About Judith
Wright (1915 - 2000)
Judith Wright was a Queensland
resident for over thirty years.
She was born in New England,
in regional New South Wales,
and came to Brisbane as a young
woman. She lived for a time
at 100 Sydney Street, New Farm,
and worked as a statistician
at the University of Queensland
(a job she was completely untrained
for) while she wrote the first
of the poems that were to make
her famous, among them “Bullocky” and “The
Moving Image”. In Brisbane
she met and fell in love with
philosopher Jack McKinney,
and in 1945 they bought a tiny
cottage on Mount Tamborine.
They later moved to a nearby
house which they named “Calanthe”,
after a white orchid which
blooms on the mountain at Christmas
time. They shared twenty happy
years together on Tamborine,
until Jack’s death in
1966.
During the 1950s and ’60s
Judith’s fame as a poet
grew, although she also wrote
children’s stories, books
of criticism, and GENERATIONS
OF MEN, a novel about her grandparents
who were early settlers in
Queensland’s Dawson Valley.
Her deep love of the Australian
landscape, and her growing
distress at the devastation
of that landscape by white
Australians, led her in the
mid-sixties to help form the
Wildlife Preservation Society
of Queensland, an early and
powerful conservation group.
The battles to save such places
as Cooloolah, Fraser Island,
and the Great Barrier Reef
radicalised her, and after
Jack’s death she increasingly
threw herself into active environmental
work, which continued until
the last decade of her life.
Along with her deep awareness
of environmental problems came
a new understanding of the
terrible wrongs inflicted on
the Aboriginal people. In 1975
Judith moved south, to Braidwood
in New South Wales, and soon
after she and Nugget Coombs
helped form the Aboriginal
Treaty Committee, an organisation
dedicated to helping spread
the word about the need for
land rights and a treaty among
white Australians. Judith continued
to fight both for the environment
and for Aboriginal land rights
until her death in June 2000,
at the age of 85. A week before
her death she triumphantly
attended the Reconciliation
March across the bridge in
Canberra, full of hope that
the tide might at last be turning.
Judith Wright has been called “the
conscience of the nation”,
for her early, ongoing and
passionate commitment to Australia’s
environment and the Aboriginal
people. Nevertheless, it is
for her poetry that she is
best remembered, poetry which
has helped shape Australia’s
perception of itself as much
as her tireless battles have
helped to save it. Meredith
McKinney 2001 |
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