There is no monument to those who kept Eliza Fraser alive.
When Judith Wright’s poetry was first foisted upon me as a schoolboy in the 1990s, she was still being taught as a jingoistic nationalist. The focus was on early poems like ‘Bullocky’ and ‘South of My Days’, which could be taken to celebrate the heroic pioneers of Australia’s rural mythology. In the classroom, even furiously angry political poems like ‘Australia, 1970’ were systematically drained of their force by the counting of iambic feet and the labelling of line endings. Wright, ever the prophet, accurately predicted that generations of schoolteachers would turn her poems into ‘implements of torture’. That was certainly the case at my suburban state school, where even the handful of us who were keen readers and drawn to poetry decided, on the basis of Judith Wright and a narrow sampling of others, that Australian literature was ‘too dusty’ for modern city kids. We devoted ourselves to reading Americans and Brits. They seemed to inhabit a larger, more sophisticated universe than our own. It was only in my twenties, when the tough subject matter, formal daring and intellectual energy of Latin American writers set my senses alight, that I began to be curious about writing from my own hemisphere.
Further around the shoreline, past the general store and the camping ground, stands the trunk of a lone paperbark. Knotted white, and dead as many years as I can remember, its branches claw the sky like a witch’s gnarled hand. Even when campers’ kids play in the shallows around it or kick a ball across sand knobbly with its dead roots, the tree casts an eerie spell over this stretch of beach.
This scorching summer morning we have the place to ourselves. I hold Vera up to see the skeletal paperbark, but recoil when she reaches out for its trunk.
‘Don’t touch. Not that tree.’
The haunted paperbark has always reminded me of the ‘driftwood spear’ that startles the narrator of Wright’s poem ‘At Cooloolah’, from The Two Fires (1955). It is among her best-known lyrics and became an unofficial rallying cry for conservationists pushing to protect the region from sand mining in the 1960s and 1970s. Returning to it after many years, I realised I’d only skimmed the surface.
The poem is a nature inscription. It commemorates the feelings triggered by a place of natural beauty, beginning with the image of a white-faced heron. Wright refers to it by its common name, the blue crane, capturing the impression that the bird, a greyish-white wader common across Australasia, ‘wears’ the colour of the evening sky mirrored in the water:
The blue crane fishing in Cooloola’s twilight
Has fished there longer than our centuries.
He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
And he will wear their colour till he dies,24
For Wright, the sight of the crane fails to bring ‘tranquil restoration’,25 as might be expected in the European romantic tradition. ‘Our centuries’ stresses the brevity of settler-Australian presence at Cooloola when compared with the crane’s timeless belonging. It’s not the individual bird whose life has endured centuries, but the species. By repeatedly referring to plural phenomena with singular nouns – ‘plumed reed and paperbark’, ‘crane and swan’ – the poem slides from the individual to the archetypical. Birds often symbolise the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind in Jung’s writing – a strong influence on Wright. The poet’s unconscious fear, anxiety and sense of unbelonging in the Australian landscape are implicitly registered from the outset and become ever more pronounced. The stanza ending ‘till he dies’ has an ominous ring in the wake of Wright’s epigram from Heraclitus, which describes the world as a fire, ‘with measures of it kindling, and measures going out’.26 This is 1955, ten years on from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the USA and Soviet Union locked in an arms race. Are the bird, the lake, the poet and her song all about to be extinguished?
The third stanza shifts suddenly from the threatened loveliness of the lakeside scene to violence of another kind:
But I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people.
I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake,
being unloved by all my eyes delight in,
and made uneasy, for an old murder’s sake.27
What is this old murder? As with the crane, Wright is working from the particular to the general. In talking about one killing, she is referring, in the first instance, to the local fate of ‘those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah’. It’s well known that massacres of Indigenous people took place at nearby Lake Weyba and Teewah Beach during the nineteenth century. But the ‘old murder’ also stands more broadly for the violent dispossession of Australia’s first peoples that was written out of our history over much of the twentieth century. ‘At Cooloolah’ attends to the mental toll repressing this past takes on the settler-Australian conscience. As the daughter of an old pioneering family, Wright feels personally implicated:
Riding at noon and ninety years ago,
My grandfather was beckoned by a ghost –
a black accoutred warrior armed for fighting,
who sank into bare plain, as now into time past.
The cause of the grandfather’s bad conscience becomes clear when we refer to a more detailed version of the same incident in Wright’s novelised family history, The Generations of Men (1959). Albert Wright, Judith’s paternal grandfather, was an important settler in the Dawson Valley district of central Queensland in the 1870s. According to his diaries, he was once called to the scene of a murder of four Aboriginal men. As co-manager of the station and local justice of the peace, it was his duty to inform police. Instead, knowing he would be shunned as a traitor to his fellow white men if he reported the incident, he rode conspicuously back into town, giving the perpetrators time to dispose of the bodies. ‘Neither whites nor blacks would ever speak of them again,’ wrote Judith. ‘But on Albert’s mind they stayed a heavy load.’28 This is the background, in The Generations of Men, to the ghostly appearance of ‘a warrior standing alone by the one dead tree on the plain’.29
In ‘At Cooloolah’ the grandfather’s role as collaborator in a cover-up, rather than a perpetrator, is not spelt out. The reader must disentangle the relationship between old murder, grandfather and ghost for him- or herself. The historian Georgina Arnott argues in The Unknown Judith Wright (2017) that, while the poet was among the first to acknowledge the devastation the pastoral invasion of Australia caused to Indigenous people, her writing tends to downplay her own ancestors’ role in it. For Arnott, Wright’s interpretation of the historical documents suggests ‘the enduring strength of a family loyalty that she was not always fully aware or in control of’.30
Wright might have been a flawed historian. But her poetry gains much of its charge from the tension between family loyalty, love of the land, and the ethical imperative to acknowledge past wrongs. In ‘At Cooloolah’, the neat four-line stanzas and regular five-stress lines express a need for containment and control that is undone by the thematic focus on the return of the repressed. Finally, an ancestral curse wells up from the lake water to trouble the conscience of the pioneer-pastoralist’s poet granddaughter:
And walking on clean sand among the prints
of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear
thrust from the water; and, like my grandfather
must quiet a heart accused by its own fear.31
The spear is the guilt of the historical beneficiary of colonialism, and it is also the fear of the fire that might soon be reflected in the lake’s ‘clear heavenly levels’ in the event of nuclear war. The crane’s centuries of fishing may soon be disrupted, it is implied; even this peaceful shoreline will not be spared.
The little we know of Cooloola’s earliest inhabitants has been built up by triangulating archaeological evidence, written accounts by nineteenth-century Europeans and testimony from a handful of Aboriginal elders.
Camp entrances faced downwind; grass was scattered on the floors of bark huts; possum-skin rugs were sewn together with k
angaroo-tail sinew; they set out inland on daily foraging missions; oysters, fresh fish, scrub turkey, bunya nuts, bandicoots and honey were consumed; children were forbidden to eat eels; the chests and upper arms of initiated men were cut with sharp shells and healed with grease and charcoal; bark canoes were used to navigate waterways; tracks were marked by bending a branch to 90 degrees at hip height; much time was spent gathering firewood; they feared thunder and lightning and would not pronounce the names of the dead; whites were believed to be the ghosts of blacks; the land was believed to have been created by a turtle brooding on the water; the cry of a curlew signalled impending death.
Cooloola, with its infertile soil and dense forests, protected the coastal Dulingbara – the people of the nautilus shell – from Europeans some 25 years longer than their inland neighbours, the Batjala and Gubbi Gubbi, whose traditional lifestyles were disrupted by pastoral settlements along the Mary River and the brutality of the Native Police Force throughout the 1850s. Shell middens and stone artefacts discovered at Cooloola suggest Aboriginal presence for five millennia, with a continuous pattern of occupancy from about 900 years ago until around the time of the 1867 Gympie gold rush. At that time, the demand for building supplies on the booming inland goldfields attracted timbermen to Cooloola’s pristine stands of cedar and pine.
The Dulingbara were shipped off to missions or forced from the forest to seek their fortunes in Gympie, where they often died of imported diseases and drink. They were poisoned at Kilcoy and shot near Lake Weyba at a place now called Massacre Creek. In 1950, an elder named Gaiarbau, or Willie Mackenzie, sat down with an anthropologist and recorded his memories of touring the region as a young man in the 1880s – the basis of much of our present knowledge. A few years later, he spoke with Judith Wright’s close friend, the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who commemorated their encounter in a poem:
I asked and you let me hear
The soft vowelly tongue to be heard now
No more for ever. For me
You enact old scenes, old ways, you who have used
Boomerang and spear…
All gone, all gone. And I feel
The sudden sting of tears, Willie Mackenzie
In the Salvation Army Home.
Displaced person in your own country,
Lonely in teeming city crowds,
Last of your tribe.32
The three of us hike the forest trail out to Mill Point. For the first kilometre or so, Vera gazes into the treetops from the hiking pack on my back, trying to find the whip bird whose song rings out in the canopy. Sunlight slants between the dazzling white trunks of red and scribbly gums, blackbutts and melaleucas. There are plenty of 30- and 40-year-old trees, but nothing older. The forest is still regenerating. By the time we reach the turn-off, Vera’s fast asleep. She ignores the mosquitos, and doesn’t even wake when a huge grey kangaroo, taller than R, bounds across our path and vanishes into the long grass.
The ruined brick chimney of an old dairy under mango and guava trees announces we’ve arrived. Along with a few railway sleepers and a rusted-out boiler, this is all that remains of McGhie, Luya and Company’s timber settlement. At its height in the 1880s, 60 families lived on the shore of Lake Cootharaba. The township flourished for 20 years, sending Kauri pine and cedar to Brisbane by steamer. But by the 1890s, the best timber supplies were exhausted. Shortly after the mill closed its doors, it was wrecked by the catastrophic floods of 1893. Lake water rose 2 metres over the shoreline.
Judith Wright’s ‘The Graves at Mill Point’ describes the lonely tomb of a timber cutter named Alf Watt, whose passing she imagines as the end of the whole forlorn, windblown little outpost: ‘When he died the town died.’33 The poem unfolds as a dialogue between the poet and the bloodwood tree growing from the dead man’s bones: ‘Tell me of the world’s end, / You heavy bloodwood tree.’34
Wright’s lyric has sometimes been interpreted as an elegiac tribute to the pioneers who opened up Cooloola. But I’m inclined to read it ironically, as a grim parody of bush balladry. The bloodwoods, with their tear-shaped leaves, only appear to weep for the woodcutters in their graves, and to flower ‘for their sake’,35 if we accept the anthropocentric conceit that humans operate outside and above nature. If we believe, as Wright did, that humans are part of nature’s web of interdependencies and subject to its laws,36 then what we have is an image of humanity being cut down to size. The wind in the leaves is less a lament for the timber cutter than a sign of nature’s indifference. The trees that outlive the timber town have no cause to mourn its human occupants – they simply go on flowering as they’ve always done.
Like ‘At Cooloolah’, the poem uses local history to prophesy apocalyptic consequences for civilisation more broadly, if human beings continue to assert God-like power over nature. The ultimate symbol of this arrogance, for Judith and Jack, was the nuclear bomb. ‘The long wave that rides the lake / with rain upon its crest’37 is an image of a tidal wave sweeping the placid waters of Cootharaba, perhaps even of nuclear rain. The ruined mill is ‘where the world ends’ in multiple ways. It’s situated at the ‘end’ of civilisation and is where the ‘world’ of the town ended. But in a final and more drastic sense, the Mill Point timber settlement symbolises the end to which the world will come if humans fail to reconfigure their relationship with nature. As in Wright’s more overt poems of atomic anxiety, her fears for the future are embodied in the figure of her daughter, the ‘wandering child’38 who stoops to read Alf Watt’s gravestone.
Through roaring wind and lengthening shadows, we hurry back from Mill Point to the sanctuary of the lakeside house.
In 1966, after 15 years ‘in the very core of concentration’,39 Jack McKinney finally finished The Structure of Modern Thought, his philosophical epic about ‘the modern crisis of feeling and of thought’.40 Though he had written himself out of the personal crisis that had gripped him when he first met Judith, the effort of transforming himself from a soldier-farmer into a published philosopher wrecked his health. He was suffering from rheumatism and severe stomach cramps and had already survived multiple heart attacks. In October, sensing their time together would be limited, the couple took a driving holiday to the ‘obscure hamlet’ of St George in south-west Queensland, where Jack had worked as a drover in his ‘last year of innocence’ before the First World War.41 Half a century on, they found the brigalow country unrecognisable – cleared, ploughed and environmentally devastated. Travelling through this dead landscape, the normally gregarious Jack lapsed into silence.
He was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer upon their return and died, two months later, of a heart attack, at Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane.
Judith couldn’t bring herself to visit the lakeside house for many years. ‘I have not dared to go to Boreen,’ she wrote to Barbara Blackman a year after Jack’s death.42 In 1973, she finally returned to sell Melaleuca. Her last Cooloola poem, ‘Lake in Spring’, attests to the loneliness of this trip, for the shallow reaches of Lake Cootharaba no longer carry Jack’s reflection:
Now when I bend to it again
another spring, another year
have changed and greyed the images,
and the face that lay beside
my own, no longer answers there.43
By the time I returned from my first trip to South America with an unkempt beard, shaggy shoulder-length hair, and a backpack stained with red dust, Old Al was in a high-level aged-care facility near my parents’ house. I turned up with a tape deck, intending to record the story of his war service. Though he remembered who I was, he wasn’t in any state to coherently recount his life. He kept counting the red vehicles in the carpark and the horses in the paddock behind the back fence.
His dementia was advanced by the time R came into my life. She never met him, but she held my hand through the funeral and that was enough. It was a small service at a Redcliffe funeral parlour with about 30 mourners in attendance. Beyond the immediate family, most
were elderly female friends from the retirement village – he had outlived his male friends.
‘Your grandfather could have remarried, you know,’ said his blind neighbour, leaning on my arm. ‘Plenty of ladies were interested.’ She shook her head. ‘But he was a one-woman man.’
We sat across the aisle from my parents through the speeches. My mum, who’d been at the bedside when he died, calmly outlined his childhood, war service, marriage and long widowhood. My peacenik uncle, up from the commune, wept at the lectern as he tried to convey something of the generational divide that had separated him from his father.
In the absence of any religious rites, the funeral director had asked us to supply a reading. Reluctantly, we settled on ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ because an old Banjo Paterson anthology was the only poetry we found in his house. From the state of it, I suspected it had belonged to my grandmother and had sat mouldering in the garage for 20 years. Though there was always a stack of popular science by his bed, I’d never seen Al read a work of imaginative literature. As I read the poem aloud for the assembled crowd, its nostalgic depiction of rural Australia seemed remote from the reality of his life. I wish we’d found Judith Wright in his garage instead.
When the ceremony was done, the funeral director asked if I’d like to say goodbye before the body was taken to the crematorium.
‘Just be aware,’ she said, parting the curtains and leading me towards the coffin, ‘that he’s been in the fridge. The cold gives some people a fright, but it’s perfectly normal.’
He wore a baggy brown suit. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly ajar. I lay my warm hand on his cool one and wondered about the things that hadn’t made it into his journals. ‘Why make a fuss?’ was a far cry from Judith and Jack’s overt anti-war activism. But I thought I sensed in his refusal to celebrate Anzac Day an unspoken scepticism, and in his compulsive reading of atheist polemics a quiet unease about the things he’d been made to do as a young man. There were a million German casualties of the Allied bombing campaign in the Second World War, at a cost of 100,000 Allied airmen. Men who refused to fly were classified as ‘lacking moral fibre’.44 Those who did were asked to flatten whole towns. Some of their missions, like the bombing of Dresden, weren’t directed at major centres of wartime industry, and instead targeted civilians to break German morale. Having survived the terror of more than 40 night-time bombing missions, and lost many friends, Al had 60 years to reflect on what it all meant.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 19