The following article was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, July 5th, 2000. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795. CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au> Subscription rates on request. ****************************** Judith Wright Australia lost a great poet and a great Australian when Judith Wright died on June 26 of a heart attack, still vigorous at the ripe age of 85. Through her poems, steeped in passionate love of her country and its people, she became the voice and conscience of the nation. by Joan Williams To the end she refused to give up and continued her public commitment to reconciliation with the indigenous people by leading the historic walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which could be seen as endorsement of her efforts over three decades for Aboriginal land rights, a Makarrata (treaty), preservation of our indigenous heritage and reconciliation. "It is sad to lose somebody like Judith Wright, but the spirit doesn't die," said her biographer Dr. Veronica Brady in an interview with "The Guardian". "She was born into a pastoral family who expected her to become a grazier's wife and just bear children, but she was determined to become a writer. She was a woman who simply went her own way. Nobody was going to stop her and she did what she wanted to." "Her poems were not descriptive eulogies of nature or heritage buildings, but took sides and put the blame for neglect, ignorance or destruction where it belonged," Dr Brady said. In one of her more recent poems "At a Public Dinner", she wrote: "I am not eating because they are eating my country..." "Her compassion showed even as a child when she saw the Kaiser being branded with hate and cried out ``Oh save him!'' She had a real sense of being responsible for other people, and was very troubled by the sight of young men tramping around the country seeking work during the Depression. She was moved by the suffering of the people in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist Franco, having seen for herself what Hitler was doing in Germany. "She had an unerring feeling for human beings -- and was appalled by the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and by what capitalism is doing to the earth. Always passionate about social history and its environmental and political background, she worked with the Whitlam Government to create the National Estate. "Her poem "We Call For a Treaty" had touched a chord in the conscience of the nation," Dr Brady concluded. Judith Wright wrote bitterly on past crimes against the First Australians: "Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers" and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?''" Her passion, anger and joy expressed in her poems, had been taken to the hearts of her people. Her feminism was expressed as part of the human condition in her portrayal of love, birth and death, and celebration of the joy in life. "The love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion have become part of me," she wrote in the Tasmanian "Wilderness Calendar" in 1981. Her stand for peace and horror of war became explicit in her famous "Christmas Ballad". ``... the Musak angels sang above. A long way off was the napalm war...'' And the reception to a returning Vietnam veteran: "You wasn't here when the Cup was run" You don't say much. Cat got your tongue?'' Judith Wright wrote perceptively of the development of poetry in Australia in her foreword to "A Book of Australian Verse" in 1968, looking at it with awareness of the economic and political forces at work. From the unfavourable climate due to the reliance of early poets on the British tradition, she saw the stirring of national feeling in a movement that culminated in Federation, and a new kind of radicalism expressed in the poetry of Lawson and O'Dowd. She saw the significance of the great increase in technology in the 1940's and the swing from country to city. Although the early ballads were influenced by the harsh landscape and empathy with the drovers and workers, she regretted the lack of any living link with the land itself until recently. Judith Wright is not a romantic, but makes her judgement on changes in the economy and lifestyle, the growth of industry and the swing from country to city. In her own way she has taken a step further for us in the expression of Australian national, spiritual and environment values in her poetry. Judith Wright is survived by her daughter Meredith McKinney, to whom we extend sympathy. -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
