My Blood's Country

by Fiona Capp

  When we damage the earth, says Hamilton, we also damage ourselves.

  As we left the house, we passed the few remnants of Judith’s garden— some rosemary bushes, thyme, lavender, some native grasses. Outside Judith’s old bedroom window is some native jasmine from a cutting from Dalwood, her great, great grandparents’ house in the Hunter Valley, and which also grows at Meredith’s property, Yuen. When Judith first arrived at Edge, she still longed to cultivate a garden, even if a very minimal one. She planted herbs, ferns, native plants, and started a vegetable garden. She recognised that, in conventional terms, the land was considered poor. It was rocky, with little top soil, and had been stripped and poisoned by goldmining. As always, she kept up a running commentary about her garden in her letters, although now she was not struggling against the furious rate of growth—as she had in Queensland—but against frost, drought and native animals which came to graze. She planted nettles amongst the vegetables to keep the kangaroos away and, early on, reported that she had ‘a fine crop of broad beans and some nice parsley coming on, if nothing much else.’

  But the land and the weather soon taught her the futility of imposing one’s will upon the landscape rather than accepting it for what it is. Letting go of this impulse meant relinquishing deeply ingrained ways of relating to the land that went back to childhood. In cultivating that little garden of wild violets when her mother was ill, she had sought to work a kind of healing magic. Although this magic had failed and her mother had died, gardening had remained for Judith an expression of that longing to heal and nurture. One of the reasons she had been attracted to Edge was because it was such a visibly wounded landscape. But now she was beginning to recognise that the land would heal itself. It did not need her to tend it. Nor did it need her nostalgia for how it once was, for some dream of Eden or the ‘lost garden’ of her childhood.

  This place’s quality is not its former nature

  but a struggle to heal itself after many wounds.

  The compensation for relinquishing this impulse was that, now, the whole of Edge could be her garden.

  Meredith led the way, looking for signs of the old paths she and her mother once followed. The land used to be more open but, in the years since Judith had lived here, a scrubby, waist-high bush called bitter pea had filled in the gaps. The way everything had become overgrown disconcerted Meredith. She stopped for a moment, trying to get her bearings. ‘It’s lucky we die,’ she sighed, ‘because everything changes and it would break your heart if you had to live through it.’

  We bush-bashed our way up to the ridge, which was Judith’s favourite place to watch the sun set over the Great Dividing Range. It is a low plateau of scattered quartz and iron stone boulders covered with dwarf casuarina, a kind of heath that changes colour according to the seasons. Judith knew every corner of Edge and was keenly aware of the constant changes it underwent. She developed an eye for its smallest details. During one of her walks, she discovered a rose-coloured boronia she had never seen before. With some difficulty, the botanists at the Canberra Botanical Gardens identified it as an Ice Age relic that grew only on rocky summits in this region and in Tasmania. The more she walked and looked, the keener her eye became.

  Judith would send letters to Meredith telling of her ‘serenely ecstatic walks’ and nocturnal rambles through this rugged landscape. One recalls an ‘end-of-summer evening all buzzing with beetles and rushing with ants and birds and things, everything deeply coloured and nearly autumnish, mountains violet again. Brought back the usual clutch of stones and flowers.’ Meredith had given her mother a microscope which Judith would use to examine whatever she had collected.

  On the way down to the river, occasional pieces of faded orange plastic ribbon tied to branches signalled that we had reconnected with the old path. We passed through what used to be a swamp, now completely dry and, further on, a large dead wattle which marked the spot where Judith, Nugget and Meredith used to camp. Through the tea-tree and ribbon gum, I could see the waterhole that Judith so loved. As she sweated her way through February heatwaves, with the sky so close she felt surrounded by blazing blue, a swim in the Mongarlowe was something she looked forward to all day.

  It was a muggy morning and I was glad we had our bathers with us. Although I didn’t like to admit it, even if it had been cooler I probably would have gone in, just to experience what Judith had known here. I had constantly told myself during this journey through her landscapes that I wasn’t on a pilgrimage, that I hadn’t come to worship—only to learn. But the distinction was a fine, and possibly arbitrary, one. Immersion in water carried with it connotations of baptism, and yet the kind of immersion I was after was more sensual than religious. I might never be able to see and know this place as Judith had, but at least I could taste some of its pleasures and, in doing so, ease my way deeper into the poems themselves.

  The water was the colour of black tea. On its smooth surface, white gum blossom shimmered like tiny sequins. Because the level was lower than usual, there was very little current. Meredith warned me to watch out for rocks beneath the surface as I swam. I glided through the water, thrilled by its silky softness, stroking lazily up-river. Rolling on to my back, I watched the tall eucalypts, shaggy with bark, drift by. I don’t remember the sound of birds, just the soothing rustle of water falling over the rocks at either end of the swimming hole, what Judith called a ‘sunken song’. After all the travel and constant movement through the landscapes in which Judith had lived, after all the thinking and investigating and note-taking, it was good to stop. To simply float, suspended in time. This surrender, this attentiveness to the textures and sensations that make up the fabric of every instant, was the state of being her writing aspired to. Here, for a fleeting moment, I felt that I was finally inside one of her poems.

  Then, of course, life intervened.

  I went to stand up and struck my foot on one of those submerged rocks. Yet even this had a poetic justice to it. I remembered that Judith had written of a similar experience in one of her poems. Drought had ‘stopped the song of the river’ and the swimming hole had dropped so low that she bruised her knees on the rocks. It was daybreak and, as she swam, she looked at the moon, blurred by a gauze of summer dust, and recalled her mother’s face looking through a grey motor-veil. Being was infused with memory, there was no escaping it:

  Poems written in age confuse the years.

  We all live, said Bash, in a phantom dwelling.

  This concept of life as a phantom dwelling was made all the more real for Judith by the signs of the land’s previous occupants. What had once been miners’ huts were now ‘a tumble of chimney-stones’ and old shafts near the river now sheltered ‘a city of wombats’. It disturbed her that, over a hundred years after the mining was done, the remaining mullock heaps were still bare and ugly and possibly contaminated by the mercury which miners used to separate the ore. There were also old water-races used by the goldminers, and shafts sometimes five or six feet deep and hidden now by fern, tea-tree and rushes. Judith nearly fell into one the first time she stumbled across it. The fact that she didn’t fall into any of these shafts or injure herself when she was on her nocturnal rambles indicates how well she grew to know this plot of earth.

  Conscious as she was of the Yuin people who had first lived here, it was still hard to find traces of them. When she stood on the ridge and looked east toward the v-shaped gap between Mount Budawang and Mount Currockbilly, she knew that there had once been an Aboriginal track that ran from the Clyde River to the land around Mongarlowe and Braidwood. She knew that along these tracks to and from the coast were some bora rings, spear-sharpening grooved rocks and some scattered stone tools. Along with a couple of middens of mussel shells on the banks of the Mongarlowe, these traces were all that remained of the Yuin ‘who saw the first cruel ghost-people arrive in the 1820s and lived to regret the sight.’ The country remained haunted for Judith. ‘This is not my land—nor anyone’s; greed and the passion for ownership had done
it endless damage. But I stop to look, as I scramble over the gullies and past the shafts, at the clumps of flowering wild purple Patersonia irises which it has drawn over its wounds. And the sound of the river goes on.’

  As I dried myself on the riverbank, I thought of Nellie, whose story Judith tells in her poem ‘River Bend’. Nellie was the last of her tribe, who, having lost her husband and children and taken to the grog to drown her sorrows, was eventually banished from the township of Braidwood. It was said that she spent her last days camped by the Mongarlowe River foraging for mussels in what must have been, it seemed to Judith, a state of ‘loneliness unbearable to think of ’ because Aboriginal people ‘live through their kind and their land’. She could still hear the woman’s grief in the sound of the swollen river, ‘a wild perpetual voice’.

  On the way back to the house, we passed a large upright slab of granite that loomed suddenly over the track, the remains of some ancient cliff face. This rock had been special to Judith, Meredith said, because she believed it held great significance for the Yuin people. They knew, much better than we, the ‘ancestral powers of stone’. When she walked this way at night, her torch would light up ‘something massive, motionless’ that confronted her with a sense of the numinous. In a perfect summary of the philosophy that underpinned her time at Edge, she wrote:

  I’ve no wish to chisel things into new shapes.

  The remnant of a mountain has its own meaning.

  SEVENTEEN

  Years of Love and Work

  The next day, Meredith drove me back to Canberra as she, too, had work to do at the library. When we reached the outskirts, she mentioned she had recently heard about two new, adjacent suburbs that were to be named Coombs and Wright in recognition of their contribution to the city. It was one of those civic-minded public decisions that serendipitously contained a hidden story.

  We went via the university so that I could revisit University House, where Judith and Nugget had spent so much time together. In one of her early letters to Nugget when he was interstate, Judith told him how she had lunched with a friend in the Fellow’s Garden at University House but didn’t like being there when he was away: ‘Tried not to look at your windows.’ As we paused by the entrance, I thought of the ploughman’s lunch Judith and I had shared at the University House cafeteria in 1983. I had written asking if I could interview her for a small literary magazine for young writers I was co-editing. She replied that I could contact her on the phone number of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee office during the day. She didn’t know what her evening phone number would be, as she’d be ‘staying with various friends and occasionally at University House.’ This, I now realised, was a reference to Nugget’s flat. As always, she was carefully off-hand about the connection.

  This was during the final days of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, a voluntary organisation formed in 1979 by Judith, Nugget and a diverse group of scholars who believed that an internationally recognised treaty was the best way of achieving Aboriginal land rights. The committee advocated exclusive Commonwealth responsibility for all Aboriginal matters and for the legal recognition of the right to self-determination. It also became a mouthpiece for the public mood for change in black–white relations. Work on the treaty had consumed much of her and Nugget’s time and energy for the past four years, and would culminate in Judith’s book, We Call for A Treaty (1985), which documented their efforts and their vision for the future.

  Two years before my visit, her epic account of frontier history, The Cry for the Dead (1981), which exposes the devastating impact on the Aborigines of ‘the great pastoralist invasions of inland Australia’, had been released. But I knew nothing of it when I went to talk to her that day. As well as revealing the gaps in my knowledge of her life and work, my ignorance also reflected the book’s general reception. Although well reviewed, it did not have the impact she had hoped for. The general public, it seems, was not yet ready to confront the full truth about frontier history: stories of massacres and Aboriginal resistance had never been part of the ‘official’ story most Australians grew up with. Consequently, the book did not sell well and ended up on bookshop remainders tables. Once again, she was too far ahead of her time.

  Judith and Nugget’s commitment to redressing the injustices done to the indigenous people shaped every aspect of their relationship and took them far from Edge. In the late 1970s, freed from his role as political adviser, Nugget had begun to spend more time in the Northern Territory with Aboriginal communities. As Chancellor of the Australian National University, he had helped establish the university’s North Australian Research Unit (NARU) in Darwin for the study of Aboriginal culture and relations between indigenous peoples and the government. NARU provided him with a base from which to work. Occasionally, Judith would join him up north.

  After her first visit, she told him: ‘I have washed the desert out of my hair, at last, but remember it fondly. It was a very good introduction to the country, thank you, my love.’ As always, she was conscious that they might be recognised but enjoyed the excitement of an ‘illicit’ affair. In 1978, discussing a rendezvous in Alice Springs, she found their plans ‘very alluring . . .’ With uncharacteristic girlishness she wrote: ‘I don’t doubt our movements will be charted, out there where nothing that moves is unnoticed, but that can’t be helped! I expect I ought to book into a motel for decency’s sake but won’t anyway—we shall see what happens. What fun!’

  The need for secrecy and the possibility of being watched had a dark side for Judith, though; a dark side I had unwittingly glimpsed when she wrote to me in 1989, asking me to pass on a letter to Phillip Toyne, who was then head of the Conservation Foundation. Years of pitting herself against the deeply conservative Queensland government had made her acutely sensitive to the potential repercussions of challenging powerful vested interests. When she was campaigning to save the Barrier Reef in the 1960s, she had become convinced that she and other activists were being investigated by the CIA. The experience inspired her poem ‘They’:

  They look like people

  that’s the trouble . . .

  Only afterwards

  when you’re alone

  you realize what you said

  what the bargain was

  you hear the click

  as they say well thanks so much

  and go off

  to file the evidence.

  Judith was the subject of an ASIO file from 1954 to 1969. ASIO ’s primary interest appears to have been her association with organisations regarded as communist fronts (such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers) or with people thought to be communists. While there is no evidence that the security service was interested in her environmental activism, any connection she might have had with Soviet-linked organisations could have been used to discredit her.

  This experience predisposed Judith to a conspiratorial mentality, which was only heightened by her secret relationship with Nugget and the perceived sensitivity of their work for Aboriginal land rights. By 1988, she was advising Nugget to tear up her letters after reading them. As they both became heavily involved in the behind-the-scenes negotiations that led up to the Mabo case—which did potentially threaten powerful land holders and mining interests—her fear of surveillance escalated.

  The more her hearing deteriorated—she went completely deaf in 1992—the more these anxieties preyed on her. Severe tinnitus (which involved hearing voices) and failing eyesight contributed to her feelings of isolation and vulnerability. Since the late 1980s, Nugget had been spending half the year in the Northern Territory because he was prone to life-threatening bouts of pneumonia during the colder months. Although Judith supported him in this—she knew all too well how freezing Canberra winters could be—she found his absences hard: ‘It seems like years, not five months, since you left, and will be longer still.’

  During this deeply troubled period, Judith destroyed two decades worth of Nugget’s letters to her out of fear that they would fall into the wrong hand
s. On a melancholy winter’s day, she burnt them in her wood fire stove.

  Well, my love,

  . . . it is a dreadful thing to have done but I see no alternative after weeks of thinking. Simply, there is nowhere they couldn’t be found and probably nowhere that somebody wouldn’t suffer for it. Forgive me for the holocaust of such a beautiful record . . . of years of love and work. Those letters were a joy to get, a personal window on your work . . . Whatever we’ve lost it isn’t possible to lose the storyline now, and we’ve worked together long enough to be remembered for that.

  Yours and always,

  J.

  Nugget was devastated. It was beyond him to destroy anything she had written to him. He brooded about Judith’s isolation and felt guilty about not being with her. A year later, Judith was able to recall that ‘fierce time’ as a period of delusion marked by an ‘inexplicable sense of bitter enemies lurking nearby.’ Even thinking about it made her shake ‘like a terrified horse’.