Australian Dictionary of Biography

Judith Wright, 1960s

Courtesy of Meredith McKinney

Judith Arundell Wright McKinney (1915–2000), poet, author, and activist, was born on 31 May 1915 at Thalgarrah, on Nganyaywana Country, New South Wales, eldest of three children of New South Wales-born parents Ethel Mabel Wright, née Bigg, and her husband Phillip Arundell Wright, grazier, benefactor, and later university chancellor. Until the age of fourteen Judith lived at Wallamumbi station, one of several large New South Wales properties owned by her grandmother, Charlotte May Wright, who had assumed management of the family’s land holdings after her husband’s death in 1890. The station was overseen by Judith’s father. He was active in regional associations, including the Country Party, and loomed large as a powerful figure in her childhood imagination. Though the family’s pastoral wealth had been secured by a woman, she knew it would ultimately be inherited by her brothers. She developed a strong connection to Wallamumbi and the surrounding valley, which she often roamed on horseback. It was her ‘most beloved place’ (Wright 1999, 54); in poetry it became her ‘blood’s country’ (Wright 1945, 2).

Wright taught herself to read at a young age. Her mother hoped she would become a writer and encouraged her to correspond with the Sydney Mail’s children’s page editor, Ella McFadyen, who recognised her talent and published eight of her poems. She was initially supervised by her mother in her lessons with the New South Wales Correspondence School, Blackfriars, and later by her aunt and an occasional governess. In 1924 she travelled to Java, Netherlands East Indies, with her parents in an attempt to cure her mother’s persistent influenza, which had afflicted the Wright household since the pandemic of 1919. Judith would remember her mother’s death in 1927 as the end of her childhood. The tragedy left her with a lifelong sense of crisis and precarity. In 1928 her father married Dora Isabella Temperley; they had two children, Annette and David.

In 1929 Wright started boarding at New England Girls’ School, Armidale. She did not meet society’s expectations for a young woman of the pastoral aristocracy: she loved reading, not sport, and was self-conscious about her appearance. Later in life she remembered: ‘The only thing I had to treasure was poetry and the knowledge that I was going to be a poet’ (Wright 1999, 107). Several of her poems were published in the school magazine and she gained first-class honours in English in the Leaving certificate examinations in 1932, though she was unable to matriculate as she had decided not to study maths. A year earlier, she had had a serious riding accident, after which she was told she was unlikely to ever have children.

After a year tutoring her younger cousin Cecily, Wright studied for a bachelor of arts at the University of Sydney (1934–36), but could not graduate due to her unmatriculated status. She later said that her real purpose in attending was to make use of the university’s library. After boarding at Neutral Bay and Glebe, she spent two years at the Women’s College. She completed courses in philosophy, psychology, English, oriental studies, and anthropology, and was social editor of the student publication Honi Soit. Her poetry also appeared in Hermes and The Arts Journal under pseudonyms that she never revealed.

In 1937 Wright travelled to Europe and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where her mother’s sister was a ‘tea planter’s wife’ (Wright 1998, 16). While overseas she observed anti-Semitism and impending war. Returning to Sydney in 1938, she worked in market research for the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson (Australia) Pty Ltd and as a secretary at the University of Sydney. She also continued to write poems, at least one of which was published in the literary magazine Southerly. During this time, she was diagnosed with otosclerosis, a condition that led to severe hearing loss, which worsened over time. Deafness compounded her sense of being unmarriageable. By 1941 she was working in the building section of the Sydney City Council at the Sydney Town Hall, which became part of Sydney’s Air Raid Precautions Centre in World War II.

Returning to Wallamumbi in April 1942, Wright assisted her father in managing the property and began to write with increasing intensity. Encountering her childhood home—the people, the place, and the way of life—in a new light, particularly under threat of Japanese invasion, made it ‘feel far more important’ to her (Wright 1987–88). In her 1944 poem ‘For New England,’ she gave voice to a feeling of dislocation, of being foreign but rooted in Australia. During these years her father told her the story that would inform the poem ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ (1945), which recounted a massacre of Aboriginal people. Other works, such as ‘Bora Ring’ (1944), revealed an early interest in Aboriginal culture and the impact of British colonisation.

In 1943 the poetry editor of the Bulletin, Douglas Stewart, finally accepted a poem submitted by Wright. The same year, she moved to Brisbane to work for the Australian Universities Commission and volunteer at the recently established literary magazine Meanjin Papers (later Meanjin). Through literary circles she met Jack Blight and Barbara Blackman (née Patterson), with whom she was to enjoy lifelong friendships. She also met Jack Philip McKinney, a novelist and philosopher, who became her partner in life and thought. Twenty-four years her senior, he was married with children, but possessed ‘the most exciting mind’ (Wright 1987–88) and was an admirer of her poetry.

While in Brisbane, Wright published two of her best-known poems: ‘Bullocky’ (1944) and ‘South of My Days’ (1945). ‘Bullocky’ was received with acclaim seemingly after a decade of drafting. In 1946 she became a statistician at the University of Queensland and purchased a small cottage at Tamborine Mountain, south-east of Brisbane, where her poetry was enriched by reading and discussion with McKinney. The same year, Clem Christesen, founding editor of Meanjin Papers, published her first collection of poems, The Moving Image. It was well received and set a benchmark that would at times be a burden for Wright. A second edition appeared in 1953, followed by several reprints.

In 1949 Wright was awarded a one-year Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) fellowship that enabled her to leave her job and research her family history. The resulting manuscript, eventually published as The Generations of Men (1959) by Oxford University Press, was initially rejected by publishers claiming that it was neither history nor fiction. The book set out to extend the legacy of her pioneering grandparents, George and Margaret Wyndham, who had arrived in the Hunter Valley from England in 1827, where they established a vast homestead, introduced Hereford cattle, and were among the first wine producers in the region. Infused with a ‘subtle feminism’ (Griffiths 2016, 97), the book was reprinted several times and became a major work in the burgeoning field of family history. In 1949 her second poetry collection, Woman to Man, was published to critical acclaim, many regarding it ‘a frank confession of female sensuality’ that offers ‘the woman’s point of view’ on sex and love (Walker 1991, 41). It was awarded the Grace Leven prize for poetry (1949). The following year, after a difficult pregnancy, Wright and McKinney had a daughter, Meredith.

During the 1950s and 1960s Wright became a major figure in Australian poetry. She published five book-length volumes of verse with Angus & Robertson: The Gateway (1953), The Two Fires (1955), Birds (1962), Five Senses (1963), and The Other Half (1966). Each of her collections was widely celebrated, although there were always those who regarded her best work as beginning and ending with The Moving Image. She maintained that the ‘male literary establishment’ resented her for upsetting ‘traditional female boundaries’ (Wright 1976, 18). In this period, she also published five children’s books and a short-story collection, The Nature of Love (1966). By 1964 her poetry was being included in State school curricula. While she welcomed the interest, she had reservations about the teaching of poetry in schools, believing true engagement with art was personal, ungovernable, and mysterious.

Wright also became an influential literary critic and anthology editor. Within a decade of her first poetry collection, she delivered the 1955 CLF lectures on Australian poetry. Oxford University Press also commissioned her to edit A Book of Australian Verse (1956), and New Land, New Language: An Anthology of Australian Verse (1957), which was reprinted several times over the next twenty years. Her critical study, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), became one of the most referenced studies in the field. She claimed that Australian poetry was shaped by a dialectic between exile and hope, a thesis she pursued in several articles, essays, and talks. In 1963 she published biographies of the poets Charles Harpur and John Shaw Neilson. She also became a poetry reader for Jacaranda Press and was active with the Australian Society of Authors (founding council member 1963), supporting campaigns for copyright, royalties, and public lending rights.

Much of Wright’s creative and intellectual output during these years was inspired by her relationship with McKinney. Theirs was an intense love that their daughter described as ‘a force that flowed equally between them’ (Clarke and McKinney 2004, 2). In the 1960s McKinney became increasingly unwell and, after years of requesting a divorce, his wife finally agreed. Wright and McKinney married at the General Registry Office, Brisbane, on 13 June 1962. He died four years later. In 1968 Wright spent eight months travelling throughout Australia and Europe with Meredith. Two years later she was part of an Australian delegation to India to attend a seminar on Australian and Indian literature. In 1976 she was the first recipient of a Senior Anzac fellowship and travelled around New Zealand as a literary ambassador.

The Australian landscape held immense personal and poetic significance for Wright and underpinned her involvement with the conservation movement. Her friend Kathleen McArthur had alerted her to the vulnerability of wildflower and coastal ecologies in the early 1950s, and together they successfully campaigned for the high dunes and coloured sands at Cooloola, north of Brisbane, to be declared a national park. Wright and McKinney had bought a lakeside cottage nearby at Boreen Point. In September 1962 she and McArthur founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland with Brian Clouston and David Fleay. Wright served as president (1962–76) and supported several campaigns during her term, including efforts to stop coral-limestone mining at Ellison Reef and oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef. The Coral Battleground (1977) was an account of that epic campaign against ‘a civilisation that lives by exploiting everything in land and sea’ (Wright 1977, xiv).

With the ecologists Francis Ratcliffe and Leonard Webb, Wright built momentum for a national environmental body. The Australian Conservation Foundation was launched in 1966; she was a member of its provisional council. In the ACF’s early years she lobbied to protect K’gari/Fraser Island from sand-mining. By the late 1960s she had become critical of the organisation’s direction and frustrated that they would not support her work to prevent the supersonic Concorde aeroplane from establishing a route to Australia, which she believed posed a threat to the environment. She also felt that the conservation movement too often dismissed the perspectives and knowledge of Indigenous people. In 1972 she resigned from the council, though she later became an honorary life member (1980) and left a donation to the ACF in her estate.

Wright’s critique of Australian land management was shaped by a growing awareness of Aboriginal history and the violence of colonisation, as well by her experiences of First Nations people in contemporary society. That awareness was the result of another friendship, which began in her forties, with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Though she knew Walker as an Aboriginal leader, she encountered her poetry in Jacaranda Press’s submission pile, where she was struck by the ‘merciless accusations, their notes of mourning and challenge’ (Wright 1994, 163). She recommended publication of We Are Going (1964), and the women subsequently formed a close friendship, which was the subject of the documentary Shadow Sisters (1977); during Wright’s final decades she would often ‘refer things to Kath in my mind’ (Wright, in Brady 1998, 361).

Returning to her family history in 1977, Wright set out to understand the impact of her forebears’ actions on the local traditional owners. It was perhaps her most difficult writing project and took several years to complete. The resulting book, The Cry for the Dead (1981), was a serious reappraisal of her family history that recognised her ancestors as part of ‘[t]he great pastoral invasion’ (Wright 1981, 4) of eastern Australia. She envisaged the book as a work of revisionist history and restorative truth-telling.

Although Wright did not consider herself a public intellectual, she was one of the country’s most formidable and eloquent orators. Throughout her life she wrote across a wide range of genres and was a spirited letter writer. By the 1970s she admitted that ‘she no longer felt herself to be primarily a poet’ (Clarke and McKinney 2006, xii), a source of some sadness but a necessary result of her activism. In 1973 she was appointed to the Australia Council for the Arts, where she met its founding chair H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, and became a member of the committee of inquiry into the National Estate (1973–74). Such was her standing that Whitlam considered her for the role of governor-general.

In 1975 Wright moved to Braidwood, New South Wales, where she purchased one hundred acres (41 ha) of land. The move brought her closer to friends, including Coombs, with whom she had already commenced a secret romantic partnership that would continue for the next twenty-five years. She was the first woman appointed to the council of the Australian National University (1975–79) and served as patron for many organisations supporting human rights, women’s rights, and environmental causes. In 1986 she donated her Braidwood property to the ANU for environmental study, living there as a caretaker. Towards the end of her life, she would see the enduring concerns of ‘environmental loss’ and poetry’s ‘increasing neglect’ as linked (Wright 1992, vii).

Between 1979 and 1983 Wright was also a member of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, which Coombs initiated and chaired. Some literary figures were dismayed by her heavy involvement in committee work. Such choices were, in her view, a political act, as was all her writing. She saw her work for the ATC as a natural extension of The Cry for the Dead and ‘perhaps the most useful part of my life’ (Wright 1983, 10). In 1983 she and Coombs co-authored We Call for a Treaty (1985).

Sometimes, during these years, poetry emerged in the twilight hours. Wright experimented with form, liberated in some ways by being apart from literary society and inspired by the clarity of her political convictions. In 1994 her Collected Poems 1942-1985 won the Human Rights award in the drama category. She was also the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the Robert Frost medallion (1975), the Alice award (1980), and the Asan World prize (1984). In 1980 she was invested with the degree of ridder (knight) in the Dutch Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard. She was thrice nominated for the Nobel prize in literature (1964, 1965, and 1967) and was awarded honorary doctorates by seven Australian universities (1956–88).

Despite these achievements, Wright became frustrated with the way some of her poems had been used to justify colonialist or nationalist readings of Australia. In 1986 she controversially withdrew ‘Bullocky’ from publication in anthologies. Later, in Collected Poems 1942–1985, she encouraged her readers to consider historical and personal contexts: ‘the poems have been written out of the events, the thinking and feeling, the whole emotional climate and my own involvements of that time’ (Wright 1994, n.p.). Whereas early in her career she had believed poetry to be a purveyor of universal meaning, she later understood the social and historical contingency of reading, which fuelled a doubt in poetry’s capacity to bring about change.

By the 1980s Wright’s worsening deafness made committee work and public events difficult. On Australia Day 1992 she lost what remained of her hearing. Her eyesight also continued to deteriorate. During the early 1980s she had begun working on an autobiography and in 1987 and 1988 she participated in a series of oral history interviews for the National Library of Australia. In 1998 Veronica Brady published a biography, South of My Days, with Wright’s involvement. Wright also wrote a small memoir, Tales of a Great Aunt (1998). The following year, she published her most substantial autobiographical work, Half a Lifetime, edited by Patricia Clarke. The book finished with an apology to the Indigenous people of Australia: ‘I now bend my head and say Sorry. Sorry, above all, that I can make nothing right’ (Wright 1999, 296). She had spent a lifetime attempting to ‘make right,’ driven in poetry and public life by a ‘fine fury’ (Clarke and McKinney 2006, xiv).

Wright’s contributions to activism and literature were widely celebrated in her final decade. In 1991 major recognition came in the form of the Queen’s Gold medal for poetry. She was the second Australian to receive the award, after Michael Thwaites in 1940. The Association for the Study of Australian Literature also honoured her with the A. A. Phillips award (1995). Privately, even as she was venerated as a pioneer of Australian environmentalism, she despaired about the failures of the movement. In 1997 she moved to Canberra, where she grieved the death of Coombs. Two years later, her old family home of Wallamumbi was requisitioned by the bank. She died from a heart attack on 25 June 2000 at Canberra Hospital. Survived by her daughter, she was buried in North Tambourine cemetery, Queensland, with her husband.

Tragedy as well as the fragility of nature and the body powerfully shaped Wright’s life. She was intolerant of frippery, some finding her overly serious, pessimistic, and unnecessarily alarmed. There were also those who believed that deafness suited her because she was not interested in other perspectives, while others valued her attentiveness to life and preserving it for future generations. There was a ‘blazing quality of integrity about her’ (Brooks, in Stephens 2000, 13) and friends and family lovingly recalled spending time with her in the bush and her tended garden, the poet’s five senses fully alive. She enjoyed birdwatching, the surf, whisky, a wry joke, the warmth of a letter, and loyalty to loved ones.

Since Wright’s death there has been increasing recognition of her central place in twentieth-century Australian literature. For many, her life underscored a tension between poetry and politics, her legacy the bringing together of these ‘two fires’ (Wright 1954). It might be said that she saw the sacred in language and nature. She has been honoured with various eponyms, including a suburb in Canberra (next to Coombs) and a Federal electorate in south-west Queensland, and several short films have been made about her. The Judith Wright Arts Centre at Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, opened in 2001, and a memorial grove of trees was also dedicated to her at Civic Park, Armidale (2004). In 2007 a poetry prize was established in her honour by Overland, and the Judith Wright Calanthe award has been part of the Queensland Premier’s literary awards since 2004.