words
as its essential tools, as its very life-blood in fact. Of course, not
all poets set out to communicate a clear ‘message’, but I am referring
to poetry here as a powerful means of speaking to a reader or audience.
Judith Wright (1915-2000), one of Australia’s greatest
poets, brought up on her family property in the beautiful gorge country
near Armidale NSW, believed that poets should affirm life against death
and the threat of destruction in this technological age. In her essay,
‘The Writer as Activist’. she quoted Charles Harpur, an early Australian
poet: ‘poetry has never been a mere art with me, but always the vehicle
of earnest purpose.’
Most of her life was spent campaigning, through poetry,
prose and active lobbying, to save the Australian environment, notably
the Great Barrier Reef (threatened by oil mining) and the coastal sands
of Queensland. Praising the quality of endurance in Man and Nature, she
writes,
‘Only those coral insects live
that work and endure under
the breakers’ cold continual thunder’ (‘The Builders’).
Her anger blazed through such poems as ‘Australia’:
‘Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood
that gaps the dozer-blade
I see your living soil ebb with the tree
to naked poverty’.
Her deep love of the land and all native flora and fauna
is poured forth in her earlier poems, such as ‘Northern River’ written
in quieter mood:
’lit with the rock-lilies,
the river speaks in the silence,
and my heart will also be quiet’.
Her philosophy about the oneness of all living things is
expressed in many of her poems, where she seeks to identify with the
natural environment - sun, moon and stars, plants, animals and her
fellow human beings, accepting both the light
and the darkness within herself and others. Passionate
about the manglers of her beloved English language, she creates a scene
on the level of fantasy in ‘At a Poetry Conference Expo ‘67’, a poem
where ignorant screaming crowds indulge in the burning of poets which
becomes the burning of language itself.
Wright will be remembered too for her campaigning,
through her poems, for aboriginal land rights, prefigured in one of her
early pieces:
‘The song is gone,
the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.’ (’Bora Ring’)
These few very brief excerpts might create a flavour of
the lyrical poetry of Judith Wright, contained in the ten volumes of her
work published between 1942 and 1985. Her Collected Poems (Angus and
Robertson, 1994), containing approx. 430 pieces, is surely one of our
most treasured examples of ‘art as communication’. They deserve to be
read again and again.
