The Equal Heart and Mind

Born and reared in the pastoral country of New South Wales, Judith Wright returned to this area during World War II, after attending the University of Sydney and traveling in Europe. It was a significant homecoming, for she rediscovered her heritage and put that rediscovery into poetry. She wrote about the beautiful region known as New England, those who peopled it---both the descendants of white settlers and the Aborigines. Her first book, The Moving Image, appeared in 1946, and was enthusiastically received, the poems admired for their lyricism and honesty. Like other writers emerging at this time, she employed Australian materials in a new way, no longer seeing them in a literal sense. Wright continued to publish poetry for the next 30 years, 14 or so volumes in all, as well as making important contributions as a critic and anthologist. Although her early poems are still admired, often anthologized in Australia and abroad, the later work has faded. Turning away from poetry in recent years, Wright has written extensively about the environment and the treatment of Aboriginals, and has also become an articulate public defender of these causes. Her book about white Australia's destruction of Aborigines, The Cry for the Dead (1981), stresses the vacuum that the disappearing Aboriginal culture has left both in nature and Australian society, and reveals the guilt felt by white Australians aware of the genocide practiced by earlier generations. Even though Bruce Bennett, one of Wright's critics, admits that her poetry has gone "off the boil," he sees this as "a temporary phenomenon" and believes that the "informing ecological vision so deeply rooted in her work since her first book of poems, The Moving Image, is ever more urgently relevant." 020