My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  We knew from the map that Lake Cooloola lay a few kilometres up river on the other side of that rainforest wall. When Judith went to Lake Cooloola with Kathleen, there had been a path from the river through the forest and the low-lying land beyond. The boatman had told us that the walking track to the lake had been left to grow over because it had become too swampy. Now, the lake can only be seen from a distance by walkers climbing the sand patch. The sight of this remote, pristine lake crystallised in Judith’s mind why European-Australians felt so alienated from their native environment. Watching a blue crane fishing in the lake’s shallows, it struck her suddenly that she could never share this bird’s relationship with the land, its unconscious sense of belonging. The crane was ‘the certain heir of the lake’ but she was forever the outsider, ‘a stranger, come of a conquering people’.

  As we chugged very slowly up river, I tried to find gaps in the trees between us and the lake, tantalised by the thought of Lake Cooloola being so close yet out of reach. ‘White shores of sand, plumed reed and paperbark, / clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan.’ I told myself it was enough to know the lake was there, and that it had been saved. It would remain pristine, replenished by aquifers below the dunes and unsullied by human contact. For now, Lake Cooloola was a place that only poetry could take you to, like the western side of Mount Tamborine in Judith’s poem ‘Lyrebirds’. She chose not to go to there, to lyrebird country, she said, because ‘Some things ought to be left secret, alone; / some things . . . / ought to inhabit nowhere but the reverence of the heart.’

  But if I were to follow this logic, then why was I on this journey at all? The lyrebird is a symbol of ‘the few, the shy, the fabulous, / the dying poets’ and the poem is a warning against invading the poet’s territory; just as Judith had tried, for most of her life, to keep biographers at bay. Hadn’t I come to Boreen Point and Mount Tamborine hoping for echoes of the ‘master practising [her] art’? The difference, I liked to think, was that my search was not for the poet but for the wellsprings of her art and activism in the landscapes she loved. The poetry had grown out of these landscapes, just as the plants in her garden had grown out of the red Mount Tamborine soil. Knowledge of these places may not be imperative to understanding her work, but I knew beyond doubt that my appreciation of her poetry was all the richer for having been here. To read her poems in light of this experience was like observing once-captive animals now released into their native habitat. They took on a whole new life when seen in the context from which they had sprung.

  My rationalisation that Lake Cooloola was best left as a secret, a place inhabited only in the imagination, made me uneasy for another reason. By thinking of it in this idealised way, I avoided the human story which cast such a dark shadow over what Judith saw there. She had never been interested in wilderness for wilderness’s sake. ‘At Cooloolah’ is explicitly about our relationship with the landscape and, more specifically, the relationship between blacks and whites. The poet feels ‘unloved by all my eyes delight in’ because of what her ancestors did to the land and the indigenous people. Judith was researching The Generations of Men at this time and was painfully conscious of her family’s complicity in this process of dispossession. Hence, Cooloola felt like a place haunted by invisible presences that seemed to flicker at the edges of her vision. She remembered her grandfather Albert’s story about coming across a solitary black warrior who vanished before his eyes. The ‘dark-skinned people who once named Cooloola’ might too have vanished, but they knew that ‘earth is spirit’ and that the land cannot be possessed. In trying to possess it, she concluded, we find ourselves in turn possessed by ‘arrogant guilt’, a guilt that reverberates down through the generations and touches us all.

  In search of somewhere to have lunch, we moored at a small jetty not far from Kinaba Island and followed a path through the paper–bark forest and high native grasses. Suddenly, it opened out at a dreamy billabong dotted with native waterlilies whose pale pink flowers stood upright on long stems. The still brown pool was full of reflections—mostly shades of green and scraps of white cloud. I automatically thought of Monet’s paintings, then stopped myself. Why couldn’t I see the scene for what it was? Judith was constantly grappling with this dilemma: how to see and appreciate our natural environment on its own terms rather than through the filter of a European aesthetic. Two generations later, I still carried this baggage; still thought of Monet when I saw waterlilies. But the comparison jarred. More and more often, now, I saw things through Judith’s eyes and through the prism of her art.

  We were heading back down the river when we passed a large bleached trunk that had fallen into the water and was partially submerged. The way it curved and dipped under the water and reappeared again made me think of the Big Snake that was said to inhabit the lake. The story of Big Snake which ‘had something to do with the rainbow’ was told to Judith by some Aboriginal children who lived at Boreen Point in a fibro hut on the lakeside. She wrote about them in her short story ‘At the Point’ and in a slightly different, unpublished version which can be found in her papers called ‘For Christine’. In both accounts, the Aboriginal family are treated as outcasts by the local community, but are befriended by Judith, Meredith and Jack. The father has come from a reservation, the mother is said to be an islander. In every way, they are made to feel that they do not belong. The four children may have no tribal connection with the area, but they bring to it what remains of their cultural inheritance: the lake is sacred to them because it is the home of Big Snake.

  The story of Big Snake isn’t mentioned in the published short story but is central to the version Judith wrote as a letter to the oldest girl, Christine, who had been Meredith’s friend. Both versions end in tragedy: the father, Sam, goes on a drunken-bender and disappears for a few weeks. When he returns, his wife, Rosa, has taken up with a local fisherman, and he kills her in a fit of rage. Afterwards, the two youngest are sent to a children’s home, and Christine and the oldest boy are sent to live with their grandfather on the notorious ‘tropical gulag’ of Palm Island. Recollecting it all, Judith writes: ‘Most of all I remember you, Christine, . . . telling us the breathless story of the Big Snake who made everything and then went to bed in the lake.’ As she knew when she wrote ‘At Cooloolah’, the beauty of these lakes could not be divorced from their history and from the human tragedy that lay so close to the surface.

  Tragedy, it must have seemed to Judith, was never far from the surface once you developed an eye for it. As we returned across the lake, we passed a headland called Elanda Point, once known as Mill Point after the sawmill which operated there from the 1860s to the early 1890s. In its heyday, it was the biggest sawmill in Australia. The company town that grew up around the mill was now an archaeological site. Amongst the few remains—pylons from old jetties, part of the original tramway, a brick chimney from a farmhouse—I knew there was also a cemetery where four men, killed when a boiler exploded at the mill in 1873, were buried. It was this event that inspired Judith’s poem ‘The Graves At Mill Point’.

  Back on shore, the boatman pointed us in the direction of an overgrown path across open grassland that was supposed to lead to the cemetery. After much tramping around, we eventually found a triangular-shaped commemorative stone that had been erected ‘in memory of the European settlers buried at Mill Point Cemetery’. Somewhere amidst the trees and high grass were the actual graves, although most of the headstones were gone. Judith must have wandered here amongst the bloodwood trees and heard the wind through their branches, for it is this distinctive sound that she gives voice to in her poem.

  Much as she lamented the loss of the native trees that were felled for the mill, she resisted the temptation to turn the explosion into a morality tale about the consequences of recklessly exploiting the land. Instead, she wrote an elegy in the form of a dialogue between one of the dead men and the wind through the bloodwood tree that grows over his grave. Like so many of her poems, it is haunted by voices fro
m the past, and by the way time makes all that is solid melt into air. In Judith’s version, the town dies with the men, and what remains becomes akin to the remnants of a bygone civilisation. For the dead men, the mourners and the town, this tragedy marks ‘the end of the world’. Time washes away the words on the gravestones and all memory of the men is forgotten. Yet what the poem leaves us with is not a bleak sense of vanished lives, but of the intimate bond between the dead men and the natural world, suggested by the very name of the bloodwood tree which grows out of their bones and still ‘flowers for their sake’.

  That evening I went for a last walk by the lake. The place was deserted. Everyone must have been inside having dinner. There was no one at the beach, no boats on the water. No one wandering the shore. Even the birds seemed to have gone elsewhere. I had spent the day contemplating the ghosts that still lingered in the landscape. Now, I couldn’t help thinking about what Boreen Point came to mean for Judith after Jack died.

  Almost a year after his death in 1966, she told her close friend Barbara Blackman that she wasn’t sure if she could bear coming back here. She began talking about selling the house two years later, but held on to it until 1973. Her final visit inspired ‘Lake in Spring’, a deeply personal echo of her earlier poem ‘The Lake’. In it, she recalls walking by the lake with Jack and how their ‘living looks met eye to eye’ in its reflection. When she returns after his death, in ‘another spring, another year’, she bends to look into the water but ‘the face that lay beside / my own, no longer answers there’. To read the poem is to understand why Boreen Point became, like Cooloola, a haunted place for Judith. Her world had changed utterly, yet the lake remained locked in an eternal present. It reflected back ‘whatever comes, whatever goes / on path or hill’, while being unable to hold any trace of the past or of the man she loved. Looking at her reflection, she was confronted not only by Jack’s absence, but by the frightening erasure of memory the lake represented: the memory of all they had shared:

  A ripple goes across the glass.

  The faces break and blur and pass

  as love and time are blurred together.

  THIRTEEN

  Landscape of Grief

  Two months before Jack’s death in 1966, Judith and Jack went on a final journey together. Jack had recently finished The Structure of Modern Thought, the culmination of fifteen years’ work on the philosophical underpinnings of the ‘crisis of thought and feeling’ afflicting the modern world. Judith asked Jack where he would like to go for a holiday. Jack decided on St George, ‘an obscure hamlet’, as Judith describes it, in south-west Queensland where he had taken a job droving cattle to Victoria in 1915, before joining the Light Horse. It was his way of revisiting ‘his last year of innocence’ before the horrors of war.

  Jack was clearly unwell and had been for some time. His health had been particularly fragile since 1958 when he had suffered a heart attack. He was now 75. Judith’s account of this final journey in an autobiographical fragment written in the months before her own death is her most heart-wrenching piece of prose. During the trip, Jack ate little and, even more distressing given what a great talker he was, he said little. Judith’s mounting anxiety is evident from her descriptions of the landscape they travel through. As they crossed the Dividing Range, the bush gave way to cleared farmland. They stayed overnight at a pub but had to sleep in hard, single beds which made it impossible for them to hold each other. ‘We had been for years without sexual contact but I liked to think that, even so, to be close was comforting to him as it was to me, and I lay awake thinking of the more than twenty years of warmth and partnership.’

  The next day they drove through ‘cruelly cleared country and bare plains of ploughed land’. So changed was it fifty years after that Jack did not recognise it. This wholesale clearing of vast tracts of Brigalow country, devastating soil and wildlife, would inspire Judith’s most scathing poem, ‘Australia 1970’:

  Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood

  that gaps the dozer-blade.

  I see your living soil ebb with the tree

  to naked poverty.

  She wrote this howl of rage, this furious curse on all our houses, when on an Adult Education tour through Queensland’s Brigalow Belt in 1970. But the poem’s mood of intense despair—‘we are ruined by the thing we kill’—probably had its origins in her first experience of this country on this sad, final journey with Jack.

  As the trip progressed, Jack fell silent. Judith captured their mutual misery through the bleakness of the landscape. They arrived at St George to find ‘a bitterly eroded, riverside townlet’ with weather-beaten houses, few trees and ‘gardens baked by all those passing days of sun and wind’. But the return journey to ‘our gentler country’ brought little comfort. When they got back to Mount Tamborine, Jack was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer.

  A few months after his death, Judith referred to this final trip in a letter to her good friend, the poet Jack Blight. Unable to speak of the most distressing aspects of the journey, she wrote jauntily of ‘the beautiful weather’ and how ‘we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, driving off on to side roads, finding new kinds of bush f lowers and drinking enormous beers in the pubs en route. Not as much fun as camping out—but we were a bit past that stage and stayed in motels instead.’ Desperate to make the best of a deeply painful memory, she concluded: ‘It was a very good finale to all our camping holidays together.’

  Judith’s journey through the landscape of grief had just begun, and would continue for many years. She would give away little of her feelings in her letters, but would chart the contours of this grim terrain in her dreams and poems.

  Six weeks after Jack died, Judith had a dream in which she found herself on yet another journey: she, Meredith and a friend set out to walk around Cape Horn (presumably South America). The dream took her through many different landscapes including a polluted creek, reminiscent of that behind the hospital where Jack died. Judith knew that the journey would be a long one but found comfort in the knowledge that others had done it before them. She also knew that she and Meredith would have to take separate paths. Eventually, she found herself on a beach which reminded her of one she visited with Jack the year before when they had been so happy. The dream ended with a voice telling her to ‘Linger by this pool. Here your structural problems will be solved.’

  Judith understood this to mean that she shouldn’t leave Tamborine yet. She and Meredith had moved to a flat in Brisbane while Meredith completed her final year at school. She still felt deeply connected with the mountain, however, and looked forward to returning there on weekends. ‘It’s so good getting back there, with the garden to dig in,’ she wrote to a friend. Being at Tamborine made her feel like ‘a real person again’. Later in that year, after a trip to Canada for a literary festival, she told Barbara Blackman that she physically ached for Tamborine—another way of saying how much she ached for Jack. Her love for him would always be inseparable from the landscape where they had felt so blessed.

  Here still, the mountain that we climbed

  when hand in hand my love and I

  first looked through one another’s eyes

  and found the world that does not die.

  Much as she longed for the mountain, each return journey was a painful reminder of Jack’s absence. Even the landscape felt dramatically changed. The world that she had shared with Jack had been full of brilliant flowers, aromatic plants and stars that ‘circled round us where we lay’. Now, it was as if she were climbing the mountain with her bare hands, facing ‘steep unyielding rock, / . . . struggling the upward path again, / this time alone.’ Her poetry about this grief-stricken period shows her withdrawing into a place beyond the reach of the outside world. She remains vaguely aware of life going on around her but it feels removed, mechanical and uncaring. At her most bleak, she sees herself as Eurydice in hell. The contours of the mountain are there—two lovers walking hand in hand along a path. But then the path suddenly collap
ses, as if in a landslide, and traps her beneath the earth in a nightmare world of clay corridors and blind passages. A recurring feature of this psychic landscape is its deathly silence: the silence she fears she is condemned to now that Jack, who had so inspired her, is gone. In a letter to a fellow poet, she wrote forlornly of her hope that she might eventually get another book written. At present, though, she was ‘stuck at the bottom of a page as though it were a cliff edge.’

  Eight months after Jack’s death, Judith had a dream that Meredith came to her during the night to tell her that ‘something is wrong with Dad’. She found him in Meredith’s room, invisible except for his vestigial blue pyjamas, trying to get under one of the beds. Once her arms were around him, Judith recognised his shape and was filled with great joy. She helped him lie down on Meredith’s bed and reassured him that he was only ill, that everything was all right; he was back with them. When she woke up, it was midnight and she could still feel his shape, warm and real and strong as before, in her arms.

  When I returned to Mount Tamborine a second time, I drove up the old road. The first time, on the ‘do-it-yourself road’, I had seen the developed side of the mountain—the housing estates, the cleared rural land, the Gold Coast in the distance—before I saw any forest. And then, once on the mountain, I had been primed to see how little remained of the original vegetation—the National Parks seemed mere scraps of land, sad fragments or remnants of the once great rainforest that had been here. But this time, I saw things differently. After the rural lowlands came the thick sclerophyll forests which slowly gave way higher up to the damp world of the rainforest, the darkness intensified by the brightness of the day. I felt I was seeing the mountain as Judith and Jack had known it, and was reminded of what Meredith told me about her experience of coming back here. How she saw only what she knew from childhood and was able to ignore what had changed. She was pleasantly surprised by how much remained as she remembered it, even down to the particular roots of trees on the forest paths.