by Fiona Capp
From the window of the flat where she stayed at University House, she looked out on a huge eucalypt much older than the city itself. It was sights such as this that made Canberra livable for her. Not surprisingly, the European trees struck her as forlornly out of place, lining the roads like an official welcome, always on guard. When considered as an ecosystem, Canberra was ‘impossible’. Deliberately adopting the sterile language of a bureaucratic report, she declared that as a monoculture it ought to be unstable: ‘No balance between input and output.’ There were too many predators, too few producers and too few refuges for prey. That the city continued to exist, she wryly concluded, was ‘an ecological miracle’.
While she didn’t feel any great attachment to the city itself, she was deeply attached to one particular Canberra resident, Herbert Cole ‘Nugget’ Coombs, who lived at the Australian National University’s residence, University House. Each day, after immersing myself in their newly released letters in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the National Library of Australia, I would emerge with a mounting respect for the way they conducted themselves in this relationship; the way they forged their own private realm while remaining answerable to the public world in which they were both so active. It astounded me that their desire for privacy, even after death, had been observed for so long. Until the release of these letters in 2009, the relationship had been one of the best kept open secrets in Australian literary history.
Judith first met Nugget in the 1960s when he was then chairman of the Council for the Arts. He asked her to become a member and, although she couldn’t take up his invitation, they stayed in touch, exchanging views on the arts, Aboriginal issues and the environment. Nugget was a prominent and extraordinarily influential bureaucrat, about whom Judith had known for decades, just as he had known of her. She first became aware of him as the economist who played a leading role in planning the rationing system during the war. He became a household name as Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction and, when he was made Governor of the Reserve Bank in 1949, his signature on banknotes suggested to her a man of even-handedness and balance. This impression was confirmed when he retained his role as adviser to seven Labor and Liberal federal governments, proving the wisdom of his non-partisan advice. As his concern about the impact of economics and industry on the environment began to grow, along with his advocacy for the arts and his commitment to Aboriginal land rights, their passions began to converge.
After Judith’s death, Meredith found a note Nugget had written to Judith. It was a fragment of a conversation, scribbled down because Judith could no longer hear. In it, Nugget reminded her of their first night together after a meeting they’d both attended. In 1972, Judith introduced Nugget to her daughter as the new love in her life. Judith was fifty-seven, Nugget was sixty-six. Ten years before, she had written a poem called ‘Prayer’, a plea to the muse not to desert her as she ages. Its opening line, however, addresses a more fundamental fear: ‘Let love not fall from me though I must grow old.’ In this respect, her prayer was answered.
By the time their relationship began, they were both well-known public figures—the distinguished yet down-to-earth statesman and the famous poet-cum-activist. As éminences grises, both had reputations to live up to and responsibilities that often trumped their individual desires. The tension between the demands of public life and private needs was something they would struggle with throughout their relationship. Nugget and his wife, Mary, were estranged, but his loyalty to her and to his children meant that he never contemplated a divorce. According to Meredith, Judith was even more determined than Nugget to keep the relationship secret because she still carried guilt about the pain she felt she’d caused Jack’s family when they first met.
In her public writing, Judith spoke of Nugget as a valued and respected colleague. She was always careful to keep her tone detached and professional. Nugget, who was a less reserved person, did not feel quite so constrained. In his book Aboriginal Autonomy, published in 1994, he warmly acknowledged his fruitful thirty-year partnership with Judith. ‘Indeed,’ he wrote, ‘it is difficult for me to identify much which was not, to a greater or lesser degree, the product of that partnership.’
Their letters make plain that their passion for Aboriginal rights and the environment was inseparable from their passion for each other. This is not to downplay the physical chemistry between them: Nugget was a charming man with a mischievous smile who was very appealing to women. Meredith remembers him as a ‘darling person’. Judith’s slightly gruff, patrician manner, which masked an intense emotional life and a generous spirit, held its own appeal. Nugget found her poetry very moving and his letters to her usually began: ‘My lovely woman’. But both were too committed to social reform to be interested in a purely romantic liaison.
Mutual concern for the common good and for their private obligations would ensure that they maintained appearances until the end. It’s a stance that, in a culture obsessed with celebrity and self-exposure, can seem heroically quaint. Not once did they attend an official function together as a couple or publicly declare their love. In April 1975, with her sixtieth birthday looming, Judith wrote to Nugget: ‘Barbara Blackman wants to give me a birthday party and asks who I would want to ask. Well—but perhaps not. Only a couple of weeks, but it’s a long time, my love.’
Over their twenty-five years together, they would write hundreds of letters to one another, sometimes at a rate of three a week. But the story of the relationship as told through the correspondence is inescapably dominated by Judith’s voice, as only a fraction of Nugget’s letters remain. I knew from having read many of Judith’s other letters that it would be unwise to expect ardent lyricism or sensational revelations. The letter had never been a form of literary expression for her. It was a tool, a way of maintaining friendships, of intellectual exchange and of making things happen. As a correspondent her voice was very much like her spoken voice: matter-of-fact, practical, wry. All her pain and passion went into her verse. Although Judith’s letters to Nugget bear little resemblance to a conventional love letter, there is no doubt that they document a profound and lasting bond.
The more I read of the letters, the more I became aware of how the need for secrecy, their work and, later, their health problems kept them apart—and how much they missed each other. There were times when I found myself wishing they would just ditch their commitments and wander off into the sunset together. They did vaguely entertain the idea, but this Hollywood fantasy was never a real option for them. I had to keep reminding myself that letters, by their nature, document periods of separation. Judith and Nugget also had much time together—time they savoured because they knew it was short.
When the relationship began in 1972, Judith was still living at Calanthe and commuting regularly to Canberra, Sydney and elsewhere to attend meetings, address rallies, go to protest marches and lobby politicians, while constantly writing papers, books, poetry, reports and letters. She was still heavily involved in the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland as its president, but campaigns like those to save the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island had now become national issues. She had also helped found the national Project to Stop the Concorde, opposing plans to establish a supersonic corridor across Australia that would subject Aboriginal people living in inland Australia to the aircraft’s sonic boom, as well as threatening the ozone layer.
Whenever she was in Canberra, she would stay with Nugget in his flat at University House. The position they found themselves in was not unlike the position she and Jack had been in when they first met in Brisbane. They could not live together and, as yet, they did not have a shared landscape. What they did have, though—as did Judith and Jack—and what sustained them in these early days, was a common intellectual terrain and a passion for social reform. This shared landscape took its contours, as had Judith and Jack’s, from the idealism of the immediate post-war period. But, now, it was informed by the new language of conservation and Aboriginal land rights. As I sat in t
he National Library with the boxes of letters in front of me, I felt like an early explorer finally granted entry to an unmapped landscape: the place where their minds met.
In the 1960s, the emergence of ecology as a discipline had given conservationists a scientific grounding for their arguments about the interconnectedness of all life on earth and the importance of balance between the natural and man-made world. Ecology as a concept has its roots in the eighteenth century when it was known as ‘the economy of nature’. This crucial nexus of ecosystems and economies was a subject that would preoccupy Judith and Nugget’s earliest exchanges. Although most economists at this time paid little heed to the environmental costs of modern consumer society, Nugget was just beginning to turn his attention to the issue.
In her own writing, Judith had long been voicing alarm about the way economic thinking flew in the face of environmental realities. To read her many forceful essays from the 1960s onward is to be struck—yet again—by how prescient she was and how slow we have been to catch on. Current debates about global warming still lag behind her recognition that the problem ‘entails a whole new philosophy of living, a whole new social and legal dispensation, a new kind of education and new kind of government’ including a new form of economics ‘based firmly on the biosphere itself and its own support systems.’
As well as discussing her views with him, Judith would send Nugget recent articles on ecology to help him clarify his own arguments. Their message, however, was not one that politicians and the business world were ready to hear. After his death, Judith reflected that ‘climate change, pollution of land and sea, ozone loss have become obvious since that time and cannot be disputed any longer. But he suffered a good deal from his first-footing in such subjects.’ She had long known that the outspoken conservationist was invariably seen as ‘a Cassandra prophesying woe—he may be right but he will not be popular.’
Just as Judith was influential in deepening Nugget’s understanding of environmental issues, Nugget’s commitment to Aboriginal autonomy and land rights deepened and radicalised her understanding of Indigenous affairs. As Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he saw the destructive effect of assimilation policy and became a believer in the importance of allowing Aborigines to determine their own future. Throughout his relationship with Judith, this was his overriding obsession, and it increasingly became Judith’s also. What began as an intuitive understanding of the tragedy that haunted the New England landscape and later deepened into an emotional bond through her friendship with the Aboriginal poet, Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Nounuccal), now found intellectual substance and rigour through her conversations and travels with Nugget.
Appropriately, for a couple dedicated to social reform, their love affair began in the year the Whitlam government came to power. But, as heady a time as it was, their new responsibilities immediately put pressure on the relationship. The formality of Judith’s early letters to Nugget suggests that she was wary, at first, of putting her feelings to paper, and that she suspected his position as Whitlam’s special adviser and head of the new arts body, the Australia Council would consume much of his time. Within a year, her tone had relaxed. While she fretted that Nugget was being asked to do too much, too quickly, she was grateful for the government’s responsiveness on environmental issues, particularly the declaration of the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island as National Parks. In 1974, she was appointed to the Inquiry into the National Estate, which advised on the protection of cultural and natural heritage—everything from historic buildings to National Parks. This demanded much travel around the country, after which she had the task of editing a massive report.
As exhilarating as this period was, she found life in Canberra unsettling. ‘Everything here is immediately related to political endgames and seen in terms of advantage for one side or the other; a city that has so few pensioners, people over 60, and ordinary workin’ types and is so nicely cushioned against most things isn’t part of the real world to me.’ She was a territorial animal, as she remarked to a friend, and Canberra wasn’t her territory. She had never been fond of cities. Nothing was more real to her than the natural world and she was beginning to hanker for it.
When Nugget heard that land at the Half Moon Wildlife District, not far from the town of Braidwood, one hundred kilometres east of Canberra, was up for sale, he told Judith and they went to look at it. She immediately fell in love with this ‘long slope that goes down to a still wild and unpolluted river’. The landscape here on the south-east edge of the southern tableland reminded her of the ‘lean, hungry country’ of New England, where she grew up. As she didn’t have quite enough money to buy it, Nugget helped out and also put money towards the building of the house.
‘The land’s so lovely I can’t believe I’ve really got it,’ Judith told friends. ‘The ridges are all ironstone quartz conglomerate rocks with all manner of wild-flowers.’ Her excitement also had much to do with the fact that she and Nugget would now have a place of their own, a private sanctuary where their love could find its fullest expression. While the fall of the Whitlam government in 1975 left them both disillusioned, it also marked the beginning of a new and thrilling phase in their lives.
FIFTEEN
The World’s Last Edge
It was late afternoon when the bus pulled into the goldfields town of Braidwood with its wrought-iron verandas, heavy stone buildings and sleepy, country air. Meredith was waiting for me at the stop. It wasn’t hard to pick her. Although she has her father’s fine features, she is unmistakably her mother’s daughter when she smiles.
We drove down the main street past an old, colonial-style bank which was now a gallery and cafe called Studio Altenburg. She and Judith had lived there in 1976 while the house was being built at Edge, and while Meredith was completing her doctoral thesis at the Australian National University on a wandering Japanese Buddhist monk and poet, Saigyo. After finishing school, Meredith had studied Japanese at university, done further study in Kyoto and then begun teaching English at various universities there. After twenty years in Japan, she now lived on her own bush property not far from ‘Edge’ and translated Japanese literature into English for a living. She had called her hundred acres of eucalypt forest ‘Yuen’—Japanese for garden of serenity—and in acknowledgment of the Yuin Aboriginal tribe who had lived there.
Once we were out of town, Meredith pointed to the rocky outcrops of granite pushing up through the open farmland. On the crest of one hill sat a row of large grey boulders, the configuration of which gave it the air of an ancient sacred site. In other places, clusters of smaller rocks huddled together like sheep. It was easy to see why this landscape had reminded Judith of New England. The weather, too, would have reinforced this sense of familiarity—frosts in winter, crisp dry air and parched summers. She must have felt in her bones that she had come full circle; that in a fundamental way, she had come home. And yet there was more to it than this. Part of Judith’s attraction to Edge, as I would discover, was that it required her to surrender the last vestiges of her dream of returning to that ‘lost garden’ of childhood. In the end, she knew that being ‘at home’ in the landscape was quite different to recapturing the landscape of one’s youth.
That night, I slept in the guest room of Meredith’s exquisitely proportioned, rammed-earth house—the room in which Judith used to sleep whenever she came to stay. Judith would spend one week here every month when she became too frail to live alone at Edge and had moved back to the old bank in the township of Braidwood. The cow bell that Jack used to ring to call Judith in from the veggie garden at Calanthe now sat by the bed. On the wall near the door hung Charles Blackman’s stark but moving portrait of Jack.
The next morning I was woken by a bird fluttering at the high small window opposite the bed, tapping a repeated tattoo on the glass, as if it had an urgent message to communicate. When I told Meredith about it, she said that just after Judith’s death, one of these birds—a shrike thrush—
started visiting this particular window, sitting on the sill and tapping at the glass. It was now tame and came to the door every morning to be fed. Judith had believed that birds were spirit carriers, Meredith added, leaving the implications hanging. I told her about the large lizard we saw near Council Rock at Wallamumbi and how we had joked about it being a visitation from her mother.
We sat near the bay window which overlooks a native garden of banksias, grevilleas and a small paved courtyard area with a Japanese-style pond. Before the garden was landscaped, Judith had noticed that water gathered in a slight depression and suggested to Meredith that it would make a good place for a pond. The positioning could not have been better. As we ate our breakfast, the morning sun reflecting off the water danced in bright patches on the high, cathedral ceiling of the living room. Once she’d become totally deaf, Judith took extra pleasure in what her eyes could feast on and loved to sit here and watch the play of light.
With the sun streaming through the window, Meredith told me about a dream she’d had the night before. She and Judith were in a house together that kept shifting location. Meredith tried to tell Judith what was happening but her mother didn’t understand until she went outside and saw that the landscape had changed. They were so disorientated they had to go and ask the neighbours where they were. It turned out that the house was on wheels and moved of its own accord with the wind.