My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  Like her mother, Meredith has a propensity for searing, visceral dreams. The day before, she had told me about a ‘big dream’ she’d once had about Judith. It was still playing on my mind because it raised such confronting questions about what people like me, who went looking for the woman behind the poems, expected to find. In Judith’s later years, Meredith was conscious of her mother’s life being transformed into legend. After Judith’s death, media and public attention was intense, leaving Meredith with little room for her own private grief, for the fact that it was her mother who had died, not the famous poet and activist everyone else imagined they knew.

  The dream, which Meredith had had long before the Two Fires Festival was established at Braidwood, was about a literary festival honouring Judith at Calanthe. Meredith was invited and, although she found the idea painful, she felt that she ought to be there as her mother’s representative. The festival began in the study, the front room of the house, where Judith had worked. A number of people gave papers about Judith as a poet. Sitting in the front row of the audience, Meredith was aware that her reactions were being monitored; she smiled encouragingly because she felt it was expected of her. The next part of the proceedings took place in the room next to the study, Meredith’s old bedroom, where she used to fall asleep to the sound of her mother’s typewriter. Here, she found it harder to participate because this room had once been her private space. Someone got up and began to talk about objects that had once belonged to Judith— personal items, things Meredith remembered from around the house—and the speaker was getting it wrong. Meredith didn’t want to contradict them in public but, on the other hand, she wanted to protect the truth. In a state of turmoil, she felt obliged to remain supportive even as her and her mother’s past was being violated.

  The pièce de résistance of the dream festival was a special display in Judith and Jack’s old bedroom. Propped up against the wall was a life-size, wax dummy of Judith which was said to be wearing her clothes. Meredith remembered the old blouse from the fifties, but knew the skirt had been made from the curtain that had hung between Meredith’s bedroom and the main bedroom. This was disturbing enough in itself. Then the guide lifted one of the dummy’s inert arms and dropped it, remarking that they hadn’t got the exhibit quite right yet. Meredith watched in horror: the dummy was not a waxwork but her mother’s corpse. At this point, she rushed out of the room in tears.

  ‘When I woke up, I thought, that’s how it feels—that sense of everybody wanting a bit of her, the whole myth-making thing.’ There wasn’t a lot I could say in reply. In self-defence, I said I hoped that whatever I wrote would not feel like a violation to her, and that my main interest was in how the landscape had shaped Judith’s vision as a writer and an activist. But, of course, much as I disliked the grosser invasions of biography, I had intruded on her private life and there was no getting away from that.

  A five-minute drive along the road through the hamlet of Mongarlowe brought us to the Half Moon Wildlife District, three hundred and eighty hectares of land on a high ridge that slopes down towards the Mongarlowe River. In the distance to the east loomed the ‘black calligraphy’ of the Budawung Ranges. When I had arrived at Braidwood the previous day, I had no memory of having been there before. But now the sight of Edge and the A-frame house which Judith had designed to blend in with the surrounding landscape, suddenly brought everything back. I had visited her here in 1986 when I was a young journalist working at the Age. Judith was seventy-one, I was twenty-three. It was the only time I ever saw her in her ‘natural’ habitat.

  Judith had greeted the photographer and me at the door, telling us she was glad we had found our way. Most people, she said, drove straight past. After a lunch of soup, bread and wine, she took us for a wander through the property. As we walked, she named the eucalypts (the peppermint gums, the white-barked brittle gums and candle gums) and talked of the animals (native rodents, wombats, kangaroos, platypuses) that she often saw on her daily rambles. She stopped by one particular gum and described how an insect had created the scribbles in the bark that look like a primitive-form of writing, while tracing the pattern with her finger. She talked of how she still loved watching birds but, with her hearing failing, she had to spin around and around before she could find them. I remembered how, intermittently, her hearing-aid would squeal with feedback.

  Her final collection of poetry, Phantom Dwelling, had come out the year before. Many of the poems in this collection were inspired by her life in this austere, granite-strewn landscape of wind-blasted, ghostly eucalypts and low bronze heath, the ground pockmarked with abandoned goldmines. The poems are spare and concentrated, like the bush itself. There was one in particular that I liked, a meditation on how time grinds down both the landscape and the human body:

  Blood slows, thickens, silts—yet when I saw you

  once again, what a joy set this pulse jumping.

  I had been corresponding with her for six years by the time I visited her here at Edge but I knew little of her private life. What I did know was that she had spent twenty happy years with Jack on Tamborine Mountain. I assumed that she was now living alone, and imagined that the ‘you’ she addressed in the poem was a vision or recollection of Jack, or a visitation in a dream. Being young and presumptuous, I saw her celebration of desire as a moving gesture of defiance, a refusal to submit to the clichés of sexless old age.

  Back in Melbourne, I wrote an article for the Age about our day together. It ran under the headline ‘Eve Alone in Her Garden’, a reference to a series of poems Judith had written in which Eve addresses Adam about the mess the human race has made of this ‘green world that dies’. But, of course, Eve wasn’t alone in her garden. The portrait I had drawn of her—as a self-sufficient, independent, older woman serenely communing with the natural world while battling with the man-made world—was an idealised one based on partial knowledge and a desire to turn her into what I wanted her to be: an Eve who has no need of an Adam. A reflection, no doubt, of my own emotional state at the time. If I had listened more carefully, I might have noticed that, when we first arrived, she had mentioned how there were nine other households living on Half Moon. As if warning against any assumptions I might make, she added: ‘It looks much more unoccupied than it is. Most of us hide in the bushes, but we call on each other for help and refuge.’

  Although Nugget kept his flat at University House, he too loved Edge and regularly spent time here each week. Judith’s letters to Meredith report on their daily walks through the bush. In one letter, she described how they wandered right down the boundary fence to the river, which was flooded, and found a recently killed skeleton of a kangaroo. Judith feared it had been shot. The walk inspired her poem ‘River Bend’ which ponders the traces of extinction and loss that linger on in this spot: the death of the kangaroo doe, whose skeleton has been cleaned ‘white as moonlight’, and the passing of the Aboriginal people who had once lived here. Like many of the poems in Phantom Dwelling, it reflected the shift that had been taking place in her poetic treatment of the landscape and her relationship with it. She was wary now of imposing meanings on to what she saw. Adopting the perspective of an indigenous tracker, she was more interested in following the clues the land threw up; learning from it rather than trying to remake it through language. Contemplating the kangaroo skeleton, she writes: ‘Pad-tracks in sand where something drank fresh blood.’

  And, more than ever before, she was immersing herself in the landscape. In the warmer months, she and Nugget would go swimming naked in the long pool between tiny rapids in the river, and picnic on its banks. The first summer at Edge, before the house was built, they camped with Meredith by the river and swam at dawn and dusk with platypuses who seemed remarkably unfazed by their presence. At night, they studied the night sky, marvelling that the stars felt close enough to throw sticks at. When Nugget was away, Judith would write to him about what was happening with the building of the house, and how she and her neighbours were banding together
to oppose new goldmining applications. She would tell him about the wildlife she’d seen, which orchids were in flower, how the landscape glittered with frost and how the vegetable garden was going.

  Once I learned of Judith’s relationship with Nugget, I began to realise how many of the poems in Phantom Dwelling are indirectly addressed to him or, in a veiled way, about their relationship. While knowledge of this is not necessary to make sense of the poems, it does cast them in a new and moving light. That Edge became a bush hideaway for the clandestine lovers is beautifully captured in ‘Violet Stick-insects’ which zooms in on a ‘landscape of leaves’. What appear to be a leaning twig and a gnawed thin-bellied leaf turn out to be two well-camouflaged stick insects, pointedly referred to as ‘he and she’:

  Any shadow might be a beak,

  but as twig or leaf they are safe.

  Yet he planes on a downward swing

  unfolding a brilliant wing—

  a fearless violet flash

  to centre that grey and green.

  ‘Winter’ sees them sitting around an open fire drinking red wine and contemplating old age and the paths that brought them—‘you and me’—to this point. Everything—knowledge, wine, poetry, conversation, the human body—is contemplated in terms of the flow of energy which must eventually exhaust itself. There is a mood of acceptance and quiet celebration of the moment. So too in ‘Late Meeting’, which is, ostensibly, about the last journey a ‘wind-worn bee’ makes to the very last flower of autumn. This final fling between bee and flower is clearly an allegory for the coming together of Judith and Nugget.

  They meet, they mingle,

  tossed by the chilly air

  in the old ecstasy,

  as though

  nothing existed past

  the moment’s joining.

  In one of her poems—published not long after Judith and Nugget became lovers—Eve addresses Adam. While the poem is not necessarily about their relationship, there are tantalising echoes of it:

  Lover, we’ve made, between us,

  one hell of a world. And yet—

  still at your touch I melt. How can there be

  any way out of this?

  As always, I go overboard for you,

  here at the world’s last edge.

  Ravage us still; the very last green’s our kiss.

  SIXTEEN

  Phantom Dwelling

  A child’s plastic tractor lay on the dirt near the house. This time, a little boy ran out to greet us. Edge was now owned by an ex-politician from the ACT parliament, and inhabited by his niece and her family. After Judith bought Edge, she and Nugget had hatched a plan to hand it over to the Australian National University for ecological research purposes once they were too old to live there. When the handover finally happened, Judith took pleasure in the thought that it would be used to help further knowledge of the environment as a place for students to come and study. The university, however, found the cost of upkeep too onerous and later gifted the property to the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme to get it off their hands. While initially enthusiastic, the Scheme, which had promised to care for the land and use the buildings for youth camps, lost interest in the property and it fell into disuse.

  In 2007, the Scheme decided to sell the house and land at market values. Alarmed at the way this wheeling and dealing had violated the spirit of Judith’s original agreement with the university, Meredith requested that they seek a sensitive buyer who would accept stewardship of the land, as Judith would have wished, and donate part of the proceeds to the Judith Wright Award for Indigenous Students at the Australian National University. It seemed only fair, she felt, that they offer some recompense for the huge profit they would get from selling Edge. The Scheme, however, rejected both requests.

  Meredith was still saddened by the university’s cavalier treatment of the property and angered by the greed of the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme, but she was glad to see the place being looked after and lived in. And it was good to know that she was always welcome to visit. We had a quick a look around, before heading down to the river for a swim. What I remembered most vividly from my first visit was the Japanese-style glass corridor that connected the living area with the bedrooms and provided views of the bush on either side. At the end of the hallway, the new inhabitants had hung a framed copy of Judith’s poem ‘Glass Corridor’, a wry meditation on self perception inspired by the experience of walking up this passageway and seeing her reflection in the windows: ‘We three walk through / a forest of tree-branches, / a swaying maze of gestures.’ With moonrise on one hand and sunset on the other, the poet is left puzzling over the many selves that constitute a single human being.

  This Buddhist sense of the fragmented, multitudinous self had long been with Judith. As her reputation began to grow and take on a life of its own after the publication of the acclaimed early collections, The Moving Image (1946) and Woman to Man (1949), Judith had grown uncomfortable with the public persona that went with ‘being a Poet’. Behind this attitude was not just a desire for privacy and a dislike of posturing, but a recognition of the folly of clinging to a fixed identity. ‘I’ve come more and more to think that “I” is a process, not an absolute. Once you begin to think that “I” is really real, you start trying to protect it and coddle it and bash the other person with it.’ Although she never called herself a Buddhist, she shared many of its precepts and saw Buddhism as a way of learning self-control which, paradoxically, allowed one to ‘do away with the self’—the isolated ego—and become one with the world, ‘without argument or differences’.

  This philosophy reached its fullest expression in her final poems and in the way she lived at Edge. The phrase ‘phantom dwelling’ comes from a letter by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, Basho, in which he described the derelict, overgrown shack he had been living in on the shore of Lake Biwa, east of Kyoto in Japan. It was called the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond or Jung in his tower by the lake, he spent his days there meditating on the changes in the seasons and the natural world. He reflected on his life and how he had once envied those in government or with impressive jobs, and how he had considered becoming a Buddhist monk. But, instead, he had spent his time writing poetry and taking journeys as aimless as the wind and clouds, while pouring out his feelings on flowers and birds. What he had achieved, he said, could never compare with the achievements of truly great writers. ‘And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling?’

  The ‘phantom dwelling’ is the web of illusions we are trapped in—a state of mind distracted by cravings and fixed ways of seeing ourselves and the world which blind us to the reality of the present moment. Judith quoted Basho’s rhetorical question in her late poem ‘Dust’ and underscored the sentiment by naming the collection Phantom Dwelling. In doing so, she drew attention to her desire to strip away these illusions and live as clear-sightedly as possible; to apply what Buddhists call ‘bare attention’, the capacity to let go of petty obsessions and attend to the world as it is. The way she observed nature signalled how her perspective had changed. She would spend hours just watching, sometimes getting down at ground level to study the life on a patch of earth from an insect’s eye view.

  In ‘Backyard’ she describes a square of grass as a ‘forest level with my eye / where travellers toil and hurry’ and concentrates on ‘trying to live there too’. On this small piece of ground, she uncovers whole worlds normally overlooked. All is furious activity as various creatures prepare for winter, obeying their genetic programming, their ‘ancient orders’, which ensure that every scrap of nutrient and energy is used and recycled. This was how she was now trying to live in her ecologically attuned house and bush property, alert to these ‘ancient orders’. ‘I dote on it quite amazingly,’ she told a friend, ‘though no doubt to most eyes it’s just an untidy lot of gum trees.’

  Just as the spare, pared-back, semi-arid environment of Edge changed the way she saw and appreciated nature, so to
o did it pare back her writing. She turned away from her traditional influences— Romantic poets like Keats and Blake—and embraced haiku ‘for its honed brevities / its inclusive silences.’ In that first letter she wrote to me in 1980, she had suggested that I study Chinese and Japanese poetry for their ‘sterner aesthetic’. It did one good, she said, to ‘pare down words to essentials and to see things clearly.’ From a broader, philosophical perspective, she felt that Buddhism, with its emphasis on unity and the interconnectedness of all life on the path to Nirvana, was the kind of ‘ecological ethic’ the West urgently needed to adopt.

  The other major influence on her during this period was, of course, the indigenous attitude to the land. Judith had always been wary of appropriating Aboriginal ideas, motifs or beliefs, and never claimed that her relationship with the natural world had the depth and comprehensiveness of the first inhabitants’. She felt, however, that non-Aboriginal Australians had much to learn from Aborigines for whom ‘every part of the country . . . every mark and feature [is] numinous with meaning.’ The Western notion of landscape is a limited one because it presumes a division between ourselves and the land, not to mention the rest of the cosmos. Much as she had tried to foster recognition of the deep connections between our psychic life and the phenomena of the natural world, she feared that, in the West, we would never know real kinship with the mountains, stars, moon, sun, trees and animals as our ancient forebears had.

  Implicit in this fear was the recognition that, as the inheritors of Descartes’ definition of humans as isolated egos in a world of lifeless matter in motion, we have lost touch with the idea of a ‘living earth’. In formulating his famous maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’, Descartes saw the modern mind as ‘solitary, autonomous and a world unto itself, unaffected by outside influence, and separate from all other beings.’ Previous thinkers and theologians, who had understood God as unknowable—beyond thought and words—regarded the earth as infused with the divine and therefore alive. Such a view ensured reverence and respect for nature, says philosopher, Clive Hamilton, who has analysed the shift in Western thought underpinning the current climate crisis. Descartes’ quest for certainty lead him to conceive of the cosmos as a machine—set in motion by an all-powerful God—that ran on mathematical principles. The natural world was no longer a source of wonder but a mechanism to be comprehended: spirit and matter were split asunder. This worldview was taken up by ‘powerful social and political forces who wanted to sweep away any spiritual obstacles to the exploitation of the earth,’ says Hamilton, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution. In belated response, environmentalism not only aims to protect and preserve nature but also seeks to bring about a return to the notion of the living earth. To remind people that ‘we are dependent on the natural world, not only physically in an ecological sense, but also in some deeper, spiritual way.’