by Fiona Capp
Judith’s changing awareness was reflected in her garden as she began to plant more natives. The name she had given to the house was a clear sign of her attachment to native flowers and this became more pronounced as her friendship with Kathleen deepened. They would go ‘wildflowering’ together near Caloundra, where Kathleen lived, and further north on the Noosa Plains. Meredith remembers the endless walks they went on when she was a girl, and of Kathleen bounding ahead to identify vast carpets of flowers. Meredith and Judith would also pick wildflowers from the eastern edge of the mountain and make them into colourful bunches, which they entered in the Best Wild Flowers section of the local flower show. They always won because no one else was interested in native flowers.
For all her dreams of cultivating a perfect garden, Judith knew that a gardener’s desire for control over nature is ultimately futile and fraught with pitfalls. In ‘That Seed’, the poet tells how she took a red fruit from a rainforest tree and tried to cultivate it. When nothing came of it, she threw the soil into the garden. Where it fell, ‘quite against my plan’, sprang up a tree that grew ‘as tall as a man’. Too close to the house, it would, in time, shade the windowsill, beat its branches against the wall and even smash the roof if it fell in a storm. In this way, the poem rebukes the gardener’s delusions of godlike control. But the inescapable truth is that the gardener still has the final say. This is, the poem reminds us, the moral dilemma that we all must face, both in our own backyards and in the wider world: ‘Shall I take an axe to it / or shall I let it grow?’
It is not surprising, then, that the crucial shift Judith made from private poet to public activist during her years on Mount Tamborine first registered as concern for the welfare of her own ‘backyard’. She complained to her good friend Barbara Blackman that ‘down the creek the chain-saw keeps on whining and trees fall with a crash . . . The big scrub up near the cemetery is a desert of ashes and stumps.’ Changes were afoot in her local community that she could not ignore.
In the early 1960s, Judith joined the conservation subcommittee of the local Progress Association. While most of the inhabitants of Mount Tamborine were politically conservative and supported development, Judith found a small group who shared her concerns. The committee did a lot of work with local schools, educating students about conservation, and holding competitions and outings.
Once Meredith started boarding school in Brisbane in 1962, Judith’s attention turned outward beyond the mountain. In that year, she helped found the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, which began publishing the magazine Wildlife. Like the conservation subcommittee in Tamborine, the society aimed to educate people about the need to preserve the natural environment. In time, the achievements of this small but growing group would be monumental. In the face of powerful opposition from the state government and big business interests, their efforts would eventually bring about the National Parks of Cooloola, the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island.
In many ways, Judith’s focus was still on her ‘backyard’. It was just that her sense of what constituted her backyard had expanded. Cooloola and the Great Barrier Reef were part of her ‘other’ backyard at Boreen Point, just north of Noosa, where she and Jack had bought a holiday shack in the 1950s.
TWELVE
Eye of the Earth
There was a strange feeling of pressure building, of being squeezed through a narrow opening into a confined space as we drove into Noosa. I realised why when I looked at a map: the town is wedged in-between the Noosa River, the headland and Lake Weyba, the lowest of the chain of lakes in the Noosa River system. On the one hand, development is curbed by these natural features. On the other, the town’s location makes for relatively high density in a small area. The crowds restlessly surging along on the shopping strip behind the main beach left me with a sinking feeling about what changes I might find at Boreen Point, which had been a sleepy backwater when Judith knew it.
Yet in the National Park on the headland, amongst the banksias and pandanus palms, it was tranquil and crowd-free. At the rocky chasm of Hell’s Gate, we watched a school of dolphins swimming by. In the bright sunshine, the sea was divided into two distinct bands of colour, as if a line had been drawn across it. Close in, the water was clear aquamarine. On the other side of the line, the dark blue was so abrupt it made me shiver. ‘No one has marked the sea,’ Judith once wrote. Remembering the murky trails of effluent and litter I had seen drifting off-shore at various beaches in Europe, I wished it were true. As we walked back, we could see Laguna Bay and the beach of Coloured Sands in the distance, reaching all the way to Fraser Island at its northern-most tip. And somewhere behind the scrub-covered dunes of this vast stretch of sand lay Lake Cootharaba and Boreen Point.
Clear of Tewantin—once a town and now a suburban extension of Noosa—the countryside opened out into farmland and state forest. Half an hour later we took the Boreen Point turn-off and drove straight into a time-warp. Only twenty kilometres from Noosa, and yet a world away. Judith, Jack and Meredith first came up this way in the mid-1950s with Judith’s friend Kathleen McArthur, who had invited them to go looking for wildflowers on the sand-plains north of Noosa. In Judith’s day, there were no street names or even proper streets at Boreen, just sandy tracks between nine or ten houses ‘delectably perched on a lake shore above a pink and white sandstone cliff.’
In letters written in the first rush of excitement after buying their holiday shack, she rhapsodises about the ‘wild and birdy lakes, lost in the wallum country; bordered by paperbarks grown old and twisty and little white sand beaches with reeds and fishing herons, and wildflower swamps and trees.’ There were now a dozen streets and a population of three hundred, but the essence of the place seemed unchanged. A small, bush-covered bluff nosing into a lake so vast it made the land feel no more substantial than a mirage. In Judith’s writing, Boreen Point was a place defined by shimmering reflections:
All day the candid staring of the lake
holds what’s passing and forgets the past.
Unlike Noosa, it had no buzzing shopping hub, just a cafe-cum-real estate agency and a general store down by the lake. If there was a hub at all, it was the lake itself.
As we drove down towards it, I strained to see the water through the foreshore trees. I imagined it as a mirror of the sky: a picture of timeless serenity and a perfect place for contemplation. In Judith’s memory and in her writing, Lake Cootharaba was always blue—‘blue as a doll’s eye’—and the small sandy beaches were glittering white. But what greeted us suggested that neither was the case any more, if it had ever been. Driven by a gusty wind, small catamarans skimmed across an expanse of murky brown water, while other yachts lay beached on beige-coloured sand.
‘Blue as a doll’s eye?’ Anna laughed.
‘It’s probably the wind, churning it up,’ I said, not knowing what to think. I watched the yachts leaping over the small brown waves. It was hard to imagine this tea-coloured water ever looking blue. We struck up a conversation with a weathered-looking sailor, and asked him about it. On sunny mornings, if the water was still, he said, the lake could look blue. But he seemed to think it was stretching things. ‘Lots of people don’t come here because they think the lake’s dirty. But it’s just clay from the lake bottom mixed up with the sand.’ We agreed it might be a blessing, if it kept the crowds away. Each morning during our stay, I would go to the kitchen window of our rented house to see if the lake had turned blue.
One of the things Judith most loved about their shack was its view of the lake. In her memoir, she recalled how ‘in that little, light-filled concrete house I suffered through a failed pregnancy that nearly killed me, Jack through a bout of flu that almost turned into pneumonia . . . but the house remained solid, warm and comforting and the blues of the lake shone through its windows.’ That view was now blocked by a two-storey brick house a few doors down. But their house remained largely untouched: a quaint little cottage with a rough, white-washed facade, a concrete porch and t
he name ‘Melaleuca’—in Jack’s copperplate—still there on the front wall.
That evening, we walked by the lake amongst luminous paperbarks with their arthritic branches and knotted roots clutching at the rocky shore. I knew that the lake was a haven for bird-life, and that a number of Judith’s poems from her collection Birds were inspired by what she saw here. While these often whimsical poems were written to appeal to children, they are as concerned with the way we construct nature as are her more ‘serious’ poems. We had seen some pelicans earlier on, gathered on a small sandbar, having a conference. There was something wonderfully comic about the way they were crammed together, as if afraid of getting their feet wet. In her poem about pelicans, Judith acknowledges this comic element: ‘that old clever Noah’s Ark . . . kind as an ambulance-driver’. But at the same time, she makes it clear that our indulgent response is a form of evasion. We prefer these birds to spiders and snakes because we can project comforting human qualities on to them. They allow us an ‘easy faith’ in nature and ourselves.
This warning note sounds throughout much of her later poetry. While the early Mount Tamborine poems pluck symbols from her garden and the rainforest to represent the creative and destructive impulses within the human psyche, Judith grew increasingly uneasy about treating nature as ‘forest of symbols for poetic harvesting’. As a girl she had dreamed of learning the ‘Master-Words’, of being able to give voice to the heard and unheard murmurings of the natural world. Yet more than ever she was conscious that ‘Words are not meanings for a tree’ and that nature’s own language would always elude her. She might hear ‘one strange word’ in the bubbling of a mountain spring, but would never know the translation. She might find tantalising scribbles on the trunk of a gum but could not decipher them. The lake brought this home to her more sharply than almost anything else because it was poetry in its purest form.
In her early poem ‘The Maker’, she had boldly announced that ‘I am a tranquil lake / to mirror their joy and pain’. It was every artist’s impossible dream: to be able to take into oneself ‘all living things that are’ and reflect them back in all their complexity for the world to appreciate and understand. Twelve years on, the real Lake Cootharaba forced Judith to confront the narcissism of this presumption. As nature’s poetry, the real lake reflects back everything that crosses its path—stars, sky, clouds, trees—but also captures life’s endless, moment-by-moment flux in a way that a man-made artefact can never do. ‘Eye of the earth,’ she says to the lake, ‘my meaning’s what you are.’ The lake is, quite literally, the poem Judith dreams of writing, except that she can only do it through language. When she casts the ‘net’ of her mind out over the lake, she can only draw in words. Everything else drains through the holes in the net, and slips her grasp. No poem can capture reality as does the reflection in a lake. In the end, Judith concludes as much. When she looks into the lake, she sees herself. Underlying the poem is the fear that we can never be true to nature. What we see in it will always be a reflection of the human mind.
As dusk fell, a ripe moon rose up from behind the dunes on the far side of the lake and dripped light across the water. Our walk took us through a camping ground on the foreshore where everyone we passed seemed transfixed by the sight of this swollen orb. I thought of how Judith had walked here and seen the silhouettes of black swans crossing the moon, driven to the coast by drought. In their desolate cry, she had heard cry of the parched land. There were no swans on the lake this evening, but we had seen a few white egrets picking over the rocks near the sailing club beach. I still hoped that we might get lucky, as Judith did one evening when she saw, in a ‘pool, jet-black and mirror-still’, thirty egrets wading. As a girl, I had loved this poem ‘Egrets’ for its sense of momentousness and wonder. Now, more than ever, I felt I understood what she was trying to do. It is a poem that refrains from imposing any meaning or interpretation on what is witnessed, apart from communicating the poet’s delight. Nothing eludes her because she is neither bent on capturing the birds as symbols nor the scene as an allegory. The poem simply celebrates the moment itself. As such, it foreshadows the tender detachment and careful observation of nature that would mark her final poems:
Once in a lifetime, lovely past believing,
your lucky eyes may light on such a pool.
As though for many years I had been waiting,
I watched in silence, till my heart was full
of clear dark water, and white trees unmoving,
and, whiter yet, those thirty egrets wading.
Although we didn’t get lucky that evening, we saw one solitary bird that kept moving on as we approached, always threatening to launch into the air as if it feared we might want to catch it and pin it down in a poem.
The next morning we hired a small motor boat to take us across the lake and into the Upper Noosa River. Just to the north of Lake Cootharaba is the much smaller Lake Cooloola, which inspired ‘At Cooloolah’, one of Judith’s most influential poems. The poem became a kind of anthem for the early conservation movement and was powerfully deployed in the campaign that stopped sand-mining in this vulnerable region of wildflower heaths, giant dunes, rainforests and freshwater lakes. The campaign, led by Kathleen McArthur and the Caloundra branch of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, showed what grass-roots activism could achieve. Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the most reactionary premier the country has ever known, had supported the mining but was forced to back down in the face of public opposition. In 1970, for the first time in Australian history, a government refused a mining venture in favour of a National Park.
If there are moments in history which mark a turning point in human values—the kind of shift in consciousness that shapes the lives of future generations—then Cooloola was one of them. After the Cooloola victory came the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island wins, all local indicators of a worldwide transformation in human understanding of our interdependent relationship with nature and this fragile planet.
The wind had dropped since the previous day and the dimpled brown water of the lake had a steely-blue tinge under a patchwork sky. The hire-boat man told us the lakes were not lakes at all but river flats—and shallow ones at that; we would easily stall if we didn’t keep a watch on the depth. As we waded into the water, we could just make out the dusty green scrub-covered dunes on the far side of the lake, and a large, yellow sandy patch which marked the beginning of the Cooloola sandmass—the largest continuous series of sand dunes in the world. When navigating this coast, Captain Cook had used this sand blow as a marker. For the Aborigines of the region—the Dulingbara—it also held great significance as a lookout, a vantage point from which to survey the surrounding terrain.
Judith first saw this sand patch from the top of Mount Tinbeerwah in 1953. Inspired to investigate further, she took a boat across Lake Cootharaba ‘so horizontal blue’ to the Upper Noosa river. It thrilled her the way the river suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like a hidden entrance into another dimension as the boat went under an overhanging tree. The river, she reported back to her friends, was ‘clear black like a mirror and covered with black swans and black ducks and bordered with huge tufts of ferns and flowers with overhanging trees reflected exactly in detail; and for miles and miles are queer deserted waterways and lakes, all different.’
We had been told to aim for the sand patch and keep between the channel markers. As yet, we could not see where the river began. We moved out into the middle of the lake and I began to register its size. Shattered sunlight danced in every direction. It seemed remarkable that this immense body of water was so close to Noosa yet remained so little known. Although Anna was a Queenslander and had been visiting Noosa for almost four decades, she had never been here and knew nothing about it. We had been let in on a special secret, a secret I was not sure I wanted to share. If mining had gone ahead, what would we have seen? Possibly, towards the north, a vast sand blow out of control. (Devastating dune instability had been the legacy of sand mining els
ewhere.) There was enough sand in the Cooloola dunes to create a desert all the way to Gympie, forty kilometres inland.
As we approached the far end of the lake, the entrance to the Upper Noosa was still obscured. It wasn’t until we navigated our way through the narrow channel between the land and Kinaba Island that we passed into the hidden opening and found ourselves at the secluded mouth of the river. The water, coloured by tannins from decayed vegetation, took on an ebony sheen and only then did I begin to understand Judith’s obsession with the reflections this watery world threw back. Layers of transparent colour floated in the darkness—the pearly clouds, the blue sky, the pale bark of towering eucalypts and the green of overhanging branches. The riverbank— thick with reed-like sedges, paperbacks, native cotton trees studded with yellow flowers, giant mangroves, ferns and vines—glided by in an impenetrable wall that went deep down, in wavering replica, into the water beneath us.
