Abstract

It has often been noted that Judith Wright struggled with two opposing ideas: her love of the land on which she was raised, and her knowledge that her family’s ownership of that land was preceded by the dispossession of indigenous Australians. The presence of dualities in general is strong throughout all of Wright’s work – from her early “The Twins” to “Patterns,” the last of the ghazals. This duality in particular, however, is such a preoc- cupation in her work that, in some ways, it superimposed itself on Wright’s life, or rather the way Wright’s life has been represented. So, we have, on the one hand, Wright the celebrator of all things Australian. This Wright is the writer of “South of My Days” and “Bullocky,” the poet who was instrumental in forging the Australian poetic conception. This is the poet who is, in the words of Jennifer Strauss, an “Australian poetic institution.” On the other hand, we have Wright the activist, the campaigner. This is the Wright we see in poems like “Nigger’s Leap, New England,” and later, more overtly political poems like “Two Dreamtimes.” 2 These two seemingly distinct aspects of Wright and her work are not reality but a myth: a misrepresentation offered to us by critics. I will argue that a fresh reading of several of Wright’s best known and, possibly, best loved poems illustrates the way these apparently separate strands intertwine. This myth which reduces Wright’s feelings about the landscape into two separate and simple positions is reductive, and does not allow for the complexity of Wright’s feelings about the landscape. I will argue that a knowledge of, and disquiet about, not only the specific history of the landscape on which she grew up, but also the process of history in general, influences the way Wright conceptualised and wrote about the landscape