by Fiona Capp
Fortunately, she stopped destroying Nugget’s letters in late 1992. By this time, she had moved back to Braidwood town because she felt unable to cope with being alone at Edge. She did, however, return there when she could: ‘I miss Edge severely here in this colonial village of parks and gardens, all English and tidy,’ she told a friend. Nugget was relieved that she was sounding like her old self again. ‘I am glad [your] sense of being watched and intruded on is at last fading and that you can revisit Edge without trauma. It makes your distance from me more bearable.’ He told her that he feared his expressions of devotion and dependence might ‘sound stale with repetition and remoteness, but believe me they come from a living source.’ Their correspondence went on as before, sharing news of their daily lives, their health problems, the latest football results and their work.
Even into his late eighties and early nineties, Nugget was still visiting Aboriginal communities, writing papers and flying interstate to attend functions and visit his family—as well as spending time with Judith. When his doctor told him his blood pressure was dangerously high, he complained to Judith that he couldn’t start swallowing pills ‘simply because I cannot finish something I am trying to write or because I wake at 2 am and brood over the state of the world.’ He worried whether he would have the stamina to continue ‘doing what I am lucky to have the chance to do.’ In what reads hauntingly like a premonition of what was to come, he added that his real worry was ‘the danger of dying of boredom being denied that chance.’
In August 1994, Judith and Nugget had one last holiday together in the Northern Territory. They used to say that they would like to end their lives by setting off into the desert together and not coming back. When they went to Ubirr Rock at Kakadu, Judith decided against going up to see the cave paintings because the spirit of the place was too powerful. She stayed at the bottom while Nugget and Meredith went on. When they returned, Judith was gone. Following a circular path, they decided to go in opposite directions to search for her on the understanding that the first to find her would return to wait at the seat. Meredith followed the path until it brought her back to the seat: neither her mother nor Nugget was there. ‘The buggers,’ she thought, remembering their vow. ‘They’ve gone and done it.’
She soon found them not far away, sitting together in a little cul-de-sac. But there had been a wonderful moment of jubilation when she thought, ‘Yes! Go!’
From now on, they would meet up at Edge or in Canberra. In January 1995, Nugget wrote: ‘Thank you my lovely woman for those days at Edge. They were balm to my troubled spirit and a joy to my body and mind. I love you.’
Eight months later, he suffered a stroke that put him in a nursing home in Sydney and robbed him of his speech. Judith faxed him every week and visited him when she could, although travel was not easy because of her increasingly fragile health. In a letter to a friend, she wrote: ‘I don’t think he is in physical misery but his mind is only partly with the world . . . I don’t often cry but it’s hard to avoid; he wants to get out and last time I was there he thought we had come to take him [home].’
When he died in October 1997, Nugget was farewelled with a state funeral. As their relationship had never been made public, Judith was not invited. Instead, with friends and colleagues of Nugget, she held a private wake with ‘good tales and memories . . . with red wine and tears and laughter.’ She was relieved that he was no longer captive in his body as he had been for the previous two years. For all her sorrow, Judith’s sense of his release was stronger than her feelings of loss.
In the 1950s, she had written a sonnet called ‘Landscapes’. As must have happened to her many times, the poem suddenly took on a new life and meaning:
To look at landscapes loved by the newly dead
is to move into the dark and out again.
Every brilliant leaf that lives by light
dies from its hold at last and desires earth’s bed:
men and trees and grasses daily falling
make that veil of beauty for her. Slight
aeons of soil on rock, of grass on soil, of men
standing on grass, can’t hide her outcrops . . .
And now the newly dead
is lowered there. Now we weep for eyes whose look
is closed on landscapes loved, and at last known.
By now, Judith was living in the bed-sit in Canberra where I visited her the last time I saw her. For all the English trees and parks of Braidwood, at least there she had been out in the countryside and near Edge. Now, she was in the midst of the suburbs.
In the Canberra Botanical Gardens, shadows were stretching across the path where we sat. I was aware that Judith would be getting tired and would probably want to go, so we headed for the entrance to wait for a taxi. Judith eased herself down on to the seat of her walking frame.
‘Would you like to sit on my knee?’ she asked. ‘This is a very strong little creature.’
‘I’m fine,’ I smiled, touched by her motherliness.
I wondered how she felt about going back to her bed-sit. It must have been incredibly hard, I said, moving to Canberra after so many years in the bush.
‘It almost broke my heart.’
But she was near friends and medical care. And her situation was not as grim as it first appeared. She was still writing, working mostly on her autobiography. She was still involved, if less actively, in numerous causes. She still occasionally spoke out in public and on television, despite her deafness. She still regularly spent time out at Yuen with Meredith and took great pleasure in the ‘garden of serenity’ there. If I wanted a lesson on how to keep living well and fully into old age, she offered a fine example.
I still hadn’t broached that question about death I had been wanting, all day, to ask. Worried the taxi would arrive before I got the chance, I pulled out the sheet of paper I had typed my questions on and pointed to number twenty-four, the last on the list. Judith looked at it and then at me, her eyes owl-like behind the big, round frames of her glasses.
‘It doesn’t frighten me,’ she said. ‘Be a relief.’
I should have known she would say something like this. She might write poems of naked intensity and passion, but she was not about to lay her soul bare for me or anyone else on this perfect, late summer day. If I wanted answers from her, I would have to look to her work and her example. I would have to find my own way into her ‘blood’s country’.
. . . Change is my true condition,
to take and give and promise,
to fight and fail and alter.
I aim towards Forever,
but that is no one’s country,
till in perhaps one moment,
dying, I’ll recognise it;
those peaks not ice but sunlit
from sources past my knowing,
its beauty of completion
the end of being human.
Judith Wright, ‘Some Words’
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
This final meeting was published in the Age, Saturday, 21 February 1998.
Quote ‘While I’m in my five senses . . .’ from ‘Five Senses’, Judith Wright: Collected Poems (CP) 1942–1985, Angus & Robertson, 1994, p. 186.
Quote ‘[O]ver years past . . .’, p. 334, With Love and Fury (WLF), P. Clarke and M. McKinney (eds), National Library of Australia, 2006.
Quote ‘stopped the song of the river’ from ‘Dust’, CP, p. 424.
Quote ‘Where is the life we have lost in living?’, T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, Faber & Faber, 1934.
Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, National Library of Australia (NLA).
Quote ‘Have they dared to trample . . .’ from ‘The Battle’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘green sap run . . .’ from ‘Never’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘I know her . . .’ from ‘Wedding Photograph, 1913’, CP, p
p. 326–7.
Quote ‘since through you I lived’ from ‘Lovesong in Absence’, CP, pp. 261–2.
‘The Vision’, Judith Wright, CP, p. 262. See also Flame and Shadow, Shirley Walker, UQP, 1991, p. 138–9.
Quote ‘like the wood on the fire . . .’ from ‘Winter’, CP, p. 425.
PART ONE—NEW ENGLAND
TRAIN JOURNEY
Quote ‘High delicate outline . . .’ from ‘South of My Days,’ CP, p. 20.
For more on John Oxley’s perspective and the geology of New England see High Lean Country: Land, People and Memory in New England, A. Atkinson, J. S. Ryan, I. Davidson and A. Piper (eds), Allen & Unwin, 2006, pp. 23–34.
Quote ‘Harsh scarp of the tableland’ from ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’, CP, pp. 15–16.
Quote from JW’s letter to John Shilliday, WLF, p. 334.
JW’s letter to Meredith McKinney, 29 September, 1980 and 18 November, 1980, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘They may have given up . . .’ from Half a Lifetime, (HL), Judith Wright, Text Publishing, p. 296.
Quote ‘small trees on their uncoloured slope’ from ‘Train Journey’, CP, p. 75.
Quote ‘When the last leaf and bird go . . .’ from ‘Eroded Hills’, CP, p. 81.
Quote ‘yearning for the moment of infinity . . .’ from Jennifer Strauss, Judith Wright, Oxford, 1995, p. 46.
JEOGLA
Quotes from Caroline Mitchell come from our visit to Jeogla and the transcript of an interview conducted in February, 2008.
Quote ‘South of my day’s circle . . .’ from ‘South of My Days’, CP, p. 70.
COUNCIL ROCK
Quote ‘steel-shocked earth’ from ‘Dust’, CP, pp. 23–4.
Quote ‘I know a pool . . .’ from juvenile poem ‘The Brook’, published in the Sydney Mail, 21 October 1925.
All quotes from ‘like an assemblage . . .’ to ‘. . . any right to their story’ are from ‘The Granite Rocks of New England’, Judith Wright, The Nature of Love, Imprint, 1997, pp. 188–92.
Quote ‘while I lectured and commanded’, ibid.
Quote from Peter Wright as told by his wife Jane Wright, South of My Days, Veronica Brady, Angus & Robertson, 1998, p. 28.
Quote ‘Who dares challenge me?’ from ‘The War Song of Thor’ published in Sydney Mail, 15 May 1929.
Quote ‘men and women experienced . . .’ from The Case For God, Karen Armstrong, The Bodley Head, 2009, p. 169.
Quote ‘the object has, in a sense, died out of our immediate experience . . .’ from essay ‘The Writer and the Crisis’ in Because I was Invited (BWI), Judith Wright, Oxford, 1975, p. 174.
Quote ‘the source of life and language’, BWI, pp. vii-xii.
Quote ‘melt the past, the present . . .’ from ‘Birds’, CP, p. 86.
Quote ‘heavy and dull’ from ‘Beside the Creek’, CP, p. 226.
Quote ‘any poem might follow my pen’ from ‘To Hafiz of Shiraz’, CP, pp. 215–6.
Quote ‘the ungathered alone stays beautiful . . .’ from ‘Beside the Creek’, CP, p. 226.
Quote ‘There was no way of following him . . .’ from Richard Holmes, Footsteps, Penguin, 1985, p. 26.
Quote ‘There’s a spirit in each violet . . .’ from ‘The Spirits of the Garden’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quotes from ‘The Garden Ghost’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘Silence is the rock . . .’ from ‘Silence’, CP, p. 121.
THE LOST GARDEN
For more on the financial problems of David and Richard Wright, see ‘Fall of a Dynasty’ by Richard Guilliat, Good Weekend, 15 July, 2000.
Quote ‘If I was born with a tassel . . .’ from interview with FC, 1998.
Quote ‘I am glad I am not there . . .’ from JW’s letter to Pip and Caroline, WLF, p. 564.
Quote ‘Now you’ll understand . . .’, JW’s comment to David Wright, as reported by Pip Bundred to FC in 2007.
Quotes ‘cautious politeness of bankers . . .’ to ‘All men grow evil with trade’ from ‘For a Pastoralist Family’, CP, pp. 406–10.
Quote ‘In our childish years . . .’ from HL, p. 67.
Quote ‘Blue early mist in the valley . . .’ from ‘For A Pastoralist Family’, CP, pp. 406–10.
Quotes from ‘Our Roof ’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Judith Wright Collection, NLA.
Quote ‘I was born into a coloured country . . .’ from ‘Reminiscence’, CP, p. 329.
Quote ‘Here where I walk . . .’ from ‘The Moving Image’, CP, p. 3.
Quote ‘lies like a pillow . . .’ from ‘The World and the Child’, CP, p. 36–37.
Quotes from Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years, Fireside, 1996, p. ix.
Quote ‘Only through this pain . . .’ from ‘The World and the Child’, CP, p. 37.
Quote ‘suck and sigh of the bellows . . .’ from South of My Days, p. 25.
Quote ‘ready to swallow him . . .’ from ‘Legend’, CP, p. 97.
Quote ‘I can remember myself a time . . .’ from letter by JW to Paul Sherman, WLF, p. 114.
Quote ‘root out everything . . .’ from HL, p. 175.
Quote ‘that time of my mother’s illness’ from Tales of a Great Aunt, Judith Wright, Imprint, 1998, p. 11.
Quotes from ‘The Colour of Death’, The Nature of Love, Judith Wright, Imprint, 1997, p. 112–119.
Quote ‘Have they dared . . .’ from ‘The Battle’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘the land seems in some sense . . .’ from Veronica Brady’s article ‘Documenting a Life. Judith Wright’s Biography: A Delicate Balance Between Trespass and Honour’ at www.nla.gov.au/events/doclife/brady.html
Quote ‘Isn’t it fun when Mummy comes . . .’ from ‘The Flickering Candle Light’ published in Sydney Mail, 25 May 1927.
Quote ‘grew outside the garden fences . . .’ from HL, p. 65.
Quotes from ‘The Bush Fire’, ‘Drought’s End’ and ‘The Black Coat’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘things that did not happen in gardens’ from ‘The Colour of Death’ in The Nature of Love, Imprint, 1997, p. 119.
Letter to JW’s niece, Catherine Wright, WLF, p. 562.
Quote ‘Cinderella considers these verses . . .’ from Sydney Mail, 25 May 1927, p. 48.
Quote ‘I was shamefully keeping away . . .’ from HL, p. 89.
Quote ‘she is one of the few young writers . . .’ Sydney Mail, 31 October 1928, p. 55.
‘Halfway’, CP, p. 290.
Letter to Cinderella about trip to South-West Rocks from WLF, p. 7.
Letter to Cinderella about Georges Creek excursion from WLF p. 9.
Quote ‘your delicate dry breasts . . .’ from ‘Train Journey’, CP, p. 75.
Quote ‘New England is an idea . . .’ from Judith Wright by A. D. Hope, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 9.
Quote ‘All the hills’ gathered waters . . .’ from ‘For New England’, CP, p. 22.
Recollections of return to New England from HL, p. 158.
GENERATIONS OF WOMEN
Quote ‘If she had wanted her children . . .’ from HL, p. 69
Quote ‘walking slow along her garden ways . . .’ from ‘The Garden’, CP, p. 35.
Quote ‘even in death she must . . .’ from Generations of Men (GOM), Judith Wright, Oxford, 1982, p. 232.
Quote ‘the real story of the great pastoral invasions . . .’ from Born of the Conquerors (BOC), Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991, p. xi.
Quote ‘that would partly be Albert’s own work . . .’ from GOM, p. 161.
Quote ‘she is entitled to her triumph . . .’ from GOM, p. 232.
Quote ‘Bright tree, white tree . . .’ from ‘May Tree’, Juvenile Poetry Notebooks, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, NLA.
Quote ‘the enfolding, the exulting . . .’ from ‘The Child’, CP, p. 34.
‘For New England’, CP, p. 22.
Quote ‘I remember listening to them . . .’ from interview with JW in Meanjin, 1982, p. 334.
Quote ‘[I] am the gazer and the land I stare on’ from ‘For New England’, CP, p. 23.
Quote ‘the place for her was alive . . .’ from GOM, p. 181.
Quotes from ‘Remembering an Aunt’, CP, p. 234.
Quote ‘In reality, she is one of the most . . .’ from Weeta’s letter to Phillip, in the possession of Meredith McKinney.
Quote ‘He may have worried himself literally to death . . .’ from HL, p. 63.
May’s attitude to Aborigines expressed in her memoir Memories of Far Off Days: The Memoirs of Charlotte May Wright, 1855–1929, Peter Wright (ed.) 1988.
Memories of Aborigines in her childhood, HL, p. 33.
Albert’s experience in Queensland of Aboriginal elder, see Memories of Far Off Days, p. 56, and ‘At Coololah’, CP, p. 140.
Quote ‘The song is gone . . .’ from ‘Bora Ring’, CP, p. 8.
Perceptions of Aborigines as a ‘dying race’ from Atkinson, Ryan, Davidson & Piper, eds, High Lean Country: Land, People and Memory in New England, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006, p. 122.
Comments on ‘Bora Ring’ as ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ from Jennifer Strauss, Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995.
Quote ‘To forgive oneself . . .’ from GOM, p. 163.
NIGGER’S LEAP
Quote ‘sheer and limelit granite head’ from ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’, CP, pp. 15–16.
Judith’s feelings for Point Lookout, BOC, p. 30.
Quote ‘both to the idea of . . .’ from BOC, p. 30.
Quote ‘many logs have been cut . . .’ from Phillip Wright’s submission to the local council in A History of the Establishment and Administration of New England National Park, Howard Stanley, National Parks and Wildlife Services, Sydney, p. 8.