next to a narrow dirt track, within a straggly group of snow and peppermint gums, and the bleached silver trunks of dead trees lying on their side.

  ‘It was around here,’ he said.

  Many years had passed since he was first shown this site. It would now take more imagination than any of us possessed to detect signs of that earthen ring in this grassy, unremarkable patch of paddock which had since been ploughed.

  The song is gone; the dance

  is secret with the dancers in the earth,

  the ritual useless, and the tribal story

  lost in an alien tale.

  Only the grass stands up

  to mark the dancing-ring: the apple-gums

  posture and mime a past corroboree,

  murmur a broken chant.

  Not even the trees here would have been the ones that Judith wrote about, Edward said. Out of all the places from Judith’s childhood we visited, this one was the blankest. The past had been more completely erased here than anywhere else. Which, ironically enough, is what the poem is about—the erasure of Aboriginal life and culture and how it haunts white culture, or at least those sensitive enough to be alert to the signs of what is gone:

  Only the rider’s heart

  halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word

  that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,

  the fear as old as Cain.

  At the time of Federation, Aborigines were considered a ‘dying race’. But by the mid-twentieth century, it was evident that this was not the case. Today, over five per cent of the New England population is Aboriginal, and aspects of the culture of the region’s first inhabitants live on through their descendants. For this reason, the poem is now considered politically naive and even sentimental in its reflection of outdated attitudes that Aborigines are disappearing and that their culture is doomed.