Judith Wright -Her Poetry and Activism

Judith Wright – Poet and Activist

Judith Wright was an Australian poet born May 31st 1915. Her mother died at an early age so she went to live with her aunt and attended New England Girls’ School. When her father remarried in 1929 she went back to live with him and studied History, English, Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Sydney. When World War Two broke out, she worked as a laborer as many men were called up to fight.

It wasn’t until 1946 where Wright first published her first poems whilst she was working at the University of Queensland. Whilst working there she also worked on the magazine, Meanjin. She married Jack McKinney in 1962 but sadly he passed away for years later.

It wasn’t until 1966 when she published her first short stories, which entailed her passion for the environment and the aboriginal suffering. This can be seen most noticeably in the poem ‘Eighty Acres’.

‘Eighty Acres’ is about a young woman and her estate agent husband who have been left 80 acres of land by her father in law from the local aristocratic family, the Serrys. It is not long before the local aborigines become involved stating that it is a tribal ground and the elder of the tribe announces he is half-Serry. Soon to be found out is the fact that the land had been given to the elder and that the Serrys had used the young couple as ‘outsiders’ to reclaim the land for ‘honorable’ aborigine commerce (The ‘Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966’ had only just been passed recognizing Aborigine land rights). The land is handed over to the aboriginal tribe and timber is sold from it, increasing the wellbeing of the natives.

This short-story shows the beginnings of Wright’s opinions and shows her to support Aboriginal rights. From this short story, Wright goes on to comment in many of her poems about the plight of the aborigines and the suffering they go through.

In 1964, Wright became president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland for 12 years. By this time Wright had written many poems about nature. Many of these poems describe mans destruction of nature and how the simply beauty of traditional farming and the day-to-day humdrum of life has changed to the destructive progression of modernization. In her poem ‘Dust’, she writes, “The steel shocked earth has turned against the plough”. This is basically stating that because of industrialization and particularly World War Two, people no longer favour the quite country, but instead prefer newer modern industry as everyone now has the opportunity to become rich as class-division is a thing of the past. She goes on in this poem to oppose this idea by stating that “Our dream was the wrong dream”, and to emphasize this she places that in the middle of the line (“the dust accuses. Our dream was the wrong dream,”) after a caesura to make us this about what we are accused of and what needs to change.