My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  South of my days’ circle

  I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

  That evening over dinner, John Mitchell asked about what we had done that day. He has a slow, deliberate way of speaking which disguises a sharp and compassionate legal mind. His bemusement with the Wright family saga was plain. Everyone who is not of the family but connected with it, I would discover, lives in its shadow to some degree and must contend with its myths and baggage.

  We talked about Judith’s need to get away from New England after she finished school and how she didn’t get on with her stepmother, Dora.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you a very special rock that Judith used to take Dad [Judith’s brother, Bruce] to when they had major problems with Dora,’ Caroline promised. ‘Judith would say, “We have to have a council meeting.” And they would leave the house and go down to Council Rock and have a talk about what was going on and make a bit of a game plan.’

  THREE

  Council Rock

  Rain had been forecast but for now the sun was shining through scattered clouds. We were at a point in the road that offered a clear view over Wallamumbi, the sheep and cattle station where Judith had grown up, fifty kilometres from Armidale. Caroline pulled over so I could take a photograph.

  ‘I still get a catch in my throat when I look at it,’ she said. ‘Then you have to remind yourself that nothing is forever.’

  She was remembering visits as a girl, the joy of seeing her grandfather, Phillip (Judith’s father), with his barrel chest and arms spread wide in greeting. And the anxiety of knowing that Dora, her stepgrandmother, would be waiting with a medicinal spoonful of molasses.

  Slowly, we drove through the outer paddocks and past a regiment of poplars until we found ourselves gently descending into the ‘mysterious valley’ Judith had written of, the land of her childhood.

  There was a wooden bridge over a creek, and I knew it must be House Creek and that Council Rock would be nearby.

  ‘There it is,’ Caroline said, pulling over again.

  We all got out. There were willows down by the creek, just as Judith had described, but the banks were richly grassy and green. This greenness everywhere was starting to feel uncanny, like a cloak disguising the true country beneath. Judith’s early mature poetry had been written in the wake of a severe drought that had turned the landscape to dust. She wrote of dust eclipsing the sun and the ‘steel-shocked earth’ turning against the plough. This had happened because mankind had dreamed the ‘wrong dream’, a dream of domination over the earth. The result was both the destruction of the land and the devastation wrought by the Second World War, with its ‘eroding gale that scatters our sons’. If there was to be any hope for the future, she believed, there needed to be a change of attitude, a new way of thinking about our relationship with the land.

  Since the turn of the millennium, New England had been again parched by an eight-year drought until it broke, dramatically, only months before our arrival. Everyone kept telling me that the countryside didn’t normally look so well fed and watered, and that I ought to come back in winter when the bones would be poking through. Although a little disappointed that the landscape was refusing to neatly replicate what I had imagined, I couldn’t help feasting on the greenness. The countryside around Melbourne where I lived was blonde and knuckle-bare and I knew too well how drought could bleach the land until it threatened to blow away. Yet what I was seeing here was an aberration brought on by freak rainfall and modern fertilisers. What Judith had experienced and foreseen back in the early 1940s was, in fact, closer to the reality facing us now. Every time I read an article or book on climate change and its likely impact, I would hear Judith’s voice tolling in my head. Green as her valley looked now, it was my hope that being here would help me better understand the bony landscape of her youth, and how it had helped her see so far ahead of her generation.

  We stopped in the shade of an old oak tree. Before us loomed a massive granite boulder that brought to mind a humped-back animal heaving out of the earth. There was a pleasing symmetry in its relationship with the surroundings, positioned as it was by the creek, the willows and the nearby bridge like a solitary—if very large—stone in a Japanese garden. I could see how it would appeal to children, how it could become a special place. It was screened by a thick stand of pines and poplars and therefore out of sight of the house further up the hill. When she was ten, Judith captured it’s secluded appeal:

  I know a quiet pool where the rushes grow

  And willows overshadow, drooping low

  As if to kiss the water cool and pure.

  On this rock by the sandy-bottomed creek, she and her brothers were free to do as they pleased. Perhaps they had once even scratched their initials into the granite. Now, the top surface was covered with large patches of moss and lichen and tufts of grass, like barnacles on a whale. And the way the rock seemed to be lifting out of the ground suggested that much of its bulk was hidden below, making it a perfect metaphor for a poem.

  Other boulders of various sizes were scattered nearby. When Judith was a child, blackberry bushes grew wild around all these rocks which were, to her young mind, ‘like an assemblage of personalities, whose shapes and surfaces made each of them recognisable.’ But it was the largest and most impressive of these rocks that she was drawn to. Her deep affection for this great rock can be felt in the tender detail with which she later described it. She remembered vividly its seat-like shape above a sloping platform, the hollow where water gathered in the middle, and the crack out of which a black snake sometimes slithered. She remembered how the moss, after rain, would give the rock’s grey surface a green glow. She remembered how the granite smelled like sulphur and struck matches in the summer. All of these textures and colours and smells were, she wrote, ‘still part of me’.

  But, by this stage in her life, Judith felt more keenly than ever that her family had been complicit in robbing the Aboriginal people of New England of their land. The landscape of her childhood had been ‘stripped of all its numinous stories and turned into mere “scenery” at best, and pasture at worst’. She remembered the many granite rocks of the region ‘with a sense of my own exclusion from their meaning. I was born within their influence, but I do not have any right to their story.’ And, yet, as I climbed on to the rock and looked around, imagining Judith standing in this very place, holding her younger brothers in her thrall as she spoke, I felt sure that she had not felt excluded from the rock’s meaning back then. She had brought her own meaning to it. She had sensed the authority of the rock and, although she would later insist that the rock must have held greater significance for the Aborigines of the valley, everything I had learned about Judith told me this rock held enormous significance in her life.

  The name Judith and her brothers gave to the rock—Council Rock—comes from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Her parents had a full set of Kipling, which she was familiar with from a young age. In The Jungle Book, Council Rock is a hill-top covered with stones and boulders where wolf parents bring their new cubs to be recognised by the pack. When the boy Mowgli, who has been separated from his human parents, is adopted by Father and Mother wolf, he is taken to Council Rock. He is reluctantly accepted by the pack, only after intervention by Bagheera, the panther and Baloo, the bear—both of whom instruct him about the laws of the jungle. Although he is human, Mowgli grows up thinking of himself as one of the pack. He not only understands the language spoken by the wolves and other animals in the jungle but is also taught what Baloo describes as ‘the Master-Words’, which are words that will allow him to communicate with (and gain the protection of) the birds and the Snake-People and ‘all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack’.

  It is a story in which to be human is to be Other, even though it confers special powers. Mowgli loves the jungle and loves the freedom and community it gives him. The humans in their nearby village are to be pitied, for t
hey do not understand the language and law of the jungle. Far from being a term for lawlessness or survival of the fittest, as it is commonly understood, the law of the jungle in Kipling is a complex body of learning and behaviours that allow most of the animals to get along. The exceptions are the monkeys who are fickle and uncooperative, aspiring as they do to be more like humans.

  I had not read any Kipling as a child. By the time I came to The Jungle Book, I was steeped in Judith’s life and writing and was able to see what I would not have seen before: that it provided a key to her early understanding of the world and her place in it. An understanding that would become much more sophisticated and philosophically complex as she grew up, yet would remain informed by the relationship with the natural world that Mowgli once knew, and by his experience of loss and alienation when he discovers that he does not really belong either in the pack or the village. In time, Judith too would find herself caught between two worlds when, with the death of her mother, she was cut off from the world of childhood and, with her father’s re-marriage, she became increasingly estranged from the world of her pastoralist family as well.

  But it wasn’t simply her affinity with Mowgli, the archetypal ‘wild boy’, that was significant. When playing on the rock with her brothers, Judith also imagined herself as Mowgli’s teacher. In effect, she was in possession of the Master-Words and able to pass them on. These games began when she was five or six, around the time she began writing poetry but before any of it was published in the children’s page of the Sydney Mail. On the rock, her brothers—whom she regarded as her ‘inferiors’—were relegated to the lower platform ‘while I lectured and commanded’. Here, Judith found her first audience (apart from her mother) and had her first taste of what language can do. In her recollections, she skips over this experience quite lightly as an example of the bossy older sister taking advantage of her position in the pecking order. But clearly much more was going on.

  Her brother, Peter Wright, later recalled that during these games on Council Rock, Judith would strike the granite with a piece of iron and raise sparks, claiming that she had magical powers. It is an electrifying glimpse of the very young Judith in the process of discovering the extraordinary power of language and her ability to wield it; a moment or series of moments during which she felt that anything was possible. According to Caroline, the children were still coming down to the rock when Judith was twelve or thirteen, after their mother’s death and father’s re-marriage. At least here, Judith had a control over events that she lacked up in the house, her stepmother’s domain. Here, she had tasted the potency of the word and, here, her word still carried weight. When she was thirteen, she wrote a poem from the perspective of Thor, the thunder god, which is full of the bravado and confidence that would have characterised her rule at Council Rock:

  Who dares challenge me?

  Ye, the little, petty ones,

  I am lord of earth and sea,

  I am king of storms and suns,

  I am Thor, thunder-god,

  And from my voice the bravest runs.

  She didn’t always imagine herself as the voice of authority, though, and would adopt the perspective of all kinds of plants, animals and ordinary people. The great beauty of writing poetry, she had discovered, was that it allowed her complete freedom to go wherever she chose, to enter the consciousness of any living or imagined being, to become the voice of nature, to wield the Master-Words.

  The stage was set for disillusion.

  Thirty years after those early games on Council Rock, Judith declared what she saw as a crisis in language; a conviction deeply influenced by the views of her husband, Jack McKinney. Jack, over twenty years Judith’s senior, was a maverick thinker who challenged the dominant trends in post-war philosophy. Drawing on Jack’s analysis of how language enabled humans to develop a shared understanding of the world, Judith argued that the word had lost the emotional and symbolic force it once had in primitive times. In the beginning, when humans developed words to describe the visible, concrete world, they did not objectify nature so much as live it. The environment was experienced as an extension of human emotions, sensations and intuitions of the divine. At this time ‘men and women experienced the sacred in earthly objects, so that symbol and the sacred [were] inseparable,’ says writer Karen Armstrong.

  But, over the centuries, it seemed to Judith our knowledge and understanding of the world had grown fiercely analytical and abstract, breaking down this intimate connection between the word and the thing. As a result, ‘the object has, in a sense, died out of our immediate experience, being replaced by a word-idea.’ On top of this, as human thought became more specialised, so did language. Each discipline evolved its own jargon intelligible only to the cognoscenti. More complex and compartmentalised than ever before, human experience had outstripped language’s ability to capture it. Modern writers such as James Joyce responded by pushing language to its very limits. But, in doing so, they amplified the work’s obscurity. This communication breakdown, this failure of language to meet the demands placed upon it, had happened, Judith argued, because we had lost touch with the living earth which is ‘the source of life and language’. Not only were humans alienated from the land but also from any emotional understanding of our place in the cosmos. It was the poet’s responsibility, she felt, to revitalise the language and help forge a new kind of consciousness.

  When I think of this Herculean task she set herself and all poets, an image comes to mind of her standing like Atlas with a great granite rock balanced on her shoulders. For this was, metaphorically speaking, the emotional baggage she carried with her: the legacy of Council Rock and the promise it had once held for her.

  Many of her poems from the 1950s testify to her growing preoccupation with the limitations of language and rational analysis, as she wistfully acknowledges her sense of exclusion from nature’s language. In poems such as ‘Gum-Trees Stripping’, ‘Scribbly Gum’ and ‘For Precision’ can be heard her nostalgia for the pre-modern experience of the world, and the echo of that early desire to possess the Master-Words, the Rosetta Stone of the natural world. This yearning is made explicit in the poem ‘Birds’, in which she expresses the desire to find ‘the words that lie behind’ all languages, both of man and nature. Torn between two worlds—her family and her new life with Jack—she feels that if only she could leave this battleground for the forest, then she could ‘melt the past, the present and the future in one / and find the words that lie behind all these languages.’

  In the early 1960s, during a visit to Wallamumbi, Judith sat by House Creek and recalled how she had once walked bare-foot through the cool water and collected ruby and cloud-coloured pebbles. Pebbles which, when dry and left to gather dust on a shelf, lost the lustre they had in the water. As a girl, she had written poetry without inhibition, without this anxiety that her words were ‘heavy and dull’ like the stones removed from their natural setting. She had once believed ‘any poem might follow my pen’. Now she knew that ‘the ungathered alone stays beautiful / and the best poem is the poem I never wrote.’

  As I sat on the mossy rump of the rock and ate a sandwich, I thought of the biographer Richard Holmes who, when travelling in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson through the Cevennes mountains in southern France, became gripped by the premonition that Stevenson was waiting for him, in person. The sensation was so powerful it was ‘almost like a hallucination’, he wrote in his book Footsteps. But when he reached a bridge he believed Stevenson had crossed, he looked up the river and saw the original old bridge of the village, broken and matted with ivy. This was the one that Stevenson would have crossed. Holmes’ conviction that he would somehow encounter Stevenson suddenly evaporated. ‘There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this was the true sad sign.’

  Over eighty years had passed since Judith and her brothers first started to hold council on the rock. She and her brothers were dead. Wallamumbi wa
s no longer in the Wright family and no one was even living on the property. It was currently looked after by a manager who lived elsewhere. What I felt most strongly here was not a premonition of a possible encounter with Judith’s ghost, but a sharpened awareness of her absence, particularly of the girl whose hair, Pip had told me, was so black it shone blue in the sunlight. I had known the white-haired older woman but not the girl.

  The rock was now an empty stage where almost nothing remained of what had once taken place there: the intense childhood dramas, the performances and games, the dreams dreamed. I wondered what it was I had expected to find. The faint echo of childish voices? An atmosphere charged with emotion? All I could do was be alert to the mood of the rock at this particular moment, and to what might have happened here given the stories I knew. Only later, after I’d had time to reflect, did it occur to me that being alert to echoes from the past was exactly what Judith had done all her life. For her, the countryside was full of echoes, full of absences that went unremarked by most people. She was instinctively attuned to them, like a medium who channels voices from another world. Just as this rock was overlaid with the moss and lichen of stories—from The Jungle Book and the Wright children’s own folklore—so too was the wider landscape overlaid, for her, with stories and signs of absence.

  As a young girl, Judith wrote about these absences or, more precisely, these invisible presences, in the conventional terms she had inherited from European poetry. Her early juvenile poems are full of fairies, goblins and elves hiding in flowers or floating out of pine cones. This is not purely fanciful or wishful thinking. When she wrote ‘There’s a spirit in each violet / each poppy and each rose’ she was reflecting an instinctive animism, sharpened by loneliness and the need to conjure up company. Later juvenile poems, many of which are preoccupied with death and may, as I have suggested, directly relate to her mother’s death, allude to other kinds of ghosts. In ‘The Garden Ghost’, the narrator tells of a ‘little grey ghost’ which comes to visit a garden it once knew. The opening verse describes the ‘wraiths of roses’ watching the garden. But the little grey ghost appears to be a separate, singular spirit which ‘comes drifting with a sad half smile adown the pathway dim’ and ‘out the low white gate again she passes, grey and shy.’ The pronoun ‘she’ comes as a jolt in the final sentence and suggests that this is no generic ghost.