4.3.2 Wright & environment

Many of Judith Wright’s later poems continue these themes of dispossession and environmental waste. Her summary of the state of the nation, ‘Australia 1970’ (17), is a scathing condemnation of European land usage and destructive agricultural and industrial practices. She turns the dream of the sunburnt country into a nightmare vision of an ecological wasteland close to death:

Die like the tigersnake

that hisses such pure hatred from its pain

as fills the killer's dreams

with fear like suicide's invading stain.

Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood

that gaps the dozer-blade.

I see your living soil ebb with the tree

to naked poverty.

Wright feels close to the dying land, exhibiting an empathy unusual for white poets of her generation, and uses the technique of naming animals, insects and plants that co-exist in this bleak environment; the eaglehawk, the tigersnake, the ironwood, soldier-ants, scorpions and the “furious animal”.

Her country is fighting back against its exploitation, the elements and animals combining to drive out those who would abuse the earth. Wright takes responsibility for her role as a white person in this country; she is part of the “we are conquerors and self-poisoners”, rather than blaming the problem on some distant ‘they’. She celebrates and lists the hardships which lead colonists to question whether or not this land can ever be truly conquered:

I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust,

the drying creek, the furious animal,

that they oppose us still;

that we are ruined by the thing we kill.

Many of Wright’s more recent poems have concentrated both on form, and on studies of minute detail of the features of the country she sees around her. Her series of short poems grouped together as ‘Notes at Edge’ is a celebration of the many aspects of the microcosm of a river bank and its surrounds, and a discussion of poetry and thought, and the ways in which these two themes central to her work inter-relate.

‘Rock’ (4) attempts to link the lasting nature of poetry with its symbol, the “rock-lump square as a book/split into leaves of clay”. The poem starts with the poet in action (“I dug from this shallow soil”), gleaning what she can from the earth of the age-old continent. The impression of the water's ripple in the stone is as lasting as the “fingerprint” of poetry, and Wright creates a connection between the ancient past and our current creative processes:

I turn a dead sea’s leaves,

stand on a shore of waves,

and touch that day, and look.

There is an immediacy in the words which is belied by their far-off sound. There is also a sense of timelessness, in which the future and the “long-before-time lost day” are brought together in the one moment of contemplation. In a sense, this pays homage to the popularly accepted notion of the Dreaming and the traditional Aboriginal cultures, and their intimate connection with the geographical features of the land. The image of the Australian landscape as a ‘timeless continent’ may well have been overdone in both poetry and prose, but here Wright manages to convey her themes and one’s own sense of wonder at the agelessness of the creativity of both nature and humanity.

In ‘Fox’ (19), the subject is obviously only part of Australian post-colonial past, and is captured in full-flight by Wright with splashes of colour and movement. The subject is alive, and in motion, and Wright crams the short piece with colour, noise and action:

That rufous canterer

through my eye’s corner

crossing an empty space of frost-red grass

goes running like a flame.

The fox/fire is an active force, causing “a bushfire bristle of brush” and “a rustle in dry litter”, hardly the image of stealth and deception normally associated with these predatory pests (indeed, Australians have found it difficult to love the fox, and they are rarely described in such glowing terms). But Wright invests the animal with a liveliness that is difficult to refuse, even though it is concluded with a cry of warning:

Fox, fox!

Behind him follows the crackle of his name.

This poses the question as to whether other poems featuring animals, such as Lee Cataldi’s goanna or even Ted Hughes’ fox, are also about landscape. I believe the answer depends on the relationship of the poet to the subject, and the value systems that are made explicit in the poem. Wright and Cataldi, like Jack Davis and Lionel Fogarty, write of animals and plants as if they are part of the fabric of the environment and so are to be considered as features of landscape.

‘River Bend’ (20) delves into the gloomier landscapes; of hunting and death, of sacrifice, of lonely haunted places where people no longer survive, of the threatening aspects of nature. The poem begins like a murder mystery:

Who killed that kangaroo-doe, slender skeleton

tumbled above the water with her long shanks

cleaned white as moonlight?

Pad tracks in the sand where something drank fresh blood.

So far we have the victim, the scene of the crime, forensic evidence and a motive. But this is no simple whodunnit, this is also a thriller:

Last night a dog howled somewhere,

a hungry ghost in need of a sacrifice.

This is a landscape similar in feel to Wright’s ‘Nigger's Leap, New England’. Atrocities have occurred in this place, and the dark mood is explained by the description of the last of the local Aboriginal population, who lived on this river, and whose community was obviously decimated:

the last old woman,

thin, black, and muttering grief,

foraged for mussels, all her people gone.

It is the “muttering grief” which is the underlying mood to this poem, the animal life and the river itself combining to mourn the past and to threaten those who come near this river bend inhabited by memory and ghosts:

The swollen winter river

curves over stone, a wild perpetual voice.