Unsettling sight
Judith Wright's journey into history and ecology on Mt Tamborine
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2015.22Keywords:
Judith Wright, Mt Tamborine, poetry, 1948-1975, anti-colonialism, symbiotic relationships, quantum mechanicsAbstract
Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright’s poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.
References
These books include: Woman to man (1949), The gateway (1953); The two fires (1955); Birds (1962); Five senses (the forest); The other half (1966); Shadow (1970); Alive (1973). Much of Fourth quarter, published in 1976, was also composed at Mt Tamborine.
See http://www.nprsr.qld.gov.au/parks/tamborine/culture.html.
Judith Wright, Collected poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), p. 29.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Beyond formalism: Literary essays 1958–1970 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 228.
Wright, Collected poems, pp. 39–40
Wright, quoted in Gary Clark, ‘The two threads of a life: Judith Wright, the environment and Aboriginality’, Antipodes (December 2006), 156.
Wright, Collected poems, pp. 140–1.
Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (eds), With love and fury: Selected letters of Judith Wright (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), p. 276.
Stuart Cooke, Speaking the earth’s languages: A theory for Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), p. 41.
Wright, Collected poems, p. 176.
See Joan Retallack, The poethical wager (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
For example, see Judith Wright, Because I was invited (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 170–1.
Wright, Because I was invited, p. 31.
Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), p.129.
Les Murray, Translations from the natural world (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 21.
See Les Murray and Judith Wright, ‘Correspondence’, Southerly, 63(1) (2003), 162–80.
Murray and Wright, ‘Correspondence’, 172.
Murray is most likely writing about the Superb Lyrebird, which, while relatively similar, has distinctive performative and physical characteristics to the Albert’s.
Wright, Collected poems. p. 287
Martin Harrison, Who wants to create Australia? Essays on poetry and ideas in contemporary Australia (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2004), p. 75.
Harrison, Who wants to create Australia? pp. 76–7.
Philip Mead, Networked language: Culture & history in Australian poetry (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008), pp. 318–19.
Mead, Networked language, p. 320.
Wright, Collected poems, p. 300.
Wright, Collected poems, p. 308.
Wright, Collected poems, p. 354.
Clark, ‘The two threads of a life’, 158–9.
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and philosophy: The revolution in modern science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1958]), p. 139.
Heisenberg, Physics and philosophy, p. 140.
Mead, Networked language, p. 328.
