by Fiona Capp
Even if the path to Jenyns Falls had not been closed, I suspect that Anna and I would not have gone there. Our anxieties would have held us back. Yet in my mind, I had already walked it. Each time I’d read the poem ‘The Precipice’, I had seen the ‘dark of the mountain forest opened like flesh’ as a woman, clutching her children’s hands, ran along the path we were on, ‘possessed and intent as any lover’. The story which inspired the poem was a true one. The woman’s husband, a soldier traumatised by his experiences during the Second World War, had become violent. Unable to bear his abuse, or the prospect of nuclear conflict which loomed large in the 1950s, the woman took her children and caught a bus up the mountain ‘behaving like any woman, but she was no longer living.’ When the woman and her children didn’t return from their walk, search parties went out to look for them. The searchers eventually came across a trail of lolly papers on the Jenyns Falls path. In the poem, Judith imagined the woman at the edge of the cliff, taking the children in her arms ‘because she loved them’. Then she jumped, ‘parting the leaves and the night’s curtain.’
This is one of a number of poems that register the apocalyptic mood of the Cold War; it also faintly echoes ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’. Both events, as told in the poems, happen at night. Both concern the havoc wreaked by the dark side of the human psyche. Both are about being driven into the abyss. Only in this case, the woman chose her own end (and that of her children) rather than face threats beyond her control. Remembering the vertiginous pull of the cliffs at Point Lookout, I felt quietly relieved that Jenyns Falls was closed and that I was off the hook.
We decided to turn back. We had experienced enough to know that the real threat did not come from the forest. As we climbed back up the steep path and out into the sunshine, I could still hear the ricocheting sound of whip birds calling to each other, as if announcing that the danger had passed. The humans were gone.
ELEVEN
Beyond the Burning Wind
About a kilometre down Long Road from Quantum, we found the house that Judith and Jack bought in 1951. It was their home until Jack’s death in 1966, after which Judith lived there alone for almost another ten years.
We were fortunate, house; in a world of exiles
stateless, homeless wandering, spying, murdering,
wars, bewilderments, losses and betrayals,
we found each other.
In your spaces and awkward corners
we spread our lives out, fitted and grew together.
This part of Long Road was more settled than the rural end around Quantum. With the vogue for mountain weddings, a number of places had been turned into reception centres for weddings with mythical names like ‘Avalon’. Judith named their house ‘Calanthe’ after the local native orchid, Calanthe veratrifolia, known as the Flying Dove. But it was not called Calanthe any more. Like the wedding reception venues, its new name harked nostalgically back to Arthurian legend.
The tall tecoma hedge that once grew at the front had been replaced by a wrought-iron fence and high, forbidding gate with cameos of mysterious-looking intertwined snakes—all of which looked too grand for the modest weatherboard beyond the iron bars. There was something spooky about this gate, especially the snake symbols. In Judith’s poem ‘Habitat’—a meditation on the experience of living in this house—she refers to a dream in which ‘Heraldic animals / stand at the garden entrance. / My snakes are at home there.’ (A carpet snake used to live in their ceiling.) Either the current owners had read Judith’s poem and made the dream come true, so to speak, or Judith had foreseen it.
The owners had told me they would be away, and I knew we would be trespassing if we went in, but I couldn’t help feeling we had a right to be here. This garden had been Judith’s handiwork and her refuge. Everything I knew about it made me feel possessive towards it, as if it were one of her poems. Peering through the gate, I thought of the barriers our minds erect around poetry. Why, I wondered, are we so intimidated by these small plots of words? And why do we feel as if we are trespassing when we try to approach them? A number of friends had told me that they would like to read Judith’s poetry but didn’t know how to find a way in. They felt they needed a key.
At first it looked as though the gate was locked but, with a bit of jiggling, the stiff latch loosened. Hesitantly, we pushed it open and walked up the gravel path. Although the house had been renovated and gentrified, the row of prehistoric-looking cycads that used to brush against the front window panes were still there, giving me hope that the lineaments of Judith’s garden would also remain. I knocked on the front door and waited, just to check. When no one answered, we took the side path into the deep backyard that sloped down towards a paddock where cattle grazed.
When Judith, Jack and Meredith first moved here, the garden had been a jungle of kikuyu grass. Over a period of twenty years, Judith spent thousands of hours pouring her energy and love into this plot of earth. Early on, she found remnants in the soil of the first settlers on the mountain—bits of crockery, smashed bottles, iron bolts, lost toys. Maintaining the garden was a constant battle with the elements— cyclones, hail storms, drought—and with the extraordinarily rapid rate of growth in the subtropics. There were few natives at first, except for the cycads and the calanthe orchid their neighbour had procured from a block of private rainforest. Judith would come to regard these white flower sprays that grew up to five feet high as ‘one of the glories’ of the rainforest. Yet a domestic garden is, in so many ways, the antithesis of a rainforest. It is ordered, trimmed and tended: nature made manageable. Although she would later set about turning the garden into a miniature rainforest, in the early 1950s the traditional European garden was still the prevailing model for what a garden should be.
Like so many Australian gardens, it was now a jumble of past and present trends, of native and introduced plants, of rainforest and European trees. Alongside the eucalypts, paperbarks, bottle brush— all of which were planted by Judith—were azaleas, oak trees, pencil pines and avocadoes.
Much of the backyard had a rambling and semi-wild atmosphere which the owners were attempting to put in order. I passed a half-built, geometric garden bed of raw red earth with edges of interlocking circles made from brick. Beyond it, where I suspected Judith’s vegetable garden had once been, was a newly created rose garden divided into four parts by gravel walkways, with a wrought-iron sculpture at the centre based on the same Arthurian symbol as found on the gate. The whole arrangement made me think of a crematorium. Only the plaques were missing.
I sat down on a bench overlooking the yard. All these changes raised a disturbing question: to what extent was this still the garden that Judith had made? My experience of the gardens at Wallamumbi and Wongwibinda had shown me the folly of hoping to step into a perfectly preserved past. But Calanthe was different from the New England gardens: those gardens had not been Judith’s creations (apart from the tiny garden of native violets she made when her mother was ill). What remained of Judith’s garden here at Calanthe mattered because it was her creation, the product of her labour and her imagination, a kind of living poem.
It occurred to me that this was what I had been foolishly hoping for—the experience of stepping into one of her poems. A poem in which you could smell the flowers. A poem alive with insects and birds, as well as plants. A poem full of colour and light and textures that afforded what Judith’s work was always straining towards: a direct and unmediated communion with nature. As a child, her parents had read to her from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. And in a letter to a friend, she once described poetry as a ‘garden to wander in’. If this was so, then the reverse should also be true. Which was why these newly built garden beds were so unnerving. The garden, as it now stood, was like one of her poems with crossings-out and new words written in by a stranger’s hand.
The truth I was resisting was that, while a poem is a finished artefact, a garden is always a work-in-progress. Judith knew very well that the p
erfect garden in her mind’s eye could never be realised— although it did not stop her from trying. This imaginary garden drew heavily on her memories of the past, especially the ‘lost garden’ of her youth. So strong was this attachment that she cultivated certain plants which reminded her of Wallamumbi. She was delighted when the wild violets—the flower she had planted and nurtured during her mother’s illness—thrived. She told a friend that she had always wanted a lawn that would have dew and shadows and plenty of spiders. ‘It rejoices me to have one now,’ she wrote, foreshadowing her poem ‘Reminiscence’: ‘I was born into a coloured country; / spider-webs in dew on feathered grass’. Another letter described how the garden was ‘full of violets, wattle, and daffodils just coming out. I’ll put in a bit of my pennyroyal . . . It reminds me of mustering cattle on hills covered with it, the smell behind the mob was mingled cow and pennyroyal.’
Judith had grown up in an environment in which man actively shaped the land. She did not condone what her pastoralist family did to the forests that once covered much of New England. But she had retained this hands-on relationship with the land; she needed to get her fingers into the soil. Poetry was a genteel pursuit she associated with her mother and life inside the house. As a girl, she had always identified strongly with what she called Outside: ‘My childhood is divided, in my mind, between the problems of Inside and the freedoms of Outside.’ Outside was the world of the garden and beyond. It was the male domain of mustering and running the property, of taking control of one’s fate. She could see the folly of humans trying to impose their will on the wider landscape—especially when it damaged the environment—but it took her much longer to let go of the desire to leave her stamp on her own private landscape. Only when she was living at Edge, where nature was not so amenable to the foreign aesthetic of the European garden, would she finally let go of this dream.
I dug the tip of my shoe into the soft, rust red earth. For a moment, I was tempted to reach down and take a handful, it looked so rich and edible. I thought of how Judith sometimes worked on poems in her head as she did the gardening. And how deeply satisfying it would have been to combine the head, heart and body in these simultaneous creative acts. At times, she must have felt she were conjuring poems out of the earth itself. This intense identification with the soil as the source of life and creativity is most evident in her early poems which celebrate the poet’s power as godlike creator. With their garden imagery, they bring to mind God presiding over the creation of Eden. The crucial difference being that the poet is not above or separate from her creation. In ‘The Maker’, her position is more akin to a gardener than to God as she takes ‘all living things that are’, cultivates them and lovingly transforms them.
I hold the crimson fruit
and plumage of the palm;
flame-tree, that scarlet spirit,
in my soil takes root.
In ‘Woman to Child’, this earthy imagery is taken a step further. The soil not only represents the poet’s imagination but also the mother’s womb: ‘I am the earth, I am the root, / I am the stem that fed the fruit, / the link that joins you to the night,’ says the mother to her unborn child. The poem—written before Judith became a mother herself—celebrates birth on many levels: the birth of a child, the birth of a poem and the birth of a new self for a new world order, all of which are contained in the image of a seed pushing up through the soil.
A garden, by definition, is a piece of land that bears the imprint of human design. In a similar way, these poems are born of a fusion of the imagination with the natural world. Talking about how raw experience becomes art, Judith once wrote: ‘What cooks out of sight in the basement comes up as a meal. I may well have picked it from the vegetable garden but I don’t always know it when it reappears.’ This rich red soil beneath my feet was her constant reminder of that mysterious cycle, and of how all forms of creation begin with the ‘living earth’.
Once she became a mother, Judith’s identification with her garden took on greater urgency. The garden was no longer purely a vehicle for creative expression or a way of communing with nature, but also a safe haven for her child. After Meredith’s birth, Judith knew what it meant to be ‘overmastered by life’ and to confront the terror that came with it. The poems that came out of this experience register humility in the face of the overwhelming natural forces that govern childbirth. Rather than boldly asserting the poet’s creative power, they pledge a mother’s unconditional love and desire to protect her child. As the mother says to her child in ‘The Watcher’: ‘I am the garden beyond the burning wind’.
After an ectopic pregnancy almost killed her five years later, Judith adopted a stiff upper lip when reporting what had happened. Yet the experience clearly shook her and the knowledge that she couldn’t have any more children left her sad and feeling suddenly old. One day, while in the garden chasing some of their cows to the creek for water, she came across an old blown-down pear tree which was still managing to put out a few blossoms even though it could not bear fruit. In it, she found a symbol for her own condition. She wrote a poem in her head and called it ‘Old Woman’s Song’, and took it back to the house with her, along with a branch of the blossoms.
Even behind a thin veil of cloud, the midday sun was painfully glary. In this almost fluorescent light, the garden—with its half-finished landscaping—looked bedraggled and blanched. Anna told me that many nurseries in Brisbane were going out of business because of the drought. While Judith, too, had to contend with hailstorms, cyclones and drought, the lasting impression from her letters is of a garden full of flowers, exuberant growth and a veggie patch bursting with edible delights. In one letter, she describes herself as ‘purring’ her way around the garden. In another, she ecstatically reports that ‘the garden is rather a dream’.
Only scraps of that dream were left now. I looked blindly around at the trees and plants wondering which were old enough to have been here in Judith’s day. Things grew so fast in the subtropics it was hard to know. And many of these plants were unfamiliar to me. Anna pointed out some wild ginger growing under a gnarled, old-looking flowering tree, along with some ferns and orchids. It was probably a fragment of the miniature rainforest Judith had tried to create. I knew the names she mentioned in her letters—cunjevoi, flame-trees, kunzea—but had no idea what they looked like.
Feeling vaguely at a loss, I wandered down to the very bottom where a shadowy copse of large, richly foliaged trees hinted at other worlds. As a child, Judith had loved the thought of her garden coming alive with elves, fairies and goblins under the cover of darkness. Even as an adult, she had been drawn to the garden at night. I might not be able to experience the ‘living poem’ Judith had created, but in this shadowy spot I could begin to imagine what it might have felt like. In the darkness, the literal details no longer mattered. The fenced-in world of the garden took on an infinite quality at night. The stars became the garden’s flowers transplanted into the sky, or a ‘swarm of honey bees’ in a great field. When Meredith was old enough, they regularly went out into the garden to identify the stars. (The mountain remains a mecca for star-gazers and has few street lights in order not to dull the full splendour of the night sky.) In that dazzling garden in the sky, Judith found a record of human history and our relationship with the cosmos. With its various mythic formations based on the zodiac—archetypes from the unconscious—she saw the night sky as the human psyche writ-large.
This vast, ‘unconscious’ darkness looms large in her poetry. She often wrote late at night when Jack and Meredith were asleep and the household chores were done: ‘Darkness where I find my sight.’ After Jack’s death, when Meredith had left home and the house was so silent it woke her, she would sometimes go out into the garden and lie on a mattress to watch the stars. I could imagine her fixing on Venus’s ‘clear, sad light’ and recalling the poem she had written about it. How modern man has, in the ‘neon night’, forgotten the ‘ritual phases of love’. With Jack gone, she would have felt more
sharply than ever the pain of this loss: this ‘hellfire blaze of the heart’.
There were times, though, when the ‘towering universe’ beyond her lighted room was too disturbingly infinite and impersonal for contemplation, and she would turn her mind instead to the achievements of man. Yet, as she grew more disillusioned by the extent of our pollution of the earth, even the vastness of the night sky began to seem contaminated, and humankind’s achievements less golden. One poem tells of waking from a dream to see what looked like a meteorite blazing through the night sky. Or was it, she asks herself, ‘some sad man-wrought metal?’
During her first decade at Calanthe, Judith was absorbed by the world of her garden, motherhood and writing—along with the constant struggle to make ends meet. Being reserved, hard of hearing and introspective, her natural inclination was to keep to herself. In the early 1940s, when she was asked to be on the committee for the Queensland Authors’ and Artists’ Association, she had recoiled from the idea. She wondered if she ought to do it but clearly didn’t want to. ‘I’ve got no sense of public service whatever,’ she told Jack. It’s a remarkable statement given her outspoken public activism later in life, and an indication of the transformation she underwent as her commitment to environmentalism deepened.
As tempting as it must have been to withdraw behind the high tecoma hedge, it was not in Judith’s make-up to turn her back on the wider world. The garden was, after all, the place where the seeds of her environmentalism had been sown when she was a child. Throughout the 1950s, her poetry continued to shine a spotlight on the darker corners of the psyche. But by the mid-fifties, she was also beginning to write poems like ‘Sanctuary’ and ‘At Cooloolah’, which are more explicit in their condemnation of our impact on the natural world and of white Australians’ complicity in the extermination of the indigenous peoples. Her friendship with wildflower artist and naturalist, Kathleen McArthur, helped focus her growing anxiety about the destruction of the natural environment she saw during family camping trips in Queensland. As yet, there was no environmental movement, just individuals and small groups of conservationists who had to contend with the triumphal, post-war rhetoric of nation building—‘conquering’, ‘taming’ and ‘transforming’—words which sanctioned the bulldozing of the countryside on an unprecedented scale.
