by Fiona Capp
Many of Judith’s Wallamumbi dreams happened in the months leading up to Jack’s death and involved journeys across the landscape where she would meet people she knew. In one dream, she was at Wallamumbi, walking by moonlight. ‘I have walked through fertile country, now I must go into the barren ground among the trees,’ she wrote. Her walk took her along a road beyond Wallamumbi which was curiously crowded. Suddenly, she heard her father’s voice ‘in some long well-reasoned argument’ only to discover that he was being broadcast on television. In order to do this, a clergymen had put the aerial-like stake through her father’s heart. During her childhood, her father was the voice of authority and reason, and she remained close to him, despite their differences. Yet here, he was a ventriloquist’s dummy, his heart sacrificed to make him a mouthpiece for the established order against which Judith was now pitted, and which placed little value on ‘unproductive’ and quixotic thinkers like Jack. The dream, she reported, left her with a strong feeling of ‘going home’ with all the ‘uneasy reservations that that implies’.
In time, the uneasy reservations of the earlier dream would blossom into full-blown nightmare in which the Eden of her childhood turned feral and ceased to be a place of refuge. She was walking up the drive past the ‘office’ (where her father worked) near her brothers’ room, when a black snake appeared beside the path and lifted its head to strike. Paralysed, Judith allowed it to bite her hand, thinking that once it released her she could run and get a tourniquet. But the snake held on for a long time and tried to bite her again. Despite the implied proximity of her father and brothers, her screams for help went unanswered.
In the months after Jack’s death in December 1966, her sense of exclusion from Wallamumbi grew intense. In her mind, it had become hostile country taken over by ‘usurpers’. She dreamed that she, along with a busload of other people, were staying in a house on the Fairburn Road at Wallamumbi, effectively kept prisoner by guards associated with the ‘rulers’. From the window she could see these authority figures transporting a giant blue cylinder or tower along the road, something related to ‘their sinister industry’. When the cylinder exploded, and mist from the explosion began to condense into bright blue chemical powder, Judith became convinced that they were doomed. (She had been reading the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich who had become a household name since the publication of his book The Population Bomb, which warned that the world faced mass starvation if its population wasn’t curbed. He also warned that everybody would disappear in a cloud of blue steam in twenty years if we didn’t mend our ways.)
When a guard tried to persuade her to ‘go to a shelter’ for the night, she refused to leave. This dream would later find its way into a poem which compares the psyche to a house with handsome front rooms but where ‘all the action goes on at the back’—in the unconscious. These rooms are guarded and occupied by ‘inner familiars’, what Jung would call archetypes. Outside the house are ‘the juggernaut machines, / the blue drifting gases, / the crashing aircraft!’ The only shelter, in other words, is not an actual place, as beloved as it might once have been, but the dreamhouse of one’s own mind.
In ‘South of My Days’ she had written lovingly of how her ‘blood’s country’ with all its old stories, still went ‘walking in my sleep’. Twenty years on, the stories that strode through her sleep were no longer comforting or nostalgic; they were nightmarish visions of environmental disaster, authoritarian rule, danger and dispossession. Yet Judith clearly had a deep need to be reconciled with her country. Three years after the nightmare in which she was kept prisoner at Wallamumbi, a potent dream signalled the new direction her activism was taking.
She told me a slightly different version of it when I last spoke to her, describing it as an important ‘big dream’ because it broke down her ‘personal fear’, a fear that went back to childhood in which a ghostly Aboriginal elder with a spear hovered in the corners of rooms. In the dream, as recorded in her diary, she was at Wallamumbi with her ‘father’, who was, in fact, an Aboriginal elder. They had come to the end of a journey across countryside with many high rocks. She asked him who owned this country. Her ‘father’ answered that it had a long history, with successive invasions, but that the ‘boxers’ had it before they did. (Her friend, the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, previously known as Kath Walker, had been married to a boxer.)
As they stared across the flat sandy plain to the ranges in the distance, Judith said to him, ‘Look how beautiful the Snowies are in the moonlight with that black band in them.’ It is an unforgettable image in a dream of profound significance. A dream that not only held out the possibility of acceptance by the Aboriginal people who had once lived here (despite her family’s role in their dispossession), but that also reconciled Judith with her father, who had been—in earlier dreams—an agent of this dispossession. All of which allowed her to finally make peace with her country.
Gazing out at the Snowies, she knew without doubt that it was ‘a holy kind of place, there forever’.
Queensland
EIGHT
The Landscape of Love
On this warm spring evening, I could feel the suburb of New Farm exhaling with relief. The working week was over. People were out walking their dogs and having their first drinks on the balconies of restaurants along the waterfront of the Brisbane River. All was green and lush and balmy. The austere landscape of New England felt a world way away.
Every time I visited Brisbane, my friend Anna and I would take this walk to New Farm Park. With its colonial mix of jacaranda trees, jungly banyan figs, flaming poincianas, Edwardian rose gardens and wide green lawns that stretch all the way down to the river, the park is a haven in the middle of suburbia, and much-loved by the locals. As we crossed the jacaranda drive that sweeps around the park, Anna pointed to a gap where some saplings had recently been planted to replace the hundred-year-old trees that had been cut down because they were dying. Their removal, she said, had caused much grief.
Sixty years ago, Judith had admired and written about these trees in her letters. One day, while reading An Equal Heart and Mind (the collection of letters between Judith and Jack McKinney from the 1940s), I registered her address—100 Sydney Street, New Farm—and realised I could picture where she was. Or whereabouts. Suddenly, Judith and I had a shared landscape. In her memoir, Judith doesn’t say what kind of house she lived in but does mention that the owners were relatively well-off, so I imagined that it might be a large, latticed-work Queenslander, as there are still quite a few of them around New Farm. The room Judith rented was narrow and windowless, but accommodation was hard to come by during the war and she was grateful to have it. I knew there was also a veranda where she sometimes wrote letters while looking out over the park.
Tangled shadows from the jacarandas were stretching across the grass by the time our walk brought us to Sydney Street. Anna had warned me that it was now a barber shop and a cafe. She pointed to a squat, commercial building across the road, with a slab-like orange veranda. Disappointing as it was, I could see why Judith had been pleased with the location and the view. This was no ordinary suburban park. It was the kind of green expanse that a young woman, who had grown up with open countryside in every direction, could take refuge in. There were sports ovals and many flowering trees and artfully constructed rose gardens for which the park was renowned (in Judith’s time, there were said to be 20 000 bushes). In the evenings, she would walk around the park before going to bed. Lovely as the roses were, though, they were familiar and European. What made the biggest impression on her were the subtropical flowers, trees and leafy, luxuriant shrubs: their brilliant colours and sweet smells and sheer flamboyance which contrasted so dramatically with the flora she had known in New England.
In her recollections of New England in the early 1940s, Judith recalled the cold and the dust storms during a terrible drought, and her sinking realisation that country life held no future for her, much as she loved the land. Desperate to escape the expectations
of the conservative, rural society she had grown up in, she fled to Brisbane in the spring of 1943 and immediately felt as if she had entered a foreign country:
What I saw now in Queensland was a different kind of beauty—a richer depth of colour, more golden, and warmer air, a darker depth of forests and a deeper blue of mountains and sea . . . As soon as I could travel again, I wanted to look at the new landscapes, the rainforests, the coast with its flowery sand dunes and the plains, to begin again to get in touch with a new way of seeing and writing.
With wartime restrictions on travel, she had to settle for the parcels of nature on offer in the city and occasional visits to the coast.
For all the comfort it offered, this natural fecundity, sensuality and abundance might well have heightened her own feelings of loneliness and sexual frustration had Judith not found a love to match it. Now in her late twenties, she had resigned herself to being ‘single and odd’. Her hearing was failing, she was shy and socially awkward. Emotionally she was ‘lost in a desolate country’. Yet, within a year of her arrival, she would meet her soul-mate, Jack McKinney, the ‘equal heart and mind’ with whom she would find the fulfilment and richness she saw all around her in the landscape.
A cloud of lorikeets exploded from a gum tree as we cut across the heart of the park. Near the central rose garden, I saw a young couple stretched out on the grass, the girl resting on her elbow as she looked down at her young man’s face. It was a familiar sight in a public park but would have been even more so in wartime, especially given the number of American soldiers stationed in the city. Parks like New Farm and the Botanical Gardens—which was across the road from the Universities Commission where Judith now worked— were a popular refuge for soldiers and their lovers to snatch precious moments together. Judith often saw their ‘struggling forms’ on her evening walks. Jack and Judith may themselves have ‘struggled’ in this park, as one of Jack’s letters asks Judith if he’d left his tie in her room. ‘If not, I left it across the way, in which case—’
Judith’s poem ‘Botanical Gardens’, inspired by this period, leaves no doubt that the explosive blooms and fleshy forms of the plant life in these parks spoke to her of sexual longing and fulfilment. Every flourishing, clambering plant is a metaphor for human bodies in states of embrace: ‘the sweet white flesh of lilies, the clutching lips of the vine / the naked flame-trees, their dark limbs curved and strong.’ All are ‘visions of fulfilled desire’ which haunt a life-denying old gardener who once worked in the park. Gardens of this kind would remain places Judith associated with love and sexual longing all her life. When she was away in Sydney for a short period in the late 1970s, she wrote to her lover Nugget Coombs that she had walked through the Botanical Gardens where there were ‘two lovely trees in bloom—I wished you could have been there to see them. It would also have added much to my own enjoyment.’ We should not be fooled by her formality. Her prose was always much more restrained than her poetry. Flowering trees—particularly the flame tree—held enormous significance for her as symbols of passionate love. Both this comment to Nugget and those to Jack in the 1940s, in which she wished he could see the glorious jacarandas blooming in New Farm Park, were coded ways of expressing sexual longing.
By the time they had become lovers, Jack was living in a nearby suburb, working as a gardener and writing philosophy in his spare time. They lived apart because Jack was still married (although separated), and the social disapproval of broken marriages, sex outside wedlock and the shortage of accommodation made it too difficult for them to live together. Judith would write telling him how much she missed him and how she wished he was there with her in the park. This was their shared territory, one of the few places (apart from a secret camp in the bush on the outskirts of Brisbane) where they could be alone together.
Judith Wright aged about two and a half years, 1917. (The University of New England & Regional Archives)
Ethel Wright with Judith, Bruce and Peter, c. 1926 (Courtesy Meredith McKinney)
Judith Wright about 1932. (The University of New England & Regional Archives)
Judith Wright and Jack McKinney with Jack’s older son Graham (left), in New Farm Park, 1945. (Courtesy Meredith McKinney)
‘The quiet pool where .../willows overshadow, drooping low’ near Council Rock. (Fiona Capp)
The hidden corner by the tank stand at Wallamumbi where Judith would go to read in peace. (Fiona Capp)
Wallamumbi Falls at the ‘bottom end’ of Jeogla. (Fiona Capp)
The view from Point Lookout across to Nigger’s Leap. (Fiona Capp)
‘Calanthe’, Judith’s house on Mount Tamborine as it is today, shaded by the pre-historic-looking cycads that used to brush the front windows.
Judith with Meredith at Quantum. (Courtesy Meredith McKinney)
Judith and Jack with Meredith and their dog. (Courtesy Meredith McKinney)
Meredith at Quantum in a cot made by Jack. (Courtesy Meredith McKinney)
Cedar Creek Falls, where Judith struggled to remember ‘the formula for poetry’. (Fiona Capp)
The author outside Judith’s holiday cottage at Boreen Point. (Fiona Capp)
The ghostly paperbarks on the shores of Lake Cootharaba, Boreen Point. (Fiona Capp)
Judith, Meredith McKinney and Nugget Coombs in Darwin in August 1994 during Judith and Nugget’s last holiday together in the Northern Territory. (Courtesy Meredith McKinney)
Meredith at the end of the glass corridor in Judith’s house at ‘Edge’, 2009. (Fiona Capp)
Meredith after a swim in the waterhole at ‘Edge’. (Fiona Capp)
Every weekend, Jack would bicycle to New Farm and they would spend long afternoons at the park. A photograph from this time shows them sitting around a rug with Jack’s older son, Graham. Jack is stretched out on the grass looking at ease, while Judith is sitting up, half in shadow looking wary, as if uncertain of her position. Behind them is an umbrella-topped poinciana and rows of palms blurred by a strong wind. The books and manuscripts scattered around them are an important reminder that these gardens not only provided them with a space where they could be physically intimate but where they could exchange ideas and dreams of the future. This intellectual exchange was fundamental to their attraction and laid the foundations for everything else. It was many months—possibly even a year—after they were introduced that their ‘intense intellectual relationship’, says Meredith McKinney, was ‘secretly sealed with love’.
Even before they met, they had admired each other’s work. Jack, a self-taught philosopher, who had experienced the horrors of the trenches during the First World War, was desperately trying to comprehend the failure of modern thought to prevent another war. While he had little formal training, his suffering gave him the kind of hard won wisdom that cannot be earned at any university. The antithesis of the head-in-the-clouds philosopher, he was someone who had struggled to make a living on the land and who loved to yarn with ordinary people. Judith’s close friend Barbara Blackman remembered him as ‘a sharp and gentle observer’ of the human condition. He was just beginning to outline his theories in a series of essays published in the fledgling magazine Meanjin, edited by Clem Christesen, which was then based in Brisbane. In these early editions, Jack came across four of Judith’s poems—all of which were responses to the war and the need for a change of heart—and recognised a like-mind.
Judith, for her part, had read Jack’s philosophical articles and been impressed. I could easily imagine her excitement, or at least her intense curiosity, when she read Jack’s second essay ‘The Poet and the Intellectual Environment’. ‘The gift of the poet is to feel the truth that cannot yet be thought,’ he wrote. During such a time of crisis, ‘the poetic gift becomes not a mere personal possession, but a profound moral responsibility: on him who possess it fall the ancient mantle of poet and prophet.’ Judith’s work was already showing that, whether consciously or unconsciously, she felt this responsibility. The exploitation of the earth and consequent dust storms she ha
d witnessed in New England were, she believed, local symptoms of a universal failing that had driven the world to war.
When Jack and Judith were formally introduced at Clem Christesen’s home, their intuition that they were on the same wavelength was confirmed. Together they began trying to imagine a new intellectual landscape out of what felt like the ruins of Western thought. It was a grand, quixotic enterprise: two isolated mavericks grappling with what had gone wrong on a philosophical level and what new directions might be taken. Poems from this period show how closely Judith shared Jack’s belief in the creative power of the poet to take the zeitgeist and distil it into a new way of being and feeling. Jack argued that it was the poet’s lot, in an age of cultural crisis, to ‘suffer not only more than others, but to suffer for others’ in order to evolve a higher level of consciousness, ‘a new co-operative enterprise of the spirit.’ In reply, Judith wrote: