In Memory of Judith Wright

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.”