by Fiona Capp
Growing up in New England, Judith knew all about haunted landscapes and the return of the repressed. But on Mount Tamborine, the ghosts—especially of the old forests—were more readily felt. Here, the landscape had not been so resolutely conquered and tamed, and was therefore more obviously at risk. Although my knowledge of the region’s history was sketchy before I arrived, our drive up the ‘do-it-yourself road’ had made it quite clear how much of the mountain’s past was in the process of being cleared and built over. Once you arrive at the top of the mountain, the fragments of remaining rainforest in the small National Parks at its precipitous edges serve as sad reminders of the vast subtropical forest of giant gums, red cedars, palms and vines that had once covered the Tamborine plateau. While there are few obvious traces of the Wangerriburra tribe who lived here for 40 000 years, implements such as stone axes and shaped flints are still being found. The mountain’s name comes from their word ‘dyambrin’, which means ‘place of yams’. As in New England, the Wangerriburra were driven into the less accessible regions as European settlement and land-clearing progressed.
During the walk up Long Road towards Quantum, I had noticed an old commemorative plaque on a rock that paid tribute to the early pioneers who had cleared and settled Mount Tamborine. Once the early timber-getters had exhausted the eucalypt forests of the riverflats below the plateau, they turned their sights on the less accessible rainforests of the mountain. It became a condition of ownership that the settlers must clear the land. By the time Judith and Jack arrived here in 1946, only shards of the original forests remained. They fell in love with the rainforests but sensed that most of the local inhabitants of this conservative farming community did not share their feelings. ‘There was,’ Judith recalled in her memoir, ‘a kind of hostility still to those deep forests—since most of the descendants of the few early arrivals had spent much of their childhood and youth battling the forest for a niche on which to farm and live.’
In this hostility towards the forest, Judith also recognised a more fundamental antipathy: the age-old terror of the ‘dark wood’, that unknown territory on the outskirts of human settlement believed to be the haunt of evil. It is a terror, as we know from fairytales and myths, that goes back to the very origins of civilisation. Our unwillingness to confront this darkness, or to recognise that what lurks in this wood is a projection of our own demons, preoccupies many of her early Mount Tamborine poems.
Now, as I surveyed the block where Quantum once stood, I tried to imagine the house based on what I’d read and seen in photographs: a simple two-roomed, timber-getter’s hut made of ‘reject weatherboards that never quite met’ with a front veranda hung with local ferns. The neighbours had told them the cottage wasn’t fit to live in, but Judith and Jack were perfectly contented with it.
A sense of what the community and the house itself were like when they first arrived here can be gleaned from a dream Judith had twenty years later. It was a dream about moving into a ‘primitive’ old house on the ‘shelf ’ of a mountain, which she recognised as Tamborine. Clearly inspired by Quantum as they first found it, this dream house was ‘very dirty, its cupboards knocked together out of old slabs.’ The local people, who were ‘very Puritan, very regional’, belonged to a settlement of survivors from an old mining town which had closed down long ago. Its location on a ‘shelf’ symbolised its sense of isolation and its desire to remain on the edge of things, locked in the past. In the dream, Judith wondered how she and Jack would get along with the locals and felt that they had better watch their tongues. However, the people turned out to be friendly and told them the story of the house, which they claimed was haunted.
This aspect of the dream—the belief that the house was haunted— was evidently inspired by the locals’ opinion that the house was not fit to live in. Her dream treats this claim as a projection of the community’s state of mind, for it is they who are haunted or possessed by the past. As Jung argues: ‘Since nobody is capable of recognising just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbour.’
Judith channelled this early impression of Mount Tamborine into her poem ‘Camphor Laurel’, which she wrote while living at Quantum. In it, a haunted house laments that things are ‘not like the old days’. The house is the collective psyche of the local community, while the ‘old days’ are represented by a group of colourful frontier figures who are buried underneath it. Connecting past and present, conscious and unconscious, is the sweet-smelling camphor laurel tree in the backyard whose roots go deep under the house, breaking the old bones and splitting the house’s foundations. The tree is a kind of Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Scandinavian mythology (which Judith was reading about at the time) that unites heaven, earth and hell, and represents life, knowledge, time and space. In this poem, it illustrates how the collective unconscious and the collective experiences of all humanity inform and unsettle individual lives.
It was Jung’s belief that we are all in the grip of unconscious psychic forces, both creative and destructive, of which we have little comprehension. Before the Age of Enlightenment—the eighteenth century philosophical movement characterised by rationalism—the workings of the unconscious were given expression through myths and religion. A recognition of the divine as part of ordinary life not only helped people make sense of the world, but also gave shape to the mysterious workings of the mind, allowing individuals to deal with their inner conflicts. The Enlightenment, however, fostered the conviction that reason was the only path to truth, and so laid the foundations for modern secular society. Jung argued that by privileging the rational above the non-rational, and by repressing or denying the dark side of human nature, we create a violent ‘shadow’, a time-bomb waiting to go off. He believed that in times of great social uncertainty—as rocked Germany in the 1930s and led to the Second World War—this collective psychosis erupts through the veneer of civilisation, with nations projecting the darkness within themselves on to their enemies.
In the aftermath of this horrific war, Judith began applying Jung’s thinking quite literally to her own backyard. The haunted house is a classic symbol of a psyche unsettled by past trauma. As she delved deeper into the world of Mount Tamborine and its rainforests, Judith would find even more fertile material for her quest to explore the ways in which we are haunted by our collective history, and of the need to confront this darkness if we are to save ourselves and the planet.
TEN
In the Dark Wood
Over the hill behind Quantum is the source of Cedar Creek, a small spring which becomes Curtis Falls a few kilometres downstream and then flows on into the torrential Cedar Creek waterfall at Cedar Creek National Park, further down the mountain. It is not easy to find the exact location of the source because it shifts with the rising and lowering of the watertable. Local historian, Paul Lyons, took me to a spot near a dead-end road and pointed to a small pond made inaccessible by its swampy surrounds, tangled bush and long grasses. The source, he said, lay somewhere between this spot and the next road. Less than a kilometre away is a protected grove of cycads, fern-like ‘dinosaur’ trees which have existed for almost three hundred million years.
The idea of finding a ‘source’—of life, of inspiration—is enormously seductive for a poet, especially a poet like Judith for whom the landscape was inseparable from the topography of the human mind. So, when Judith and Jack went walking one day in search of the source of Cedar Creek—as told in her poem ‘The Ancestors’—they were not simply following the stream through ‘the sunny grass so clear’ up to the source of the creek. They were embarking on a kind of quest, travelling back in time to the deep past which still haunts humanity in the form of unconscious drives and irrational impulses; back to our psychic and physical origins.
The poem describes the growing darkness in a patch of forest where there stood ‘fern-trees locked in endless age’. In the trunks of these ferns ‘shaggy as an ape’, Judith sensed the ‘dark b
ent foetus’ of our ancestors. The poem records the sudden intuition of what it means to carry all this prehistory—‘the old ape-knowledge of the embryo’— within oneself; how it lives on in the present and connects us all.
Their silent sleep is gathered round the spring
that feeds the living, thousand-lighted stream
up which we toiled into this timeless dream.
Just as the body bears traces of its various evolutionary stages, says Jung, so too does the psyche. Judith described this compressed history as ‘the road from protoplasm to man’. Her intense efforts to comprehend the stages of this road and the vast amount of experience and knowledge gained along the way are captured in one of her dreams. She dreamed she was a piece of protoplasm, ‘knowing in a dreadful way that I had to pass through eons and eons of learning and growing and changing all the way up to a human.’
Anna and I had gone only a few steps down the steep path into the Palm Grove forest—the section of National Park closest to Quantum— when I began to see why the darkness made such an impression on Judith. Outside it was a bright, sunny afternoon. But here, it was as if we had entered a tunnel. In this shadowy green-room, only small patches of sunlight penetrated the dense canopy of twisted vines, piccabean palms and towering strangler figs. It had rained the night before and a rich, damp smell rose from the earth.
In the upper storey of the forest we could hear the thick drone of bees, a sound which was later overtaken by the reverberating metallic chant of cicadas until the air itself seemed to hum. The elongated call and snapped-wire answer of whip birds pinged above our heads. Fallen palm fronds, branches and leaves made the ground crackle as we walked. Such was the obvious fecundity of the whole place that you could almost see things growing and rotting before your eyes.
The zig-zagging path was narrow and more overgrown than sections of the National Park closer to the township. For the first time, I felt I was glimpsing what the whole plateau might have been like before settlement.
One of the early, and unusually enlightened, settlers on Mount Tamborine wrote in his journal:
Those who see the Mountain today have no idea what the original Tamborine Mountain looked like, nor do they know of the teeming wildlife that was here awaiting destruction by the white man’s axe . . . I did my share with axe and fire. Many times have I thought about it as I have moved over the ground where the big trees stood. Do I owe this destroyed wildlife a debt? Perhaps I do?
It was Judith’s belief that we all owe the destroyed wildlife more of a debt than we can ever imagine—and not only because of the loss of a rich and ancient ecosystem. As human animals, our minds bear the imprint of the wilderness out of which we arose. We might think we have left it behind as we huddle behind the walls of civilisation but the wilderness is still in us. Only when we are able to acknowledge and accept this inheritance will the pattern of destruction end. This means acknowledging the limitations of reason. As literary critic Terry Eagleton puts it: ‘It is only if reason can draw upon energies and resources deeper, more tenacious, and less fragile than itself that it is capable of prevailing.’ While hard to define, these ‘deeper resources’ are elements of our psychological makeup and evolutionary history that we have repressed or undervalued in the post-Enlightenment world. For Judith, these ‘deeper resources’ lay, above all, in our emotional connection with the natural world. As a Jungian, she believed that we are fundamentally driven by impulses, feelings and sensations. But we have failed to recognise this, having prized rationality above all. An emotional response to nature is as valid, she argued, as a scientific one: the pleasure we take in a sunny day on a spring morning is as ‘real’ as a barometer reading. This is why, Judith argues, long held attitudes to exploitation cannot be altered by rational argument or threats alone. ‘Our feelings and emotions must be engaged and engaged on a large scale. Whether scientists like it or not, it is feeling that sways public opinion, far more than reason; it is feeling that spurs us to protest.’
Decades after her arrival on Mount Tamborine, her practical experience as a conservationist would reinforce her early intuition that what was needed was ‘not only rational recognition of the problem but human concern, distress and love.’ She knew that many National Parks in Australia had been founded because ordinary people (such as her father) were moved by deep feeling for these places. She also sensed that literature could play a vital role in rousing these feelings. The Romantic poets had, after all, helped change the way we understand our relationship with nature—and in very practical ways. The change in consciousness brought about by the poetry of William Wordsworth, argues literary critic Jonathan Bates, ultimately led to the establishment of National Parks in the United States and later in the United Kingdom.
As we walked deeper into Palm Grove, it struck me that Judith’s early Tamborine poems were just as driven by a desire to change people’s minds and behaviour as were her later, more outspoken and obviously political works. But rather than focusing on broad social and environmental issues, these introspective poems conduct their own therapy—the underlying assumption being that political change begins with the individual. As she would later write: ‘We must regenerate ourselves if we are to regenerate the earth.’ These early poems challenge readers to confront the workings of their psyches, to explore the forest inside their heads and to own the many conflicting forces that lurk there. Like Virgil leading Dante through his ‘gloomy wood’, Judith becomes our tour guide through the circles of the unconscious. Look at this cycad, she says to us, in the poem of that name. It is a living symbol of the beginnings of time, of your origins, of that which remains unchanged within you despite the passage of millennia.
Take their cold seed and set it in the mind,
and its slow root will lengthen deep and deep
till, following, you cling on the last ledge
over the unthinkable, unfathomed edge
beyond which man remembers only sleep.
Think on it, our guide urges, and let it take you back to a time when your ancestors lived like these plants, unconscious of their existence yet completely at one with their world. You ask what the unconscious is? It is that primal part of yourself you have forgotten.
Other poems, such as ‘The Forest Path’, recall a journey down a path similar to the one that Anna and I were now on. As the walkers move away from the security of civilisation and into the claustrophobic world of the forest, they find themselves growing ever more afraid. Not so much of getting lost, as of the loss of self. They turn to speak to their friends only to find they have become the trunks of overgrown trees. Snakes begin to uncoil from their own ‘hollow hearts’. Confronted with their own insecurity and with the primeval depths of the psyche, the walkers can only recoil. As tour guide, Judith is showing us how repression works. How we turn our backs on such visions and dismiss them as waking nightmares or panic-fuelled figments of the imagination. Or how we project them on to the forest itself.
Ironically enough, a mild form of the anxiety that marks ‘The Forest Path’ did overtake us. I had once been attacked by a man as I walked along a semi-secluded suburban lane. As a consequence, I was easily unnerved whenever alone, or with another woman, in a place that was isolated or off the beaten track. For her own reasons, Anna shared my fears. When we had walked through the Curtis Falls park near the township, there had been noisy school children and other groups. But here, there was no one else. No bustle of human traffic to make us feel secure. Just the whip birds, and the alarming scuffle of brush turkeys suddenly bursting out of the undergrowth and on to the path. Although we pressed on, neither of us could relax.
In ‘The Forest Path’, Judith tells us that if terror had not overtaken us, we might have discovered that this path did not lead to death but to a new way of being. What this ‘birth’ of a new understanding might mean is made more explicit in a letter she wrote to some university students who asked her about the political implications of the nascent conservation movement in 1971. Signs o
f a change of attitudes and values were apparent, she replied, in the emerging discipline of ecology. The fact that ‘we are beginning to recognise that we are not separate from what we have called “nature”, indicates a way forward.’
For a short time, we pushed on. Through gaps in the foliage came flashes of sheer, rocky cliffs that fell away to the hinterland of the Gold Coast far below. Almost all of the Tamborine National Parks are perched on the precipitous edges of the plateau because this land was difficult for timber-getters to reach and no good for farming—hence its preservation as National Park. I had wanted to do the Jenyns Falls circuit, which followed these cliff edges, but the path was closed because of landslides. The park literature described the terrain as ‘geologically unstable’ and therefore unsafe. I knew there were times, after flooding, when chunks of roads on the mountain used to fall away. One Mother’s Day, Meredith skipped Sunday school, and she and her mother went walking in Palm Grove. It was, Judith recalled, ‘one of the mountain’s extra special days with cloud-shadows and greeny-blue forests and we went into the deep scrub and drank from a little spring and found new sorts of funguses and birds.’ Idyllic it might have been, but at one stage Meredith blithely set off down a path that had collapsed from a landslide. Judith had to pull her back with ‘grazed elbow and a thorn in her foot’.
Clearly landslides were a real danger, but I couldn’t help wondering if there was another reason why the Jenyns Falls circuit had been closed. Just as it is never reported how often people jump from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, so too do we rarely hear about the number of people who go to National Parks to end their lives. Raymond Curtis, a descendent of a settler family who had worked in the Tamborine National Parks for many years, told me that it was not an uncommon occurrence. I also knew of someone who had chosen the freezing high planes of the Victorian Alps in which to lie down and not wake up.
