The director discreetly coughed, eager to clear the room for the next funeral.
That night, I woke up past midnight with the distinct sensation of my grandfather’s cold hand gripping mine. One last bone-crunching handshake.
‘What is it?’ asked R, stirring.
‘It’s nothing. Just hold my hand.’
Judith’s habit of inflating Jack’s importance and diminishing her own could already be observed in the early days of their courtship:
Darling I’ve just finished typing the article and it came over me all of a sudden on the crest of a great wave of humility that I belong to a very great man…and when my modest name goes down to posterity it will be because I had the honour of typing the first copies.45
The year after his death, she persuaded Chatto and Windus in London to posthumously publish The Structure of Modern Thought. It was brought out in 1971. Aside from a snobbish dismissal in the Spectator , the notices were sympathetic. But none of it added up to the ‘intellectual atom bomb’46 he’d predicted in an early letter. Judith, unlike my grandfather, had a second great love: a 25-year relationship with the high-profile public servant Nugget Coombs. Still, she remained a fierce advocate for Jack’s philosophy all her days, and often said her greatest regret was not bringing it to a wider audience. They are buried together in the Mount Tamborine cemetery under a gravestone that reads ‘United in Truth’. She insisted all her life that Jack McKinney would have made a seminal contribution to twentieth-century thought, if anyone had cared to listen.
On the evidence of The Structure of Modern Thought, it’s hard not to conclude that Jack’s greatest contribution to twentieth-century intellectual life was the imprint he left in Judith Wright’s poetry. However brave, brilliant and charismatic, he was not the neglected giant she believed him to be. He was her muse, I think, in an era when it wasn’t acceptable for the woman to be the genius and the man to play the supporting role, even among free thinkers and artists. And he was foremost among the many difficult causes Judith championed over the years.
From the 1970s until her death in the year 2000, Wright’s focus shifted from poetry to environmental activism and agitation for Indigenous rights. One of her great early successes as President of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland was the push to protect the Cooloola sand mass from rutile and zircon mining. In 1967, the Bjelke-Petersen state government granted Conzinc Riotinto a permit to mine sections of the 1.8 million year old Cooloola dunes, with operations set to expand within a few years. As the 1972 state elections approached, the WPSQ petitioned the Queensland parliament and targeted marginal seats. Their grassroots campaign, ‘Spend Five Cents to Save Cooloola’, resulted in 15,000 postcards being delivered to the Premier’s office:
Your government’s failure to declare the whole of Cooloola a National Park, in the face of mounting public pressure, is deplorable. The only acceptable use for this unique wilderness is its immediate dedication as a National Park.47
Their efforts prompted a backbench revolt against cabinet. Bjelke-Petersen eventually sided with the nervous backbenchers, using his casting vote to save the dunes and his own job. Sand mining ceased in 1976 and the whole of Cooloola is now part of Great Sandy National Park.
Forty years on from that victory, and a couple of years after the centenary of Judith Wright’s birth, the ongoing urgency and importance of her work – both as a poet and a conservationist – lies in the way she speaks to global environmental crisis out of the haunted, damaged spaces of the colonised Australian landscape. Gradually – with the translation of her work into Japanese, Russian, Spanish and other languages, and new scholarship like that of Stuart Cooke placing her work in dialogue with Latin American nature poetry48 – we are coming to recognise Wright as a world poet rather than one who merely explains Australia to itself. She is a poet of our hemisphere – ‘this southern weather’49– whose themes of environmental destruction and decolonisation resonate far beyond the peaceful beaches of Lake Cootharaba.
So, we lie sleeping in the lakeside house on land that belongs to us but will never be ours. The wind whispers ‘Coo-loo-la’ in the melaleucas. Vera sleeps on my chest in a room filled with golden light.
Al never set eyes on the lakeside house, but I know he would have loved it: the boatshed and macadamia tree out the back, the breezy eastern outlook from the veranda. Water was always a solace to him. Mum took him to the ocean at every opportunity during the 20 years he lived alone. They had sailed mirror dinghies together on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne when she was a girl. The lakeside house, furnished with his things, is decorated with seashells and driftwood and Mum’s photos of the world’s watery places: the Scottish lochs, the Yangtze River, the Aegean Sea. And there, out the window, our shining lake. Beyond its far shore, beyond the thin finger of land separating us from the Pacific, the roar of the ocean breakers is louder; the tide is rising.
It’s good to be still, having moved so much these last years. This is Dulingbara and Gubbi Gubbi country, but I’m finally beginning to feel we belong here, too. Outside all is water, light and air. Melbourne, Pátzcuaro, Torreón, Brisbane and Mexico City converge in the voices of the older generation. Sleep’s tide takes us. Though we are surrounded by my mother’s photos of her travels in the north, our dreams are of the south: the Oaxacan village where the healer made her prophecy; the Patagonian glacier we heard crack like thunder; the cave paintings at Carnarvon of red clay hands reaching out of the past. At the edge of consciousness, I register hands lifting Vera off me, carrying her into the next room.
I wake alone. R’s voice floats in from the balcony, speaking to our daughter in soft, childish tones. As I emerge, blinking in the sunlight, I see she has Vera sitting on the broad wooden railing facing the lake. It’s a clear morning and the water’s surface is ‘blue as a doll’s eye’.50 I put my arms around R and give Vera a good-morning peck on the cheek, but she barely acknowledges it, because her eyes are fixed on the undulating sky upon the water where a pelican is about to land. For a moment, it hangs over a perfect mirror image of itself.
Then the two birds merge.
Notes
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
1 G. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, G. Rabassa (trans.), Avon Bard, New York, 1971, p. 227.
2 Juan Manuel Santos cited in A. Navarro, ‘Colombia despide a García Márquez con Mozart y vallenatos’, El Espectador, 22 April 2014, viewed 13 June 2014,
3 Santos cited in ‘Gabo vivirá para siempre en las esperanzas de la humanidad: Santos’, El Espectador, 21 April 2014, viewed 13 June 2014,
4 J. Cruz, ‘Gabo ya no es de este mundo’, El País, 21 April 2014, viewed 13 June 2014,
5 Santos cited in Navarro, El Espectador.
6 J. Cruz, ‘Gabo ya no es de este mundo’.
7 ‘Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude’, New York Times, 3 March 1970, p. 39.
8 S. J. Levine, ‘The Latin American Novel in English Translation’, The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, Efraín Kristal (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 302.
9 Harriet de Onís cited in Levine, ‘The Latin American Novel’, p. 303.
10 G. García Márquez, ‘Nobel Lecture: The Solitude of Latin America’, Stockholm, 1982, viewed 27 May 2014,
11 García Márquez cited in G. Martin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life, Bloomsbury, London, 2004, p. 565.
12 J. L. Borges, ‘The Homeric Versions’, The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986, Eliot Weinberger (ed.), Esther Lane et al. (trans.), Pengu
in, New York, 2000, p. 69.
13 R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch et al. (eds), W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2001, p. 1470.
14 ‘La cultura latinoamericana de luto’, Granma, 17 April 2014, viewed June 2014,
15 Mario Vargas Llosa cited in V. Gorodischer, ‘Gabriel García Márquez: el mundo despide al gigante de las letras’, La Nacion, 19 April 2014, viewed 13 June 2014,
16 H. Fontova, ‘Gabriel García Márquez Castro propagandist police snitch’, FrontPage Mag, 23 April 2014, viewed 13 June 2014,
17 ‘The magician in his labyrinth’, The Economist, 26 April 2014, viewed 23 February 2015,
18 P. Carey, ‘Like Joyce, García Márquez gave us a light to follow into the unknown’, The Guardian, 18 April 2014, viewed 13 June 2014,
Caracas
1 S. Bolívar cited in M. Arana, Bolívar: American Liberator, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2013, p. 450.
We Want Them Alive
1 E. Poniatowska, ‘Regresenlos’, La Jornada, 26 October 2014, viewed 1 October 2018, < http://semanal.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/2014/10/26/201cmexico-se-desangra201d-dice-elena-poniatowska-en-el-zocalo-4330.html/> (author’s translation).
2 Felipe de la Cruz cited in P. Ortiz, ‘No tengo miedo dice el padre de Ayotzinapa que enfrentó a Peña Nieto’, Univision, 8 November 2014, viewed 16 December 2014, < https://www.univision.com/noticias/noticias-de-mexico/no-tengo-miedo-dice-el-padre-de-ayotzinapa-que-enfrento-a-pena-nieto > (author’s translation).
3 Mario César González cited in M. de Lao, ‘Padres de los otros 42 normalistas insistirán en la búsqueda, dicen’, La Jornada Guerrero, 8 December 2014, viewed 9 December 2014,
4 D. Agren, ‘Mexico’s monthly murder rate reaches 20-year high’, The Guardian, 22 June 2017, viewed 1 October 2018, < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/21/mexicos-monthly-rate-reaches-20-year-high>.
5 Human Rights Watch, ‘Mexico Events of 2017,’ World Report 2018, 1 January 2018, viewed 1 October 2018, < https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/mexico>.
6 Agren, The Guardian.
7 J. Kryt, ‘Why the military will never beat Mexico’s cartels’, The Daily Beast, 4 February 2016, viewed 20 June 2016,
8 E. Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, Ediciones Era, Mexico City, 2002, p. 13 (author’s translation).
9 ibid.
10 Poniatowska, ‘Regresenlos’.
11 Investigative Reporting Program, UC Berkeley, ‘Iguala: la historia no oficial’, Berkeley, 13 December 2014, viewed 13 March 2015,
12 M. Lowry, Under the Volcano, Penguin, New York, 2000, p. 250.
13 ibid., p. 248.
14 D. Hernandez, ‘The missing 43: Mexico’s disappeared students’, Vice News, 29 November 2014, viewed 6 January 2015,
15 Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, Informe Ayotzinapa: investigación y primeras conclusiones de las desapariciones y homicidios de los normalistas de Ayotzinapa, 6 September 2015, viewed 15 October 2017,
16 S. Martínez, ‘Los 43 pudieran haber sido incinerados en crematorios del ejercito: especialistas’, La Jornada, 4 January 2015, viewed 26 March 2015,
17 J. Brahms, ‘Text: Brahms – Ein Deutsches Requiem,’ Stanford University, viewed 16 March 2015,
18 Ezequiel Mora cited in H. Briseño, ‘Decreta el governador tres días de duelo en memoria del estudiante identificado’, La Jornada Guerrero, 8 December 2014, viewed 9 December 2014,
19 María Concepción Tlatempa cited in M. de Lao, La Jornada Guerrero (author’s translation).
Roraima & Manaus
1 B. Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?, Vintage, London, 1998, p. 273.
Don’t Care if It Ever Rains Again
1 J. Hernández, El Gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872, La Nación, Buenos Aires, 2004, p. 6 (author’s translation).
2 J. Miller (W. Lane), ‘What New Australia is’, New Australia: The Journal of the New Australia Cooperative Settlement Association, vol. 1, no. 6, 8 April 1893, p. 4.
3 Hernández, El Gaucho Martín Fierro, p. 34 (author’s translation).
And the Village Was Fair to Look upon
1 M. Gilmore, ‘Wild Horses’, More Recollections, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1935, p. 1.
2 ‘The New Australia Madness’, National Advocate, 10 June 1893, p. 2, viewed 30 November 2017,
3 J. Miller (W. Lane), ‘Introduction’, New Australia: The Journal of the New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association, vol. 1, no. 1, 19 November 1892, p. 1.
4 G. Souter, A Peculiar People: William Lane’s Australian Utopians in Paraguay, 1968, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1991, p. 139.
5 J. Strauss (ed.), ‘Introduction’, The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2004, p. xxxviii.
6 A. Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid: In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1997.
7 Souter, A Peculiar People, p. 279.
8 Cosme Cooperative Colony, Cosme Monthly, December 1894.
9 Cosme Cooperative Colony, Cosme Monthly, February 1897.
10 ‘Ross’s Monthly’ cited in G. Souter, ‘William Lane (1861–1917)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne University Press, 1983, viewed 30 November 2017,
11 Cosme Cooperative Colony, Cosme Monthly, March 1898.
Redcliffe
1 J. Manifold, ‘The Tomb of Lt. John Learmonth, A.I.F’, Australian Poetry since 1788, G. Lehman and R. Gray (eds), University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2011, p. 385.
Old Peak, Young Peak
1 J. María Arguedas, Los ríos profundos, Editorial Horizonte, Lima, 2011, p. 49 (author’s translation).
2 R. Darío, Selected Writings, Penguin, New York, 2005, p.82 (author’s translation).
3 G. de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru: Abridged, K. Spalding (ed.), H. V. Livermore (trans.), Hackett, Cambridge, 2006, p. 3.
4 T. Cusi Yupanqui, An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru, R. Bauer (trans.), University Press of Colorado, Denver, 2005, p. 2.
5 M. Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2011, p. 172.
6 Arguedas, Los ríos profundos, p. 65.
7 ibid., p. 16.
8 H. Bingham, ‘In the wonderland of Peru’, National Geographic, 1913, republished April 2011, viewed 6 October 2015,
9 ibid.
10 ibid.
11 R. Kipling, Kim, Penguin, London, 1987, p. 49.
12 P. L. v
an den Berghe and J. Flores Ochoa, ‘Tourism and nativistic ideology in Cuzco, Peru’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 27, no. 1, 2000, p. 13.
13 R. Kipling, ‘The Explorer’, Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday, Page and Company, New York, 1915, pp. 19–22.
14 Bingham, National Geographic.
15 Van den Berghe and Flores Ochoa, Annals of Tourism Research, p. 17.
16 P. Neruda, Confieso que he vivido, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1999, p. 195 (author’s translation).
17 E. Guevara, Diarios en motocicleta: notas de viaje, Ocean Sur, Mexico City, 2004, p. 107 (author’s translation).
18 ibid.
19 J. Culler, ‘Semiotics of tourism’, The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 1, no. 1, 1981, p. 130.
20 Van den Berghe and Flores Ochoa, Annals of Tourism Research, p. 17.
21 ‘Drastic new rules coming very soon for visitors to Machu Picchu’, Peruvian Times, March 2014, viewed 23 October 2015,
22 Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu, p. 57.
23 J. L. Borges, ‘Coleridge’s Dream’, The Total Library, E. Weinberger (ed.), E. Lane et. al (trans.), Penguin, New York, 2000, p. 372.
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