Most of us who survived the Australian secondary school system over the past few decades have studied Wright's poem ‘Bora Ring’. (15) The poem examines both the physical remains of an Aboriginal sacred site, and the issues surrounding the decimation of the Aboriginal population in the area.
It emphasises the importance of the traditional cultures, and their continuing impact (regardless of the extermination of the population). For, although the known traditions have died out with the people:
The dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth
and the land itself has not forgotten. Even many years later:
the grass stands up
to mark the dancing ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.
The blame for the absence of the traditional peoples is squarely placed upon their brothers, the white pastoralists who, Wright claims, still bear the mark of murderer:
Only the rider’s heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.
Wright’s landscape, therefore, is one which is active, which cries out with the voices of ghosts, and which still manages to remind the conquerors of their shame, just as the young Wright observed members of her own family halting at "sightless shadows" on their rural property.
Shirley Walker, in her study of Wright’s poetry, Flame and Shadow, believes that rather than being an active land, Wright’s New England is “alive and suffering but it has been stripped, whipped and beggared by its human overlords, rather than by natural forces”. (1991: 27)
Equally, in ‘Nigger's Leap, New England’ (16), Wright raises the issues of the deaths which occurred in the advance of white settlement. New England is Wright’s own familiar childhood territory, and in this poem she describes the country with remarkable clarity:
The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Night runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark, O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.
This is the voice of someone describing country with which they are well-acquainted. The range is equated with a human body, its spine stretching in outline against the clouds. The geological past is evident, in the “spurs tip backward from the sun”, providing a visual image for the reader of a great outcrop thrust up in a prehistoric volcanic eruption, but still, somehow, moving away from light. It is a dark place then, not a surprising setting for the murderous events described later in the poem.
Oddly enough, many contemporary critics persisted in describing the event outlined in the poem as “suicide” (Brissenden, in Thomson, 1968: 43), while Vincent Buckley goes so far as to say of this poem and ‘Bora Ring’:
She is not precisely offering an indictment of our treatment of the Aborigines; that sort of complaint is not really in keeping with her general attitude to poetry. Although the suggestion of guilt and terror is unmistakably there, she is making a point not so much about man’s injustice to man as about the general catastrophe of life in which the Aboriginal cultures, like all others, have been implicated. (1957: 163)
Both the poet and the poem’s narrator are connected to this place, have a sense of its importance to themselves and to the people who preceded their occupation of the country. There is also a haunting sense that the spirits of the traditional owners are still alive in the land, that the land itself is taking revenge upon those who threw its people from the cliffs. The awareness of this revenge is present in the mind of the reader and clearly stated by the poet and her narrator:
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tided up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
The poem describes also the sense of dislocation felt by the early white settlers, whose lives were turned upside down by the “weird” landscape they encountered in the new colonies: seasons that seemed back-to-front, strange animals and plants, harsh elements, and a topography which did not appeal to the European eye.
It is the same displaced and dispirited sense which Marcus Clarke described (see 4.1.4) which Wright is attempting to convey, the isolation which dampened the spirits of the explorers (consider the number of geographical features named Mount Despair, Mount Dreadful or Mount Disappointment by hopeless explorers, says Clarke) and which defeated many of the white settlers who took up farming tracts in a country inhospitable to European agriculture:
Now must we measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See, in these gulfs, how small the light of home.
The Europeans are indeed on foreign soil, arriving in their “boats of clouds”, but are nevertheless intimidated by their surroundings. The “gulfs” are not only a topographical feature of the European’s new world, they are literally gulfs apart from the known environment (the term is also descriptive of the valleys set into the massive range). There are enemies all around; fear pervades the experience of this land and diminishes its value, even for agricultural purposes. The great force to be feared is the night, the darkness, a silent, threatening and omnipotent presence:
Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history,
that has sunk many islands in its good time.
It is important, at this point, to consider Wright in relation to the tradition of Aboriginalism in white Australian poetry.
There is a resemblance to some of the Jindyworobak themes in the early Wright poems. However, certain distinctions regarding approach must be made, and Wright herself has shirked close association with the group (Elliott, 1979: 146)
Wright’s poems acknowledge that the indigenous people of Australia did not simply “pass”, but that a violent dispossession did occur, and that responsibility for that dispossession rests also with current generations. This is a vital distinction to be made between Wright and her generation of Australians (and later generations) which preferred, even when writing Aboriginalist verse, to convey the impression that the indigenous peoples had somehow mystically vanished (see 4.2).
Wright did not make free use of words from Aboriginal languages in the same way as Jindyworobak poets such as Ingamells (whose ‘Moorawathimeering’ is laughable) who had limited, if any, real contact with Aboriginal communities. While modern readers may judge some of her earlier works as having a patronising tone, Wright’s attitudes and views on her world adjusted and changed over the years, both in her poetry and in her political life.
Wright’s books The Generations of Men (1959) and The Cry For the Dead (1981) were amongst her personal attempts to deal with a family legacy of displacement of, and violence towards, the Aboriginal communities who had lived on the lands settled by her family. “Like the Jungian shadow,” writes Shirley Walker, “the Aborigines must be brought up into the consciousness and accepted before the shame and guilt of the white race can be healed”. (1991: 190)
Her writings about the land, from as early as Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, were also concerned with the inheritance of colonisation, and reconciliation of the past.
This was something to do with the land itself. Her poetry had long been concerned with this search, but she was realising more and more that it also demanded a new understanding or our dealings with Aboriginal people and a new appreciation of their culture. If we managed to do that Australia might “become something new in the world … [as we fashioned] a new kind of consciousness out of our new conditions”.
(Brady, 1998: 191)
Her strong links with Aboriginal writers and organisations, and those who supported the Aboriginal community, such as Nugget Coombs, placed her in a pivotal role in the politics of the developing literary community and the movements for recognition of Aboriginal land rights.
In particular, her close friendship with her “shadow sister”, Oodgeroo (Kath Walker), engaged her in an ongoing learning process, and was a source of great inspiration and joy. “Look after yourself Kath and keep writing,” she wrote to her friend in 1975, “it reaches more people than you think and we’ve only got one Kathy Walker … and though our shadow cries, still we are tied together in a special way and I love you.” (Brady, 1998: 362)
In many ways, Wright has been years ahead of (white) public opinion in the areas of environmental and race politics.
Mudrooroo would probably disagree. In his Writing From the Fringe, he describes Wright’s introduction to a volume of her friend Jack Davis’s poems as “enabling her to distance herself from any guilt arising from the treatment of Aborigines” and claims that she would “describe many of his verses as simple appreciations of natural beauty too naive for a sophisticated audience, and that they should not be taken on merit, but in the light of the poet's own gentle personality”. (Mudrooroo, 1990: 86)
If this is the case, then Wright is committing the very wrong done to her in the early days of her career, when she was (in)famously advised by Vincent Buckley to behave as befits her gender:
When she is content to be a woman, enduring the profound incidents of a woman’s life, she is able, paradoxically enough, to transcend her womanliness and be a very fine poet. When she attempts to be not a woman, but a bard, commentator or prophet, she becomes a bit of a shrew — which is the worst and most unwomanly of all things that a woman can become. (1957: 175)