My Blood's Country Read online

  Fiona Capp is the author of Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals and three novels, Night Surfing, Last of the Sane Days and Musk & Byrne. Her memoir, That Oceanic Feeling, won the 2004 Nita B Kibble Award for Life Writing. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and son.

  FIONA CAPP

  My

  Blood’s

  Country

  With kind acknowledgment to HarperCollins Publishers Australia and

  ETT Imprint for permission to reproduce lines from Judith Wright’s poetry

  First published in 2010

  Copyright © Fiona Capp 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 487 2

  Set in 12/17 pt Dante by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Meredith McKinney,

  Pip Bundred

  and Caroline Mitchell

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  NEW ENGLAND

  One Train Journey

  Two Jeogla

  Three Council Rock

  Four The Lost Garden

  Five Generations of Women

  Six Nigger’s Leap

  Seven Dreamscape

  QUEENSLAND

  Eight The Landscape of Love

  Nine My Red Mountain

  Ten In the Dark Wood

  Eleven Beyond the Burning Wind

  Twelve Eye of the Earth

  Thirteen Landscape of Grief

  CANBERRA & MONGARLOWE

  Fourteen Opera City

  Fifteen The World’s Last Edge

  Sixteen Phantom Dwelling

  Seventeen Years of Love and Work

  Endnotes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country, rises that tableland, high delicate outline of bony slopes wincing under the winter, low trees blue-leaved and olive, out-cropping granite— clean, lean, hungry country . . .

  . . . South of my days’ circle I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

  Judith Wright, ‘South of My Days’

  FOREWORD

  Sometimes in life you get lucky. Someone of rare vision and remarkable gifts crosses your path and, in ways that may be apparent only to yourself, they touch your life and change its course. I was seventeen when I first met Judith Wright. Everything that followed from this encounter led me, thirty years later, to the places she loved and dwelt in; the landscapes that made her the singular poet and environmental visionary she became. It was a journey I had been waiting to take ever since I first discovered her poetry as a teenager; a journey not only to actual places but into a psychological and imaginative terrain as real as anything recorded on a map.

  As I travelled from New England (in northern New South Wales), where Judith grew up, to Queensland where she lived with her husband, Jack McKinney, and daughter Meredith, and then to her property near Mongarlowe 100 kilometres east of Canberra, where she spent her final decades with her lover, Nugget Coombs, what had once been abstract to me took on solid form. We are all shaped by the places in which we live, as much as our relationships. The smells, the textures, the moods, the contours of these places are part of us in ways Judith understood with exquisite urgency. The urgency of someone who sensed in her bones that something had gone profoundly wrong with our attitude to the earth, long before the term ‘conservationist’ entered public discourse. She wasn’t magically blessed with foresight. Rather, her foresight was borne of her intimate knowledge of the land she loved. During my travels through her blood’s country, I began to see how her writing and her view of the world sprang out of this solid ground, this living earth.

  From this journey, I bring you back the fragile topsoil of those New England paddocks; the rich, red dirt of Mount Tamborine; the clay and gravel of Mongarlowe. The grit of the poet’s landscapes that gave us her pearls.

  INTRODUCTION

  The last time I saw Judith Wright was on a cloudless afternoon in late summer when she was eighty-two years old. After lunch at the Canberra Botanical Gardens’ cafe, we went for a walk in the sunshine. We had not gone far along one of the gravel paths when she stopped pushing her walking frame on wheels and paused to look around the well-tended native gardens.

  ‘I remember when this was just a bare hillside,’ she said.

  We passed some flowerbeds and she pointed out the bachelor’s buttons and white everlastings. When we reached the foot of the hill on which the gardens sit, she urged me to go up and have a look at the waterfall.

  ‘It’s too steep for me,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

  I hesitated, not wanting to leave her. But she waved me away.

  Once at the top, I was conscious of every sound. The thrum of cicadas, snatches of bird song, the water falling. All the things that Judith could no longer hear. After sixty years of progressive hearing loss, she was now—as the medical phrase has it—profoundly deaf. She told me that if a large dog were to bark in her ear, she would hear a distant howl, like a lone wolf on the horizon. The loss of certain sounds was particularly hard to bear: music, birds singing, frogs croaking, people speaking kindly, children splashing in pools.

  When I first arrived at her bed-sit that morning and opened the door, she was sitting facing me but did not look up from her newspaper and only registered my presence when I moved towards her. It had been twelve years since I had last seen her. In that time she had suffered a series of heart attacks and had been in danger of losing her sight. Yet she looked well and little changed, although more frail. The same determined jaw and grim smile; the same matter-of-fact air.

  The truth was, though, that much had changed. The poet had put down her pen; the activist had all but retired from the public arena; and she had moved from the light-filled bush house near Mongarlowe which she had designed, to a one room bed-sit in Canberra. Yet there was still pleasure to be had in the small amount of nature on offer in the suburbs—the grass outside her flat, the birds, the few trees, the sky and, when she could ‘con’ someone into it, as she put it, a visit to the botanical gardens.

  As I came down the hill from the waterfall, I saw Judith sitting in the shade further along the path, a slightly hunched yet alert figure in a cloud of white hair. The motionless air and soft afternoon light carried with it intimations of the approaching autumn, a wistful dying fall. We sat side by side in silence. I knew this might be the last time I would spend with her. I tried to dismiss the thought but couldn’t help feeling there were things I ought to say. Things too big for casual conversation. I ought to thank her for her poet
ry, and for the encouragement and kindness she had shown me over the eighteen years I had known her. I ought to tell her how much I admired her. I ought to tell her so many things. But she hardly needed me to remind her of what she had achieved or how many lives she had changed. And if I tried, I was sure it would come out sounding clumsy or too solemn. Too much like a farewell.

  Some blue wrens started twittering nearby and I was about to point them out to Judith when I realised that she had already spied them amongst the bushes.

  ‘Beautiful day,’ she sighed with real pleasure. ‘Perfect.’

  I smiled and nodded. There was no point speaking as she wouldn’t hear me. I reflected on how relaxed and much less preoccupied she seemed than in the past. Ironically, conversation was easier now that she no longer had to strain to catch what people were saying. There was no need for her to guess or pretend to hear. Whenever I wanted to say something to her, I wrote it down in a large notebook and showed it to her. And she replied in her emphatic, gravelly voice.

  It was a very different voice from the one I heard in my head when I first discovered her poetry. I was about twelve years old when, for reasons I am no longer sure of, I took a book from the shelf next to my oldest sister’s bed. I think it was the cover that attracted me. I remember it as a photograph of swollen puce storm clouds brooding over a dark landscape. The book was Judith Wright’s sixth collection of poetry Five Senses, published in 1963, the year I was born. At this time I was very much in the thrall of that potent, nineteenth century Romantic myth of the writer as the heroic, sensitive outsider. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson. These were the poets in my pantheon of all time greats, a pantheon gleaned from books around the house and from poems read to me and my brothers and sisters at bedtime by our father who, having studied elocution as a boy, knew how to cast a spell. In my mind, to be great you had to be dead. A few Australian writers scraped into this pantheon but they too belonged to the hazy past. I knew that Judith Wright was a major figure on the Australian literary landscape. Perhaps this is why I assumed she too must be dead.

  I looked at the biographical blurb and did a calculation, or perhaps I noticed that she was described in the present tense. Then it registered. Judith Wright was not only a woman and an Australian but she was alive. The whole lofty business of writing felt suddenly much closer to home. The fact that Wright was a living, Australian, woman— as opposed to a dead, European, male—changed everything. I had recently started scribbling poetry myself. The first poem I wrote came to me whole. I say ‘came’ for that is how it felt, as if it had been delivered from outside. And indeed it had, for it was utterly derivative, melodramatic Tennysonian verse about a knight in shining armour. But it came like a gift and it felt magical. After discovering Judith Wright, I began writing about the lemon-scented gums I could see from my bedroom window and about the world I knew. Knights, maidens, castles were no longer a prerequisite. Even that crucial Romantic concept of inspiration, epitomised by Coleridge’s ecstatic poet in ‘Kubla Khan’ who has ‘drunk the milk of Paradise’, had now been recast. Much as I longed for it, I could never imagine myself in the state of utter transport described by Coleridge. But I immediately recognised and identified with the title poem of Five Senses. I knew that tingling, dizzying feeling of a poem coming on, that sense of connection with forces beyond oneself. In my early twenties I realised that I was not really a poet, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling:

  While I’m in my five senses

  they send me spinning

  all sounds and silences,

  all shape and colour

  as thread for that weaver,

  whose web within me growing

  follows beyond my knowing

  some pattern sprung from nothing—

  a rhythm that dances

  and is not mine.

  I don’t know how, but I managed to get hold of her address. In my final year at school, I sent her a bundle of my poems. Her reply, the first in a correspondence that was to last almost two decades, arrived a few weeks later.

  Dear Fiona Capp,

  I think your poems show a lot of promise. I don’t as a rule try to criticize or make suggestions, because poetry is a very personal thing, and it is the capacity to write (which you have), not the poems themselves, which is important at your age. The best advice I can give you is the same as I always give—read a lot of poetry, find out how and why it affects you, study language, keep writing. I think one of the best disciplines I know of, for young Australians brought up on a diet of English poetry, is to study Chinese and Japanese poems—if not in the original, which you probably never will be able to, then in the best translations you can get. Their kind of aesthetic, which is a bad word for something important, is much sterner and less sloppy than ours, and it does anyone good to try to pare down words to essentials and to see things clearly.

  As for my own ‘beginnings in the literary world’, I didn’t have any, except writing and sending poems to various journals. There were very few literary magazines in the ‘forties when I began to publish, and I have never belonged to any literary group (anyway I doubt their value to a writer). Essentially, writing is a solitary job (even if you happen to be doing it in a roomful of editors and reporters).

  All good wishes,

  Sincerely,

  Judith Wright McKinney

  Now, when I read the letter I see tactfully worded, cautious encouragement. But as a seventeen year old hungry for a sign that I might have what it took, I saw ‘promise’ and ‘capacity to write’ and was quietly elated. Then, by sheer coincidence—although it felt like fate—Judith was invited by my school principal to come and talk to the senior classes. By this stage of her life she was weary of talking about herself and her poetry, but was prepared to speak about what really mattered to her: the plight of Aborigines. And suddenly, there she was, in a grey cashmere dress, having lunch with our small Year 12 Literature class and talking about the confrontation at Noonkanbah Station in Western Australia, between the Yongngora tribe and a giant American mineral exploration company who wanted to drill for oil on one of the Yongngora sacred sites. And then, a few weeks later, she returned as guest speaker at the school speech night. Within a matter of months, the flesh and blood woman behind the poems I had fallen in love with had miraculously materialised and entered my life, first through her letter and, then, through her formidable presence.

  After this, we remained in touch through letters and occasional meetings. The early 1980s were a hectic and emotionally intense time for Judith as she was deeply consumed by the Aboriginal Treaty Committee and writing We Call for a Treaty (1985) with Nugget Coombs, the quietly charismatic economist, political adviser and advocate for Aborigines, who had been her lover for over ten years. I knew that her husband Jack McKinney—the first great love of her life—had died in 1966 but I did not know about Nugget. I was not the only one. The relationship was kept secret from all but close friends and family. (Although estranged from his wife, Nugget did not want to put her or his family through the pain of divorce.) It strikes me now how little I really knew about her life even though I thought I knew so much. We like to believe that poetry is a baring of the soul, that it gives us direct access to what goes on in the poet’s heart. And sometimes, it does. But the heart has many chambers. As Judith said to me during our final meeting in Canberra, ‘I keep some things to myself because it is not necessary to tell them. And others, because I’d rather not tell them.’

  Like any deeply private person who finds herself in the public eye, she cherished her secrets. Even as a young woman Judith thought of herself as ‘the cat that walks by itself’, after the cat in Kipling’s Just So story of that name. She rarely referred to her relationship with Nugget in her letters, although she made occasional cryptic confessions, like that to her friend, the British poet and scholar, Martin Robertson:

  [O]ver years past, [I] have had a sort of double-senile love, with a man ten years older than myself . . . I didn’t tell you of
it for we have had to keep it more or less secret, at first for the sake of his own position which didn’t admit of flinging of bonnets over windmills so late in life; and also for the sake of his own children . . . Somehow, however, we have had a great deal of happiness and seen much of each other . . . Love is love, no matter what the problems, and always joyful even in the pain.

  I saw Judith as an old woman and therefore beyond sexual relationships, and assumed she lived alone at the poetically named address of ‘Edge’, Half Moon Wildlife District, Mongarlowe, which was stamped on her writing paper. By our final meeting in the 1990s, however, I knew about Nugget. When I visited her in Canberra that last time, there was a photograph of him beside her bed. She told me she missed him badly. Yet even then, six months after Nugget’s death, she did not feel able to speak publicly about their relationship.

  Another important thing I didn’t realise when I first wrote to her was how many other people were making demands of her, and how fortunate I was that she was such a diligent correspondent. Throughout her life, Judith wrote an average of twelve letters a day. It makes me tired just thinking about how she kept up this pace. The sense of public duty and responsibility that drove her clearly cost her much in time and energy that she might have devoted to her own work. When I re-read her letters to me—especially the ones from the 1980s—I am struck by how blithely I took advantage of her generosity.

  In 1985, I sent her three pages of questions about her poetry and activism as part of my honours thesis research on her work. She gave detailed replies to my general questions but, when it came to specific interpretations of her poetry and its impact, she baulked: ‘After all, this is your thesis, not mine. Also, it is for you, not me, to say what effect my poems may or may not have had on Australian poetry. I do try not to entangle myself in other people’s interpretations and theses. I don’t have much time and energy left to do my own work, and have to try at least to keep aloof from what isn’t my work. I am sure you will understand this.’