My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  I could see the wisdom in this way of viewing things. Having grown up on the mountain, Meredith accepted it—as all children do—for what it was without being troubled by what had once been. But, by the time Judith came here, she was acutely attuned to the wounds in any landscape. Meredith remembers that often on their travels Judith would point out the damage that had been done to the environment, particularly soil erosion which had been a major problem at Wallamumbi. While this was not an easy or comfortable way to live— as most activists know too well—without this heightened sensitivity to what was gone, she would not have done or foreseen all that she did.

  Much as I was glad to see the mountain in a positive light, I was still conscious of the changes. What saddened me the most was very small in the scale of things—the disappearance of the flame-tree Jack had planted near the front gate, not long after they moved to ‘Calanthe’—yet of enormous personal significance for Judith because it was a living symbol of their love. I had searched long and hard for this tree the day Anna and I visited Calanthe. But neither of us knew what such a plant looked like when it wasn’t in flower. I had a vague sense of where it should be and plucked leaves from trees I thought might be it. Later that day, I took the leaves to a nursery up the road but was told that none belonged to the flame-tree. In a month’s time, the flame-trees would drop their leaves and burst into a teeming, dazzling mass of tiny scarlet bells, but not yet. A week after I returned home from that first trip, Anna told me that the flame-trees in Brisbane had started to bloom.

  Judith devoted three poems to this tree and referred to it in a number of others. Flame-trees do grow wild on the mountain but, even before she moved here, she had fallen in love with the ones she had seen in Brisbane. Her first flame-tree poem was inspired by the sight of one growing out of a quarry like a ‘fountain of hot joy’. A quarry is a classic image of wounded landscape, which made the sight of it growing from this ‘wrecked skull’ all the more exhilarating. With its distinct echoes of Christian resurrection, the poem reminded me of the more joyful hymns I had sung as a child at church:

  Out of the torn earth’s mouth

  comes the old cry of praise.

  Still is the song made flesh

  though the singer dies—

  The rapture the poet experiences is not that of being filled with the spirit of Christ, but with the spirit of earthly desire, the sense of being born again through love—which was exactly what Judith had experienced with Jack.

  Long before their own flame-tree bloomed, Judith would feast her eyes on the tree that grew on the hill above the creek behind Calanthe. She described it to Kathleen McArthur as being ‘one huge blaze’. For her part, Kathleen would remember the year they met as one of ‘great blossoming of the mountain’s flame trees’. This particular tree was ‘the most inspiring of all flame-trees’ she had seen.

  Bookshop shelves groan with self-help guides offering advice on how to be happy, how to get the most out of life, how to find our ‘true’ selves, but Judith found the answers to these questions in the flame-tree she could see from her back steps. By dropping its leaves before it blooms, the tree gives its entire being over to the act of flowering and then, having blossomed, carelessly scatters its flowers with generous abandon. The answer that came to her ‘this sudden season’ was to live and love in the same way: passionately, without reserve, always giving oneself fully to the moment and to others. One finds oneself by losing oneself in the act of love. The poem concludes with the gratitude ‘of lovers who share one mind’, a phrase she would echo in a later poem addressed to Jack: ‘the equal heart and mind’ who answers her love ‘in kind’.

  Meredith remembers how much her parents looked forward to seeing their own flame-tree bloom, how year after year they would ask, ‘Will the tree flower this summer?’ The intense emotion they all invested in this tree makes Judith’s final flame-tree poem particularly devastating. The tree eventually flowered after Jack’s death, but brought none of the anticipated joy. Its final eruption into flower only reminded her of what she had lost, and what they had longed to share:

  Now, in its eighteenth spring,

  suddenly, wholly, ceremoniously

  it puts off every leaf and stands up nakedly,

  calling and gathering,

  every capacity in it, every power,

  drawing up from the very roots of being

  this pulse of total red that shocks my seeing

  into an agony of flower.

  The first time I went to the Mount Tamborine cemetery I couldn’t find Jack’s grave. The cemetery is not big, but for some reason Jack’s eluded me. I returned the next day with local historian, Paul Lyons, who took me straight to it. There is no slab and the granite headstone is a small one, which perhaps accounts for why I had overlooked it. It reads: ‘Jack Philip McKinney, 1891–1966, Let the spirit of Truth dwell with me’. Below his inscription is Judith’s, added later: ‘Judith Wright McKinney, 1915–2000’. Underneath both is written: ‘United in Truth’.

  I stood on the grassy slope by the grave, looking out over the Witches Falls National Park that lies directly behind the cemetery. ‘Not till those fiery ghosts are laid / shall we be one,’ Judith had written during their early years on the mountain. Those fiery ghosts were the many complications in their relationship—Jack’s marriage, her disapproving family, a child out of wedlock, their odd existence as a poet and philosopher in a conservative rural community. At that time, it felt to her as if all things conspired to stand between them. Yet, as the poem acknowledges, this feeling of being outsiders, of living on the margins of ‘respectable society’, sharpened their ability to see the world for what it was. And now here, in this grave on the edge of the mountain, those ghosts had been laid for good.

  Towards evening, I wandered a little further up the road to what Judith called ‘Jack’s seat’. It is a spot with a panoramic view over the western edge of the mountain, the foothills and checkered farmland below. After Jack’s death, Charles and Barbara Blackman paid for a wooden seat with a plaque to be erected in his memory at the spot where Jack and Judith often went to watch the sun set. Judith told Barbara that one evening, when she was sitting there, she heard a butcher-bird ‘whistling one of Jack’s tunes’. Not long before she left the mountain for good, she was delighted to see a group of ‘rather beautiful people sitting on Jack’s seat, watching the sunset and kissing each other.’

  The original seat has been replaced with a conventional park bench made of wooden slats, and a plaque dedicated to Judith has been added. Curiously, it does not mention that she was our greatest poet, but simply describes her as Jack’s wife. I sat, shivering a little, as dusk fell and watched the low sun disappear behind a thick band of gun-metal cloud. A halo of light escaped from around its edges, just enough to bathe the landscape in a gentle glow. Much of the mountain has a shadowy, closed-in feel from the fringes of rainforest. But, here, everything opens out. Despite the noise of cars speeding past on the road behind me, I could see why Jack and Judith loved this spot. To look out over the foothills and into the distance was to be left with a sudden feeling of expansiveness and relief; a tantalising sense of being, if only for a moment, above the cares of the world.

  Judith returned to live at Calanthe in 1968, after six months in Europe with Meredith. She had missed the mountain and was glad to be back in her own house and garden. Over the years, her house had come to feel like an extension of her body, her native habitat. Meditating on the time she had spent here, she recalled the eight-foot carpet-snake that used to winter in the ceiling and eat the rats, and the blossom-bat that, like a small fur umbrella, used to hang in her bedroom, and the mud-wasps that built cells in hollows under books. She recalled the three-day cyclone which made the house roll like a wooden ship, and the long heat-wave that made the weatherboards crack and shrink.

  Sometimes, lost in thought or reading, she would raise her eyes and a shadow would suggest Jack in his old chair. And yet his absence was as real to her
now as his presence had once been. Sometimes, she was able to think of his absence as a positive reminder of the ‘secret place behind the world’; to feel his silence as part of an on-going dialogue. But most of the time, it was just silence—an unbridgeable gulf.

  Judith still took great delight in her garden but, as the years passed, the two acres became increasingly difficult for her to manage on her own. ‘The garden is so huge and wild with trees I am practically a jungle woman,’ she wrote to Barbara. Yet she was reluctant to leave Calanthe because of all the memories it held— ‘the best of my life has been lived here’. Even in the year before she moved south to Braidwood, in early 1976, she still felt a ‘rush of come-homeness and the peace’ whenever she returned from her travels to Mount Tamborine. ‘So many places I can see Jack standing or sitting, that’ll be hard to leave . . .’ At the same time, she knew she was ready to go.

  As her conservation work took her away more often and her relationship with Nugget Coombs began to develop in the early 1970s, her poems and dreams revealed a process of gradual detachment from Mount Tamborine and from Jack. In one poem that harks back to Boreen Point, she writes of a ‘half-dream’ about an old boat tied up on the shore of a lake. In this semi-conscious state, the poet is aware of the mooring rope wearing away. By the end, she has accepted that it must eventually fray and, by implication, break. And yet the deep attachment she felt to Jack endured, even after Nugget became her lover.

  Judith and Nugget had been together for seven years when she had a dream that finally ‘released’ her. She could see the earth from a great distance, as if from outer space—an image clearly inspired by the pictures transmitted during the moon missions in the 1960s. She had already written about these images of our ‘tiny vulnerable planet’, and how they marked the first time that humans had had the chance to see the planet as a whole, to see it as the astronauts had, as ‘beautiful and frail and small, and above all as ‘home’.’ In her dream, the earth looked like a precious stone and it wrung her heart to leave it, but it was diseased. She woke in tears, knowing that she had been ‘detached from some bond, like having a sinew very gently parted. As though someone, a mother or father, pulled your hand gently away from holding one thing and transferred it to holding something else.’

  Then she went back to sleep and dreamed again. She was lying in bed and could hear, on the other side of the wall, a child crying in the dark. She was afraid it was a demon ‘Rakshasa’—the man-eating Hindu spirit mentioned in the book, Descent of the Sun, she was reading at the time. Although it was ‘one of the dead’, she was filled with love and longing for it. She called out and heard it reply. She kept calling and the child-demon slowly approached and stood by her bed in the darkness. Terrified yet entranced, she crooned and enticed it into her bed. Then she realised it was Jack and was filled with great joy, and knew that she had been set free.

  Jack had been her ‘earth’ but it was time to let go of him. Over a decade had passed since his death, and she had found a new love and a new plot of earth on which to live. As she prepared to leave her garden at Tamborine—cutting back fleshy stems and smelling the gardenias—she thought of the stony ridge far to the south that lay ‘waiting for me to know it’. She thought of the cold wind off the snowy mountains, and the small ‘white-etched trees’ and of the morning frosts there. She was in the autumn of her life now, and the summery, subtropical world of Tamborine with all its extravagant growth was no longer in keeping with who she was.

  I’m tired now, summers,

  of cutting you back to size.

  Where I’m going you will be more succinct;

  just time for a hurried embroidery

  of bed, leaf, flower, seed

  before the snow-winds snip you

  to a root’s endurance.

  It was hot the day I drove down the mountain. Once again, I took the old, windy road through tunnels of shade and sudden shafts of sunlight. Not long after the rainforest gave way to dry eucalypt forest, I turned off to Cedar Creek Falls. As soon as I was out of the car, I heard the sound of water falling and saw a group of teenagers heading across the carpark towards me, their hair dripping and faces glowing. A short walk along a well-established path led to the white gush of the falls, which plunged into a pool far below, before tumbling down an even more precipitous drop into a larger pool, and then continuing its course down the mountain. Everywhere there were signs warning of the dangers of the slippery rocks and ledges. Anyone who wanted to get to the rockpools was instructed to take the path. All other methods of access were prohibited.

  Not long before Judith left Mount Tamborine, she wrote a poem called ‘At Cedar Creek’. She was more heavily involved than ever before with environmental campaigns and, increasingly, with indigenous issues. Her years of activism and her relationship with Nugget, who had become one of Prime Minister Whitlam’s advisers, had allowed her to observe the workings of power from close range. She was still writing poetry, but her exposure to the language and mentality of politics, bureaucracy and the media, had left her questioning her past conviction that poetry could make things happen; that it could change people’s consciousness for the better. Under the influence of Jung, she had written poetry that mapped our psychic landscape in the hope that it would help us better understand our interdependent relationship with the real landscape. But, now, she wasn’t so sure.

  As I stood looking out over the falls, I thought about how far Judith had, by this time, grown away from the world of Tamborine and all it had once represented to her. In ‘At Cedar Creek’, she abandons her garden—which represents the vision she and Jack once shared— and heads for the waterfalls here at Cedar Creek National Park. Her lobbying and activism have left her head reeling with political slogans and headlines. Everything she contemplates—including poetry—feels polluted by this reductive way of thinking, just as nature has been polluted. ‘How,’ she asks, ‘shall I remember the formula for poetry?’ She even finds herself satirising the preoccupations she once held dear—mythology, primitive cultures and psychoanalytic thought. She used to believe that the wisdom of these disciplines, distilled into poetry, could help foster a higher level of ecological awareness and emotional intelligence that would revolutionise our relationship with the natural world. Now, all she can see are the contradictions, the flaws in any form of reasoning which applies knowledge in a purely utilitarian way, or regards human experience as an equation to be solved. Our over-analytical minds have led us to become reductive and schematic, cutting us off from the pulse of life. As she writes in another poem, ‘Whatever Being is . . . / it dies as we pursue it past the word. / We have not asked the meaning, but the use.’

  Heading back towards the carpark, I watched some more teenagers—this time, clutching beer bottles—approaching down the path. Before our paths crossed, they ducked under the railing. With the confidence of those who had done it many times before, they made their way down the foot-worn and risky-looking track next to the waterfall. Soon they were diving into the pools below. The signs might as well not have been there. It must have struck Judith, at some point, that her poems had become akin to these ineffectual signs warning people of the dangers of going beyond the barriers. Signs that were blithely ignored.

  Judith had lost her faith in the power of poetry to change the world, and the muse was beginning to desert her. She would produce only one more collection before she stopped writing verse for good. It was clear to her now that the ‘mythopoetic connection to the landscape’ she had once hoped to foster could not save the planet. Her dream in which she saw the earth from a great distance and felt that she had been detached from some bond was not just about Jack; it also marked her disengagement from poetry and her decision to devote herself almost entirely to activism. Grass-roots environmental work— campaigning to save the Great Barrier Reef, Cooloola and Fraser Island and, later, her involvement in the political process in Canberra—had shown what could be achieved through direct action. From now on, this would be where
most of her creative energy would go.

  Losing the ‘formula’ for poetry was not, then, a reason to despair. When she had woken from that dream, these words had stayed with her: To lose one’s grasp is to gain a new grasp of something. ‘Losing the first was grief,’ she wrote the next morning in her diary, ‘but the new thing was much more important.’

  Canberra &

  Mongarlowe

  FOURTEEN

  Opera City

  It was early autumn—a year since I had begun this journey—and Canberra’s many poplars were beginning to turn gold. Each day, I would walk from my friends’ flat in Lyneham (just north of the centre), through the city centre itself, and then across the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge to where the National Library sat like a giant marble treasure box on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. The walk was a long one and I was always struck by how few pedestrians there were, apart from in the city centre. I was not sure I would ever feel comfortable with the monumental scale of the city; it seemed to discourage intimacy. As I walked the wide, empty streets and scurried ant-like across the massive roundabouts, glimpsing the hump of Parliament House in the distance, I could understand why Judith saw the city as a ‘fantas[y] of power’, a kind of mirage.

  In the poem ‘Brief Notes on Canberra’ she imagines a time before the city was built: the city’s architect Walter Burley Griffin surveys ‘The tawny basin in the ring of hills’ and sees an empty space waiting to be filled by his ‘rhetorical opera-city’, with ‘great circles’ and ‘radials’. But nature was never empty for Judith. Her awareness of what had been here before, heightened by the ever-looming hills and open spaces, only reinforced her sense of the city’s uncanniness, its artificiality.