On this day 20 years ago –
June 25, 2000 – Judith Wright died. She was one of Australia's
great writers, poets and activists who made a huge and profound
contribution to literature and environmental campaigns over many
years. She was a friend and mentor to me: I'm marking the occasion
of her passing by sharing some notes about our connection.
As
a 14-year-old, in 1969,
I read Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
about the
disastrous consequences of pesticides for the environment. It changed
my life; I was distraught and in despair. I began to furiously write
letters to newspapers and politicians about saving everything from
whales to wedge-tailed eagles.
I
wrote also to Judith Wright. At the time she was living in a cottage
in the Gold Coast hinterland in
Long Road,
on
Mt
Tamborine, which
was surrounded
by subtropical rainforest. Her husband of four years, the philosopher
Jack McKinney, had died there
three
years previously.
 |
| Judith Wright at Half Moon in 1984 |
Judith
responded with a long, hand-written letter explaining how happy she
was that young people like me were so enthusiastic about protecting
the natural world. I was in
awe;
if
her intention was to inflame the activist fire in my belly, it worked.
She
introduced me to a couple of like-minded rebellious youngsters. We
formed
the Queensland Conservation Movement, which was
to
take up the cudgel for various issues in the years ahead, holding
weekly meetings at the University of Queensland and later changing
its name to the Wildlife Research Group (Queensland). The
WRG played an important role in the 1970s campaigning to protect
places like the Conondale Range and Cooloola.
We
continued to correspond and it's to my great
regret that I've misplaced those early letters from
Judith, written in her trademark tiny scrawl. I
was camped on Mt Tamborine in December 1970 when she
invited me to her home for the day. She showed me my first Regent
Bowerbird in the
garden – a male I described in my notes as “strikingly
beautiful”; I
regard it still as one of the world's finest birds.
 |
| Regent Bowerbird |
Judith
“told me something of the mountain's birdlife” and introduced me
to a birder friend who lived nearby, Hilda Curtis, who showed us a
Satin Bowerbird bower. This was another first for
me, a newcomer to birding:
I enthusiastically recorded how the bower included
“2 blue biros, 2 empty biro cases, 1 blue clothes peg, 1 piece of
blue wire, 1 toy blue wheel, 1 blue bottle cap”. My friend Glen Ingram and I were to house-sit the cottage for her in later years.
Judith
Wright had a distinctive, clipped voice and
dispensed
advice
forcefully
and frankly; she did not suffer fools. In
1972, in my final year of school, I was organising protests
against the supersonic Concorde jet, among other things. Judith
bailed me up in the Brisbane head office
of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland – a venerable
organisation of which she was president and co-founder. She told me
that noisy demonstrations I was leading
on city footpaths were not helping the cause and that I should “pull
my head in a bit”, as I noted in a diary at the time.
I
left Queensland to move interstate in 1977 due to a combination of
relationship commitments and deep disillusionment with the National
Party regime of Joh Bejlke-Petersen. When I returned to my home state
in 1982, Judith – who had also moved interstate – wrote
to me:
“Brave
of you to go back to Queensland. I am glad it is not my home state;
but when the National Party gets to rule Australia I hope New Zealand
will accept me for my last years!”
I
visited her in
1984 as
a journalist
with
The
Sydney Morning Herald
for lunch and an interview at
her rural
property Half Moon, outside Braidwood in
southern NSW.
I noted in my story that its
“bushland
ambience is scarcely disturbed by a combination of steeple-shaped
roofs, glass-panelled walls and a garden which will never harbour a
non-native plant while Judith Wright is alive”.
 |
| Part of my 1984 Sydney Morning Herald article |
She
was born in Armidale and had as much affection for the high altitude
granite woodlands of the NSW highlands as for the
Queensland
rainforests.
She moved to Braidwood to be near her lover of 25 years, the great
HC “Nugget” Coombs, who
lived nearby in Canberra.
Coombs died in a nursing home in 1998, suffering dementia.
Judith told me during my visit
to Half Moon that the “last place I want to end up” was a nursing
home. She was 69 at the time and managing a 41-hectare
property – which she
was to bequeath to the Australian people through the Australian
National University - was
challenging.
Her hearing was
always poor
and by then it was difficult to communicate with her. While always
amiable and generous,
Judith had a slightly patrician disposition: she berated me for
bringing a bottle of champagne instead of wine for lunch!
Her
first book of poetry,
The Moving Image,
was published in
1946 while she was working at
the University of Queensland as a
research officer. More
followed including Woman
to Man, The Gateway
and The
Two Fires. She
wrote a fine collection
of poems about birds, called Birds,
while living on Mt Tamborine; I cherish a signed copy of the book
that she gave me.
 |
| Inscription - Birds by Judith Wright |
Her
classic tome, The
Coral Battleground,
was a key
milestone in the long-running campaign to protect the Great Barrier
Reef. The many
contributions of this prodigious woman are reflected in numerous
gongs including the Chistopher Brennan Award and the Queen's Gold
Medal for Poetry. A federal electorate in Queensland is named in her
honour and the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane
stands in her memory.
I
can fairly assume what Judith would be thinking now amid the tumult
of bushfires, climate change and pandemics. She said this to me in
1985: “Clearly, we are
programming ourselves for destruction. I doubt the capacity of the
human race to survive and I'm afraid I don't like our chances.
Murphy's Law will get us in the end if nothing else does. Einstein
once said that the human race was too far ahead of itself. That's
still the case.”
