My Blood's Country Read online

  I had, earlier that month, briefly caught up with her at the Canberra Word Festival where she was giving a reading of some of her poems. While there, I met her daughter Meredith, who, when I first introduced myself, thought I was someone she’d met in London, also called Fiona. Over the years, my mind did a curious thing with this case of mistaken identity. For reasons that hardly need analysing, I began to believe that someone had mistaken me for Meredith. It was not until twenty years later, when I re-read my letter to Judith (one of the few letters I wrote to her which I copied) that I realised how wrong this memory was. Yet it is all of a piece with the way I, as a young writer, assumed the right to make demands of Judith as my ‘literary’ mother. I cringe now when I read how I signed off that letter with all those questions: ‘I hope I’m not being too demanding of your time and patience!’ Of course, I knew that I was.

  A year later, when I began working for the Age newspaper, I again asked if I could interview her. At first she was reluctant: ‘I’m a bit browned off with the Age, which has had an article of mine on Aboriginal land use in the N.T. for countless weeks without acknowledgment or return, and hasn’t so far as I know reviewed We Call For A Treaty either.’ Finally, there was something I could do for her. I made inquiries about her article and the review. In her next letter, Judith said she was gradually clearing her desk and agreed to an interview.

  Most of the time our letters to each other were about writing, her political activities, and what we were both working on. But, in 1989, she wrote to me asking if I would pass on a letter to Phillip Toyne, head of the Conservation Foundation, which was based in Melbourne. She apologised for being ‘so James Bond’ but said she had reason to believe that her mail was being intercepted because of her environmental and Aboriginal activism. She knew that I was doing a postgraduate thesis about security surveillance of Australian writers and intellectuals, and understood that I would take her fears seriously. I was glad to be of some use and did as she asked. In her next letter she explained that the secrecy concerned the ALP’s uranium mining policy, which she had feared was about to change.

  Then, in the early 1990s, our correspondence lapsed. I stopped writing to her and therefore she stopped replying. I’m not sure why this happened. Perhaps because I had started writing a novel and needed to break free of the role of acolyte—which I had always adopted in our correspondence—in order to see myself as a fully fledged writer. After a five year break, I wrote asking if I could use some lines from her poem ‘The Surfer’ as an epigraph for my first novel Night Surfing (1996). In my mind, the poem was the pivot around which the novel revolved. The novel concerns a young woman called Hannah, who drops out of university to learn how to ‘walk on water’. While working at a cafe by the sea, she meets Jake, who has demons of his own and dreams of surfing at night. They come from different worlds, but what brings them together is a love affair with the sea.

  Judith herself loved body surfing—she first got a taste for it as a girl during family holidays at South West Rocks. Later, when she was living in Queensland, she relished the waves on the Gold Coast, before it became a tourist mecca. ‘The Surfer’, clearly influenced by the exhilarating word-play of Gerard Manley Hopkins, observes a lone surfer driving his brown, muscular body through ‘hollow and coil of green’, his free-wheeling joy mirrored by the gulls swooping in the air above him. But the sea can never be the surfer’s home. As the sun goes down, the poet urges the surfer to come in before the sea becomes rabid and wolf-like, hungry to devour its prey. Ever since taking up surfing as a teenager, I had been drawn to this poem. For my character Hannah—who is just learning what it means to be wiped-out, and who, wave after wave, finds herself smack up against a wall of fear—the poem is about a showdown between the surfer and the sea. A showdown that only the sea can win. When she tells Jake about the poem, he is sceptical. ‘What would a poet know?’ he asks.

  This question, ‘What would a poet know?’ reverberates throughout the novel. Looking back, I can see that this same question has reverberated throughout my writing, and that it has been the driving force behind this journey.

  One day in 1996 a letter arrived from Judith out of the blue. She reflected on how long it had been since we’d seen each other and, in her typically wry way, said that she’d been having an ‘interesting’ time. She had spent three months in and out of hospitals after a series of heart attacks and a ‘vicious’ virus, and had recently become ‘embroiled in controversy’ after the Canberra Times revealed that she and Jack were mentioned in ASIO files kept on writers regarded as communists and communist sympathisers in the 1950s. This came on the heels of allegations about Manning Clark being a Soviet agent. She wondered if I’d be interested in writing something on the fifties, perhaps a portrait of that decade. If so, she could provide me with material and recollections of her experience of the Cold War.

  As I was going overseas early the following year, I explained that I couldn’t follow up on the ASIO story for the present but would still love to write something about her that would not overlap with the biography that academic and activist, Veronica Brady, was doing. When writing my first book, Writers Defiled: Security Service Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals, 1920–1960 (1993), I had not been able to get hold of Judith’s security file. In fact, there had not been any record of it existing when I had searched. Clearly, there was more to be said on the subject.

  A week or so before I left for Europe, a postcard arrived from Judith. It was a haunting photograph of a line of pine trees receding into a fog called ‘Braidwood Morning’. In it, she offered a ‘New Year’s message of encouragement’. She was ‘confined to barracks’ in the respite room attached to the Braidwood hospital but felt ‘fairly ok’. ‘This is really just a goodwill message. What you are doing is important and I hope you will go on with it.’ She was referring to her hope that I would write more about the Cold War period. At this time, I had no idea how deep her anxiety about surveillance went. It would be years before I fully understood the story behind this postcard and began to come to grips with the dread these fears inspired.

  In the early years of our correspondence she signed off, ‘Sincerely, Judith’. Later it was ‘Best wishes, Judith’. In the final five years, she signed off, ‘Love, Judith’. Although I could not claim to have known her as a close friend, I knew that we had established a relationship of affection and trust. In her last note to me a year before she died, Judith said, ‘I understand you are going in for motherhood. I’ve never regretted it myself and without Meredith I’d have little to face my eighties with. Indeed, I doubt if I’d be here. So best of luck and be happy with it.’

  When I think back on that final meeting in Canberra—just a few months before I discovered I was pregnant—there is one thing she said that leaps out at me. We had spent the morning talking about the recently released biography, South of My Days (1998). The experience of reading her own biography had clearly unsettled her. Instead of giving her a feeling of satisfaction at all she had achieved, it seemed to have left her wondering where all the time had gone.

  ‘I’m going on eighty-three, Fiona,’ she said, staring into the middle distance. ‘And the more I think about my life, the more I realise I missed it. I shot past it. “Now” is an extraordinary situation, “now” is neither past nor future and “now” doesn’t really exist. There is only one instant, if there is an instant at all. I could never really understand time.’

  When she said this, I couldn’t believe she really meant it. It seemed more of an intellectual reflection than something felt. I couldn’t believe that someone who had done so much with her life could really feel that she had ‘missed’ the moment. Judith was a poet, after all. Poetry was all about being ‘in the moment’. It distilled life to its essence, stripped away all inessentials, all pettiness and distraction, and concentrated the reader’s mind in such a way that, for the time you dwelt in a poem, you were more alive and alert to life’s beauty, intensity and fragility than at alm
ost any other moment. Poems were like dreams where truths were spoken that could not be uttered in ordinary language.

  How could she, who had written so spell-bindingly about time and the way we experience it, say that she had never understood it? The more I ventured into Judith’s world, the more her observation troubled me. I knew that she had always been preoccupied with the nature of time. The many stages in our experience of it, from childhood to old age, are reflected in her oeuvre. Quite a number of poems from her early to middle period poignantly capture the child’s experience of perpetual present—‘nothing is ago, nothing not yet’. The title poem of her first collection The Moving Image (1953) traces the shift from the child’s understanding of time as infinite yet tangible—‘time seemed as many miles as round the world . . . / . . . or a sweet slope of grass edged with the sea’—to the adult’s awareness of time as linear and beyond our grasp, only slackening its pace ‘when we are / caught deep in sleep, or music, or a lover’s face.’ When she composed this poem, she was still young enough to be confident that she could come to grips with time and triumph over it. The ‘lovelier distance’ still lay ahead of her.

  With age, this youthful confidence in the power of love and creativity to allow one to fully inhabit the present moment, this excitement about what lies ahead, gave way to a kind of resignation, a sense that the further one goes in life, the more elusive and baffling time becomes. In the 1950s, as she settled into domestic life with Jack and began feeling the pressure to earn a living to support them both, she grew more keenly aware of how easily time could get away from you. The Generations of Men (1959)—her fictionalised account of her pastoralist grandparents, May and Albert Wright, which is based on their diaries—imagines Albert, after years of unrelenting, back-breaking work to keep their pastoral property in Queensland viable, stopping to reflect:

  Where had the children gone, whose growth he had once looked forward to. Where had the years vanished of which he had once had such hopes? He had seen no more of his life than if he had been a prisoner locked away from it . . . Would his sons, too, be driven in the whirlwind of destruction, and wake perhaps as he was doing, to ask in the end what had consumed their lives?

  From the 1960s onward, vast tracts of her time were consumed by environmental and later, Aboriginal, causes as she tried to undo the ‘whirlwind of destruction’ that her forebears had set in motion. When her final collection of poetry, Phantom Dwelling, was released in 1985, there was no longer a ‘lovelier distance’ lying ahead of her.

  Now, more than ever, she wanted to stop analysing experience and time, and simply be part of the cosmic scheme. But, much as she longed for this unmediated oneness with the universe, she knew that ‘human eyes impose a human pattern’, illusory as it might be, and that this inescapably separates us from the rest of creation and makes us conscious of the passage of time. On a more personal note, these poems capture how, as one ages, the present silts up with memories from the past. In the late poem ‘Dust’, drought has ‘stopped the song of the river’—the traditional metaphor for time; and her beloved swimming hole—an emblem of the present moment—has almost dried up. Time’s current has become so sluggish that past and present merge.

  It wasn’t until ten years after my final conversation with Judith that I began to understand what she meant, what she felt, when she said that she had ‘missed’ her life. ‘Where is the life we have lost in living?’ T.S. Eliot asked. Becoming a mother had brought this home to me in a way that nothing else in my experience had. One minute I was cradling a chubby-faced baby in my arms and trying to juggle motherhood and writing and making a living, and then, in what seemed like no time, my son was nine years old and too big for me to pick up. This had happened even though I said to myself, almost every day, never forget these moments, drink him in as he is right now. Hold fast to this day.

  At the same time, I clung to the belief that I would learn, as I got older, how to better inhabit the moment. I was encouraged by what I was discovering about Judith’s interest in Buddhism and Taoist thought, and her own practice of meditation at her bush property, Edge. She would spend hours on end studying a patch of ground and the life teeming on it, or would sit by the river that ran past her property and observe the small, moment-by-moment changes in the water, the trees, the sky. One way of looking at meditation, says writer Jon Kabat-Zinn, is to view thinking as a waterfall, a continuous cascade. To cultivate what Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’—detached awareness of our mental processes—we have to go beyond or behind our thinking, much in the way that you might find a vantage point in a cave behind a waterfall. ‘We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.’ This explanation of meditation would have been meaningful to Judith, especially as she floated in her waterhole with the sound of water endlessly tumbling over the rocky ledges at either end.

  Almost every day Judith went for walks through her property; walks she described in her letters as ‘ecstatic’. She used this word, I think, with full knowledge of what the Greeks call ekstasis, the indescribable joy that comes of ‘stepping outside’ ordinary experience and losing oneself in the moment. In her ever-evolving relationship with the land, she was learning how to dwell in it without imposing herself on it. To accept it for what it was, to see it for what it was, to love it for what it was. She even gave up trying to cultivate a garden, that beguiling mirage of perfection and control. Meditating, Buddhists say, is not a matter of self-improvement or striving of any kind, but of learning how to be fully present.

  How then to reconcile this wise acceptance, this rich experience of the moment, with her remarks to me during our final meeting? Was this inevitably how everyone felt towards the end of their life? That for all the extraordinary experiences you packed into it and all the meditating you did upon it, you couldn’t help feeling that life had slipped through your fingers?

  All that sunny, late summer day in the botanical gardens I had been wanting to ask Judith her thoughts on death. Perhaps she would have something to say that would help make sense of these contradictions. But I didn’t want to put a cloud over our remaining time together. Nor did I want to be presumptuous. She might live for another ten years, I might die tomorrow. Yet I knew that she had spent more time contemplating death (in her poems) than most of us are willing to do, and I wondered what she had learned, and how her feelings about this ultimate deadline might have changed.

  Apart from the usual intimations of her own mortality experienced in childhood, death first touched her and irrevocably changed her world when Judith was twelve years old. The only glimpses we have of her immediate reaction to her mother’s death come from her very first attempts at poetry. These poems, written between the ages of about eight and thirteen, are contained in two black leather exercise books surrounded by sweet drawings and doodles in coloured ink. The early poems are written in large, round childish script. As she gets older, the script becomes smaller and more flowing. When I read these poems—now kept in the National Library of Australia—I was reminded of The Children’s Treasury of Verse or similar anthologies which I knew as a child and which many generations of English-speaking children have known. They are full of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (which he wrote specifically for children) and works by well-known poets considered appropriate for children, such as William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Eldorado’, Lord Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ or ‘Break, Break, Break’, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Hurt No Living Thing’. Poems Judith’s parents had read to her and her brothers. Not surprisingly, her first poems are derivative of this kind of verse.

  There are a number of poems amongst the later juvenilia that show a growing preoccupation with death. It may simply have been that she was at an age when we first begin to grapple with our mortality, or that she was reading a lot of late Victorian poetry, with its melancholy, and sometimes sentimental, obsession with death. (Her mother kept a scrapbook of her favourite poems which p
articularly influenced Judith’s early writing. She would later tell Meredith that she wrote as much to please her mother as for herself.) While none of her juvenile poems can be definitively said to be about her mother’s death, there is no doubt that many of them are grounded in personal experience. At this time, she was consciously learning her craft by experimenting with existing forms, forms that could both transform ordinary experience and channel intense emotion. These poems show an acute awareness of death’s finality and pointed references to the pain of being separated from one’s mother, even if this mother is figured as ‘mother nature’. A poem such as ‘The Battle’ imagines a battlefield from nature’s point of view: ‘Have they dared to trample your breast mother, my mother?’ The poem is narrated by the night that falls like a healing balm, offering comfort.

  Dead trees lament the fact that they will never feel the ‘green sap run / in their arms again’ or ‘feel the keen breeze blowing ever’ in her poem ‘Never’. The refrain, ‘Never—never—never again’ hauntingly prefigures one of Judith’s most moving, mature poems, in which she finally came out and said what she could not articulate as a young girl. Almost fifty years after her mother’s death, when Judith was the ‘grey-haired daughter’ her mother had never known, she studied her mother’s wedding photograph and confessed:

  I know her

  better from this averted girlish face

  than in those memories death cut so short.

  That was the most important thing she showed us—

  that pain increases, death is final,

  that people vanish.