Judith Wright is considered one of the most notable Australian poets in the country’s history, revered for her cerebral and evocative poems that explore the complexity of Australia’s natural landscape and its colonization by Europeans. Michael Forshaw, an Australian senator, said upon the occasion of her death in 2000, “I am sure there is not a person in this parliament and probably not a person in this country over the age of about 30, maybe even younger, who at some stage in their life did not read some of Judith Wright’s poetry.”
Wright’s forward to a volume of her collected poems explained, “The poems have been written out of the events, the thinking and feeling, the whole emotional climate and my own involvements of that time.” She saw poetry as equally important as the activist work she was involved with, stating “All these other concerns–conservation, Aboriginal rights, human rights, and the defense of freedom of speech–are as important as the writing of poetry itself.” And while she wrote often about nature, with the human presence comparably scarce, she rejected the label of “nature poet” and said “Anything I have ever written has had its human meaning even if it started from the natural. The meaning of any poem I write, I think, is immediate and not purely descriptive. I could never write what they call purely 'nature' poetry, in fact I doubt if anyone ever does. I can never find a poem that, on examination, does not turn out to be much more relevant to man than to nature.”
She could be witty and dry, once writing in a letter to a friend, “‘all I want to do is stick my tongue out at being a Poet and Writing Poetry. I refuse to have labels stuck on me and as for that Judith Wright, she turns me up. (However if I can make a bit of money out of her, I don’t mind).” Yet her overall sensibility was one of deep contemplativeness, reverence for the land, and a trenchant understanding of how fraught the relationship between white Australians and the land and the aboriginal people was. In her autobiography she was unambiguous about these issues: “To all of the peoples of the old and true Australia on whose land I have trespassed and whom, by being part of my own people, I have wronged, I plead for forgiveness.”
