The list might like to ponder on my closing remarks in this 1998 newspaper
review (for the Sydney Morning Herald) of a biography of Judith Wright.

John Tranter

________________________________

South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright, by Veronica Brady,
HarperCollins Australia, ARP AUD$39:95

Reviewed by John Tranter

Judith Wright, now in her eighties, was part of that brilliant generation
of Australian poets who published their first slim volumes in the 1940s,
with the thunder of war in the background and the clash of theory loud in
the air. In 1944 the avant-garde magazine Angry Penguins was holed and sunk
by the hoax poetry of 'Ern Malley', concocted by the young fogies James
McAuley and Harold Stewart. In that year Geoffrey Dutton and Rosemary
Dobson published their first books of poems, John Blight his in 1945,
Judith Wright and James McAuley theirs in 1946, and Francis Webb his
dazzling A Drum for Ben Boyd in 1948.
        Judith Wright has outlived most of her colleagues, and is generally agreed
to be Australia's most important living poet. She has also been a committed
activist in environmental, peace and Aboriginal affairs.
        This last concern seems to derive from her awareness that her family
benefited from the extermination of the Aborigines where they settled on
pastoral leases in Queensland and in NSW.
        As well, her grandfather, a Justice of the Peace, had been told that a
group of local Aborigines had been massacred by white men, and had
apparently done nothing to bring the murderers his neighbours to justice.
        Wright was a feminist from an early age, and leaned to the left from her
twenties, though she was never a communist. The ones she met were 'one
eyed' and 'tough and abusive'. She remained what they'd call a 'bourgeois
individualist', attacking governments of whatever stripe when they failed
to see their duty.
        In 1943, when Wright was in her late twenties, she met Jack McKinney, a
self-taught philosopher. He was more than twenty years older, separated
(though not divorced) from his first wife, and a father. Judith bought a
small house in Mount Tamborine, high in the rainforest overlooking the
Queensland Gold Coast, and a few years later they decided to live there
together. They had a child; Jack was nearly sixty when their daughter
Meredith was born. He was an idealist and a great reader, interested in
linguistics, politics, quantum physics and a range of philosophies, and
could talk the leg off a table. He became the great love of her life. When
the laws on divorce became more liberal at last and they were finally able
to marry, they did so, in 1962. Less than five years later Jack was dead.
        When they met, they began to study the psychology of unconscious forces,
reading Jung and others: McKinney from a philosophical viewpoint, Wright in
an attempt to yoke together modern poetry, ancient myths and the darker
urges that shape society. This gave her verse a density and a sense of
purpose that the work of some other writers lacked. Its gravitas, though,
sometimes lent it a heavy and earnest tone. Her poems are not noted for wit
or humour, although they are wide-ranging, thoughtful and passionate, and
generations of young people have been inspired by them.
        Unfortunately for our national literary reputation, the Australian PEN
nomination of her name to the Swedish Academy's Nobel Prize committee
proved fruitless. Then again, the Swedish Academy is made up of eighteen
old men, and is exactly the kind of chauvinist, elitist, self-perpetuating,
geriatric bureaucracy Wright has challenged all her life.


South of My Days is the authorised biography. It was written with Wright's
cooperation and help. While this guarantees accuracy and thoroughness,
Veronica Brady is perhaps too apt a choice as biographer. She is a nun (a
member of the Loreto Order), a literary academic critic, and a social
activist with a strong concern for the disadvantaged. Her sympathies run
parallel to Wright's all the way. A more critical book might have been more
satisfying to read.
        I would have liked a more incisive analysis of Wright's poetry. She has an
abundant talent and a solid dedication to her craft, and few among the vain
and quarrelsome clan of poets would claim to have a tenth of her courage,
humility and general human decency.
        But Judith Wright seems to have steered away from the more exciting
currents of literature in Australia and elsewhere. Her technique is not
adventurous. More importantly, she takes for granted that poetry's main
purpose should be emotionally and spiritually uplifting, what the American
poet John Ashbery once characterised as the work of the Salvation Army.
        Judith Wright's has been a long life, and this is a long book. I found it
tiring in the end to wade through the recitation of the details of her
struggles for the issues she believes in the Barrier Reef, rainforests,
coastal dunes, Aboriginal land rights, uranium mining, atomic weapons,
over-population, and many more enough issues for a dozen ordinary people.
These are good and worthy causes and I support each one of them, but as a
catalogue they are tedious. The ceaseless travel, the public talks and
lectures, the buttonholing of politicians, the argumentative
interviews it's an exhausting journey.
        I looked in vain in this biography for any curiosity about the origins,
mechanisms and scale of the obsessive anxiety and anger that drove her to
act thus. What is it that rings Judith Wright's alarm bells and sets her
rushing into the streets year after year, when others are content to curl
up with a good book?

More than a decade ago Judith Wright stopped writing poetry. She said she
was too old for it, and also that she was too busy with other issues. What
she has left us is a spirited body of writing, and a model for a humane and
committed concern for the future of the human race.
        I think it's time to put her image on a postage stamp, but I guess that's
a futile wish. This is, after all, the society whose obstinate philistinism
exasperated one of our great poets all her life. Athletes, trains and
penguins are about all our philatelic bureaucrats are capable of, and
perhaps these childish images are all we deserve.

__________________________


from John Tranter

        Editor, Jacket magazine: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/
        - new John Tranter homepage - poetry, reviews, articles, at:
                http://www.austlit.com/johntranter/
        - early writing at:
                http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/
______________________________________________
        39 Short Street, Balmain NSW 2041, Sydney, Australia
        tel (+612) 9555 8502 fax (+612) 9818 8569