Judith Wright is a poet whose work often reflects her interest in the landscape of Australia, the environmental impact of white settlement, and the relationship of the Aboriginal people to their land. Her writing over several decades has been closely studied.
Wright’s work exhibits a love of the land, and examines the various aspects of the landscape, and the different ways in which it can be perceived. In particular, her poems express her own understanding of Aboriginal people’s connection with the land and her sense of the different relationship experienced by white poets. Rodney Hall, in an essay on Wright’s early work, examines this relationship:
For her, there was something more urgent to be solved ... a conflict between language and experience itself, that is to say between language and the forces of a land utterly alien to it. She had been brought up on the land and loved it, but she knew she was not of it. The problem can be illustrated by a simple example: the spiritual power of an outcrop of rock, as an Aborigine might respond to it, is wholly outside the collective experience the English language embodies—and therefore outside the vocabulary of meanings that an English-speaking person can comprehend. We share the profound problem of all colonial cultures, that our society has never been through a pre-literate stage of learning this land. So even to attempt writing of Australia in English can best give rise to cry after cry of disillusionment ... It is a curiously embattled poetry in its love for the bush and bush people, which comes to the wry conclusion that perhaps the best hope for the land would be the failure of the very pioneers and settlers she loves… the land becomes a scene of suicide and ruin, an overpowering presence resisting, dominating and ultimately burying our lives and efforts.
(in Dutton, 1964: 389)
Wright is more than aware of this dilemma as a theme in her own writing, and that of Australian poets generally. In the Introduction to her book Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, she identifies both the landscape as a major concern and the duality of responses already evident in the dominant culture:
Australia has from the beginning of its short history meant something more to its new inhabitants than mere environment and mere land to be occupied, ploughed and brought into subjection. It has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality; first, and persistently, the reality of exile; second, though perhaps we now tend to forget this, the reality of newness and freedom. (1965: xi)
In a later essay ‘Landscape and Dreaming’ she claimed that landscape, in its traditional literary definition, was too prescriptive a term for her use, and goes onto to identify clearly the importance of the dialectic between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of land. Her biographer Veronica Brady suggests:
... she was not very happy with the subject she was allotted [for the journal, Daedalus], which was “landscape”. This, she said in her essay, was a very limited concept and sprang from what she saw as the “irreconcilable difference of viewpoint” between ourselves and the land’s original inhabitants, the Aborigines. For them “every part of the country ... every mark and feature was numinous with meaning”. But the notion of landscape implies a division between the self and the land. In contrast with Aborigines what non-Aboriginal people “see in the landscape”, she thought, was “partial, inadequate and temporal vision, reflecting our own interests”.
(Brady, 1998: 433)
Her poetry, concerned with inner and outer landscapes, her thoughtful criticism and other writing, and her outspokenness on a number of issues, have made Judith Wright one of this country’s foremost and most respected writers. R.F. Brissenden wrote, prophetically, several decades ago:
She is not the only modern Australian whose work reveals this unselfconscious acceptance of Australia; but she is, I believe, the first in whose poetry it has been present from the very beginning. In years to come Judith Wright will almost certainly be regarded as the typical poet of the ’forties: the decade in which Australian poetry came of age and learned to forget that it was adolescent and antipodean. (in Thompson, 1968: 42)
Many of her earlier poems are, as a result of what Brissenden calls her “balanced, easy and completely unaffected acceptance of Australia”, directly about landscape. Although in terms of the date of writing they are outside the scope of this research, it is worth briefly considering two of the most influential.