A Human Pattern

This magnificant 'selected', qith its vibrant cover splashed with all the earthy shades of Australian landscape, is compiled from eleven collections of Judith Wright's poetry. The title is aptly chosen as most of Wright's work is linked to, or made up of patterns, a leaning replicated by the covre design; clapboard planks of wood, nailed in place and painted different colours; the left edge jagged, as if broken off. In spell-binding imagery Judith Wright layers her material, mapping the imprint of the white settlers on the indigenous people of Australia, on its wildlfe, and the planet, including empathetic and insightful poems on the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal world. The miracle of her writing is that she achieves a political and historical poetry without ever preacdhing to the reader. The power of the images, and her evident passion for her subjects, make the poems work. John Kinsellla, in his introduction to the book, names her as 'one of the greatest image-makers in Australian literature'. Below, from the opening of the first section of the book: The Moving Image:
Hurling your woes at the moon, that old cleaned bone till the white shorn mobs of stars on the hill of the sky
huddled and trembled...
('Trapped Dingo')
...past the miniatory towers with their clocks
the sails rose bannering on the saltwhite mast.
('The Idler')
The piano- oh listen to the mocking bird-
wavers on Sundays and has lost a note
...and Millie's cameos loosen round her throat.
The bush comes nearer, the rangers grow immense
('Brothers and Sisters')
Judith Wright was born in 1915 near Armidale, New South Wales, the eldest child of Phillip Wright and his first wife Ethel. The Wrights were an old and wealthy pastoral family, and the poet was raised on her family's sheep station which lends authority to her writing on rural life and the treatment of the native people in enighbouring Queensland (where she later worked and wrote).
Following her mother's death in 1927, Wright was educated under her grandmother's supervision, and at fourteen was sent to New England Girls' School, where she found consolation in poetry and decided to become a poet. At Sydney University she studied philoshophy, history, psychology and English, without taking a degree. At thirty she met her lifelong partner, the unorthodox philosopher J P McKinney, twenty-three years her senior; whom she later married.
After his death in 1966, her writing became darker and more pessimistic, focusing on their love and her gried at his loss. In 'This Time Alone', Wright's love of landscape and sense of loss are interlaced thematically:
Here still, the mountain that we climbed
When hand in hand my love and I
First looked through one another's eyes
And found the world that does not die.
Wild fuchsias flowered white and red,
The mintbush opened to the bee,
Stars circled round us where we lay
And dawn came nake from the sea.
Wright undertook hack work, writing school plays for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, along with children's books, and its likely that the level of accesibiliy demanded by this material formed a useful foundation for a poetry which never leads to obfuscation. This clarity of expression is deomnstrated in two poems which John Kinsella cites in his introduction, commenting that they were so unfluential 'generations of Australian schoolchildren knew them if not by heart, then something close to it.'
'Bullocky' echoes the earlier folk verse of the popular Banjo Paterson (1864-1941), author of the rousing anthem,
'Waltzing Matilda'.
Beside his heaby-shouldered team,
thirsty with droughts and chilled with rain,
he weathered all the striding years
till they ran widdershins in his brain:
Till the long solitary tracks
etched deeper with each lurching load
were populos before his eyes
and fiends and angels used his road.
Its sturdy end-rhymng, so similar to Paterson's, is a style she moves away from in her later writing, though, Wright is always drawn to recognisable characters from Australian life such as the carter in 'Bullocky', 'The Remittance Man' for instance, who is 'spendthrift, disinherited and graceless', or 'The Surfer', who will 'take the big
roller's shoulder, speed and swerve./Come t the long beach home like a gull diving.' She writes with equal spirit nd empathy of the plight of the 'Metho Drinker': 'His white and burning girl, his woman of fire,/ creeps to his heart and sets a candle there...'; and to 'Jacky, Jacky', an Aboriginal servant:
We see you still through a mist of sentiment,
Galmahara, Songman, born at a time so unlucky,
in your tribe's last days, and you the last of their poets.
The same meticulous attention is bestowed on the 'Conch Shell', opening with the line: 'Virgin and clean the house is washed, and empty/ the wave withdrawing leaves it to my hand'., and closing as the poet finds her own affinity with the object: 'the force that leapt between your poles,/ burns forward still in me against the night.'
Following on from elegied and personal narratives, it seems appropriate that this collection should end with a sequence of Ghazals, a form traditionally used to emobdy love and loss. 'The Shadow of Fire' (from her last book, Phantom Dwelling) brings together Wright's central themes: love and connection with nature, sadness for the damage humans perpetuate upon it and upon their own kind and, ultimately ageing.
Rockface.
Of the age-long heave of a cliff-face, all's come down except this split upstanding stone, like a gravestone.
Rockpool
My generation is dying after long lives
swung from war to depression, to war to fatness...
...
Weve brought on our own cancers, one with the world,
I hang on the rockpool's edge, its wild embroideries.
In 1986 Wirght abandoned poetry to devote her time to fighting for Aboriginal rights and conservation, dying in 2000 at the age of 85. In her own words: 'Who wants to be an onlooker? Every cell of me has been pierced through by the plunging intercgalactic messages.' This is a poet whose work can be returned to with delight ansd renewed interest again and again.