My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  The loss of her mother when Judith was twelve wasn’t the only factor in making Judith the kind of poet she became. But it can be safely said that Ethel Wright’s death made a mind already attuned to ‘spirits’ in the landscape, painfully sensitive to the experience of loss. Not surprisingly then, she became increasingly aware of other signs of loss and absence in the landscape. Near the woodshed on Wallamumbi was an old tree—now gone—with diamond shapes carved into its bark by the Aborigines who once lived here. She knew also of a bora ring—a ceremonial earthen circle—on her grandmother’s property, Wongwibinda. There was the nearby goldmining ghost town of Hillgrove full of ruins from the past, and the town of Uralla which boasted the grave of the bushranger Thunderbolt, who was famous in this region. Everywhere you looked, if you had the eyes to see them, there were traces of the past in the landscape. And there were the stories that went with them: stories of Aborigines driven off nearby Nigger’s Leap by vengeful settlers, stories of convicts and settlers, of bushrangers and no-hopers and ordinary people gone mad in the bush, of bullockies and drovers, of her pastoralist family and her forebears. Her first mature collection, published in 1946, The Moving Image is haunted by these hidden presences and, above all, by the silence history had consigned them to.

  At some stage, when she struck sparks from Council Rock with her piece of iron and declared that she had magical powers, it must have dawned on Judith that she could give voice to these silences. Not surprisingly, she would come to think of silence as the foundation stone on which her poetry was built. Over two decades later she would write:

  Silence is the rock where I shall stand.

  Oh, when I strike it with my hand

  may the artesian waters spring

  from that dark source I long to find.

  Silence was her rock, and not only because it contained all that had gone unsaid or might yet be said. Silence encompasses that which exists outside language. Anyone who deals in words, anyone who has ever tried and failed to say exactly what they feel or intuit, knows that we are all capable of ideas and experiences that exceed our grasp and ability to express. It has been argued that when we come up against the limitations of language, we are confronted with the ineffable, an intuition of a transcendent dimension. Whatever we choose to call it—God or the unconscious—Judith knew that it was from this unfathomable silence that inspiration springs and on which poetry is built.

  On a more literal level, it is not surprising that someone who suffered from progressive hearing loss should become acutely sensitive to the silence of others, to silences in the landscape and to the prospect of falling into that silence. In poem after poem she would reflect on the fraught business of translating the silence of nature, of the dead, of the rejected and the forgotten, into words.

  As we prepared to leave the rock that morning, storm clouds gathered over the Snowies. Down near the creek I spotted movement by one of the poplars and saw, at the base of its trunk, a giant lizard, probably a bearded dragon. Sensing me, it froze; its streaked pewter and black head held motionless, its legs blending with the gnarled grey trunk. For minutes it remained this way, willing itself into invisibility. After admiring and photographing it, we turned our backs to release the creature from our gaze. When it had disappeared into the undergrowth, we joked about it being a visitation from Judith. It seemed the kind of creature she might return as, with its fierce intensity, its alertness and chameleon-like ability to blend into the landscape.

  We were walking back towards the car when Caroline suddenly bent down and plucked something from the grass. She held it up, grinning broadly. It was a four-leafed clover.

  ‘Thank you, Doo,’ she said. ‘Duda’ was what Judith’s younger brothers, unable to pronounce her name, had called her as young children. To Caroline, Judith had always been Doo.

  Cheryl and I scoured the surrounding grass but couldn’t find another.

  Distant thunder rumbled like the sound of horses galloping over the hills. We climbed into the car, hoping the rain clouds over the Snowies wouldn’t come our way, and headed up the driveway towards the house.

  FOUR

  The Lost Garden

  Up past the thick copse of pines and poplars that screened Council Rock from the house, the valley opened out into rolling pastures dotted with trees and panoramic views of surrounding countryside and the deep blue Snowies on the horizon. There was a sudden air of expansiveness, of arriving at the centre of things. If her ‘blood’s country’ had a heartland, this was surely it.

  And yet something wasn’t quite right. There was no wind and an eerie stillness hung over the place. The rambling weatherboard homestead that Judith grew up in was long gone, replaced by a large, seventies-style brown brick house that lay unoccupied. It was owned by a family who visited only occasionally, leaving a manager to look after day-to-day affairs. We walked around the outside, peering in the windows. Although there was still some furniture in the house, it had a sad and deserted air. Clearly Wallamumbi was no longer a thriving hub or the centre of any child’s universe.

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Judith’s half-brother, David (son of Phillip and Dora) borrowed over thirty million dollars to fund an ambitious scheme to make the Wright family Australia’s leading supplier of beef. Then a global recession hit, along with a drought. With David’s business losing a million a year, the bank called in its loan. In 2000, not long before Judith’s death, David lost his legal battle with the bank and Wallamumbi had to be sold. The unravelling of the Wright family’s claim to the land and the downfall of this side of the pastoral dynasty would loom large over every place we visited that week; its full implications only registering when we visited Wongwibinda—the original Wright family property bought by Albert and May Wright, Judith’s paternal grandparents, in 1888—which was still in Wright hands.

  Strangely enough, Wallamumbi’s elegiac mood might well have been scripted by Judith herself. Some of her later poetry had anticipated and even predicted the family’s fate and their loss of the land. The last time I saw her, before Wallamumbi was sold, she made an unexpectedly vehement remark. ‘If I was born with a tassel I’d be there now. I knew from a very early age that I wasn’t important in the family. The boys were taught things and I just tagged along. That’s very injurious to the psyche.’ (No wonder she asserted herself so forcefully over her brothers at Council Rock. It was the one place where her word carried weight.)

  When news emerged that Wallamumbi was being repossessed, Judith wrote to Pip and Caroline, reflecting on the sad business of moving everything out of the house. ‘I am glad I am not there, I don’t think I could bear it, which shows that if I had been Aboriginal and had to leave that country it would have been the death of me.’ To David, she is reported to have said, with characteristic bluntness, ‘Now you’ll understand how the Aborigines feel.’

  Yet it was only in the final decades of her life that she publicly articulated these feelings about her family, most confrontingly in her series of poems ‘For A Pastoralist Family’ which were written in the late 1970s, around the time that David and Bruce Wright split the family’s assets, and David began borrowing heavily to fund ambitious new ventures. Judith addressed her brothers in the poem, advising them to remember that they owed their good fortune— including ‘the cautious politeness of bankers’—to the hard work of their grandparents and the dispossession of the original inhabitants. Her inheritance, she dryly noted, was not the land but a love of it, which served ‘as a base for poetry’.

  No doubt aware of her brother’s ambitions, Judith warned them of the hazards of getting caught up in ‘the heave of the great corporations / whose bellies are never full.’ In their departure from the family tradition of being ‘A small stream, narrow but clean’, she felt her brothers had become sullied by the world of big business, ‘All men grow evil with trade’. It is a harsh judgement, softened only by the recognition that no one can truly keep their hands clean. While Judith did not know that David would over-reach
himself and that the once ‘cautious politeness of bankers’ would be withdrawn, she sensed—perhaps more acutely than they—that their grip on the land was tenuous. This, after all, was what her inheritance had taught her: that she had no claim on the land except her love of it.

  The irony, I couldn’t help thinking as I wandered the garden at Wallamumbi, was that her exclusion from ownership of the property and the inevitable sense of exile this bred was what had made her a poet. As is often the case with those whose great achievement is to transform their personal suffering or pain into a work of art, her loss was our gain. And it was here, in this now-uninhabited garden, that her experience of love and loss began.

  Once upon a time, such a loss was unimaginable. ‘In our childish years,’ she wrote towards the end of her life, ‘it would have seemed impossible to believe that even the eldest sons of the family would find a source of dissension and sorrow in the land we loved.’ In the final poem of ‘For A Pastoralist Family’, she makes a plea for forgiveness and lovingly recalls this period of childhood, before questions of inheritance and attitudes to the land came between them:

  Blue early mist in the valley. Apricots

  bowing the orchard trees, flushed red with summer,

  loading bronze-plaqued branches;

  our teeth in those sweet buttock-curves.

  While there were few signs left of the orchard that had once stood at the foot of the slope below the house, the yards remained, as did the ‘blue ranges’ in the distance. We were heading across the lawn, towards a wisteria-covered pergola, when Caroline stopped to get her bearings. Standing with her hands on her hips, she said, ‘You’ve got to remember how much things have changed here. Not just the house but the garden too.’

  We looked around. The clay tennis court, where tennis parties were once held on Saturdays—before Judith’s mother became too ill to host them—was disappearing beneath weeds. Caroline pointed to an old tankstand near the pergola, partially covered with the abundant foliage of an old grape vine. ‘That was there in Judith’s day,’ she said. It had once created a ‘hidden corner’ beside the old kitchen wall where Judith could read in peace and not be accused of loafing or ruining her eyes. But most of the original garden was gone, having been dug over and landscaped when the new house was built in the 1970s.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, although it was hard not to be disappointed. While I had no expectations of meeting Judith’s ghost, clearly part of me had still clung to the idea of the original garden as a kind of enchanted rabbit hole into the land of her childhood. And yet the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the original garden’s erasure was sadly fitting. The lost garden of Wallamumbi was emblematic of all that Judith would lose as she grew up.

  While her recollections of her grandmother’s garden at Wong–wibinda are vivid and detailed, the garden at Wallamumbi endures in her writing in a more impressionistic way, almost as if it were too close for her to see it clearly or with detachment. Its broad sweep is captured in childhood poems such as ‘Our Roof’, which rings with the confidence and rootedness that comes of knowing one’s own special territory, of being queen of all one surveys. Looking down from the roof of the house, the young poet sees the hills, the trees ‘stretching away, away’; the clouds in the sky, the sleepy cows and ‘the big green garden’ with its climbing rose and marigolds and orchard. But although her juvenile poetry delights in her immediate garden, the many different types of flowers and the imagined sprites that live there, its dimensions and layout remain vague. Even the adult poetry tends to go for broad brush-strokes rather than a description of a recognisable place:

  I was born into a coloured country;

  spider-webs in dew on feathered grass,

  mountains blue as wrens,

  valleys cupping sky in like a cradle.

  There is a sense that this particular garden is too powerfully connected with her earliest experiences, before the acquisition of language, to ever be reconstructed through words. ‘Here where I walk was the green world of a child,’ Judith writes in ‘The Moving Image’. It is not the physical details of this terrain, this ‘lost world’, that interest her, so much as the emotions that went with it. She might not be able to make ‘felled trees rise upright where they lay’, but she can make us experience Wallamumbi as she first knew it. These poems chart a psychological and mythological landscape as much as an actual one. This garden, as seen through the eyes of a very young child, is a magical place where everything is an extension of her own dreams and desires. In poems like ‘The World and the Child’, the garden is both vast and intimate, a Wonderland viewed by the shrunken Alice. For the child, wild harebell flowers are so abundant they form a blue cave, and an ant climbing a grass blade looks like a monster. The mountain range ‘lies like a pillow’ for her head at night and the moon swings from the ceiling.

  Here, the child is the centre of the universe. As in a naive painting, there is no perspective. The distant mountains—the Snowies on the horizon—feel so close to the child that she rests her head on them when she sleeps. The moon is not some far away celestial body but hangs right above her, like a toy for her delight. This way of seeing the world corresponds with what psychologists call ‘the magical years’—roughly the first five years of life—when, according to child psychoanalyst, Selma Fraiberg, the child’s conception of the world is a magical one because ‘he believes that his actions and his thoughts can bring about events. Later he extends his magic system and finds human attributes in natural phenomena and sees human or supra-human causes for natural events or for ordinary occurrences in his life.’ Only gradually does the child acquire knowledge of an objective world until he ‘is able to free his observations and his conclusions from the distortions of primitive thought.’

  But this rational knowledge inevitably comes at a price, just as it does for Adam and Eve. Part of the adolescent’s rebellion is fuelled, as Judith knew too well, by outrage at being expelled from the garden of childhood: ‘Only through this pain, this black desire, this anger, / shall you at last return to your lost garden.’ It is as if the adult Judith is speaking here to her younger self on whom it has just dawned that hers is to be a double exile: both from the garden of childhood and from Wallamumbi itself.

  Just occasionally, as we explored the garden and outhouses that day, the ghostly, flickering presence of the lost Wallamumbi would flare into life. A particularly potent remnant was the original blacksmith’s shop where the horses had been shod. It stood, just as Judith had described it in her memoir, under the big pine trees not far from the house. We poked our heads through broken slats in the grey paling walls to find, much to our surprise, the old bellows still there in a dark corner, coated in dust. As a girl, Judith often visited here and was deeply impressed by the ‘suck and sigh of the bellows, the glowing and fading of the charcoal’ and the black soot that coated everything.

  My immediate thought, as I peered through the semi-darkness, was of her much-loved and anthologised poem ‘Legend’ in which a blacksmith’s boy heads off towards the mountains to hunt for a rainbow. He overcomes many obstacles and warnings until night begins to fall, ‘ready to swallow him, / like the barrel of a gun’. His rifle breaks and his hat blows away and his dog disappears. But then he sees the rainbow in front of him ‘just as his heart foretold’. He catches the colours and the cold of it ‘like a bar of ice, like the column of a fountain’ and heads home with it swinging on his shoulder, instead of his gun. I had always thought of this poem, which I’d read to my son when he was a toddler, as a fable set in a fairytale landscape, in a faraway time. It had never occurred to me that the story had roots in Judith’s own garden and in her daily life as a girl; that beneath the fanciful surface might lie the bones of the landscape she loved.

  ‘I can remember myself a time,’ Judith once wrote to a friend, ‘when the world was completely animistic to me—every object had a kind of emotional connotation; trees had personalities and water was alive and even
furniture lived a life of its own.’ This was, of course, the time of magical thinking, the time before the garden was lost. A time which is revisited in this poem where animals speak to the boy, inanimate objects like mountains jump in his way, cobwebs deliberately snatch at his feet, thorn-branches try to make him blind. As he makes his way home with the rainbow, lizards run out to see and snakes make way for him. All the world tells him he is brave. Here is Wallamumbi as the very young Judith would have seen and experienced it—a landscape of adventure and fantasy in which a child could be a hero. Now, as I looked across at the ever-darkening Snowies, I could imagine her as a girl, contemplating the rainbows that would have hung over this range and dreaming of going in pursuit of them.

  There was one particular feature of Judith’s childhood garden that I knew I would never find no matter how hard I looked. It was the tiny garden at Wallamumbi which Judith herself had created. A garden that persisted in her imagination long after it had disappeared, and that became inseparable, in her mind, from her mother’s illness and eventual death.

  For earlier generations, the swathe of green around the homestead had played an important psychological, as well as physical, role as a buffer between the homestead and what was perceived as an alien and potentially hostile landscape. Judith remarked once that, for New Englanders, planting a garden meant needing to ‘root out everything there already and replace it with roses, delphiniums and petunias and fence it with barbed wire and hedges of conifers.’ Yet for all her mature ambivalence about European gardens and New Englanders’ inability to see the ‘strange beauty’ of the indigenous landscape, she remained not only deeply attached to the gardens of her childhood but also to gardening as a way of nurturing the land. Gardens of all kinds and gardening as an activity and a metaphor became enduring preoccupations.