[The following essay was delivered as a seminar in 1981. In this analysis, Janakiram examines and applauds Wright's struggle, in both poems and in life, to create a relationship "to be won by love only" between the European settlers of Australia, the Aborigine population and culture, and the land itself. Jankiram maintains that Wright uses this relationship to achieve a true Australian identity, not as an exile or a conqueror, but as a native at peace in her homeland.]

As Leonie Kramer has noted [in "Judith Wright, Hope, Mcauley," Literary Criterion, Vol. XV, Nos. 3–4, 1980], Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James Mcauley form a major trinity, who together with R. D. FitzGerald, Douglas Stewart and David Campbell, "virtually wrote the history of Australian poetry" in the period after the world war II. "Their work represents", according to Kramer, "not so much a renaissance in Australian poetry as a first full flowering, which established poetry as a form able to challenge what had hitherto been the dominance of fiction." Whatever poetry is or may be, it has its springs in the human condition and reflects the personal and social aspirations of a particular milieu that produces it. The history of Australian poetry may be described, briefly, as the history of the white man's encounter with an alien landscape and alien tribes. The story of the white man's colonial adventure in Australia, a short one since it covers just three or four life-times, has been reflected in the Australian verse produced over the years and accounts for its peculiar pre-occupations with the landscape, the bush, the bushrangers and explorer-heroes. The dominance of the Romantic-Symbolist tradition in this poetry, with a greater share going to the Romantic component, can be explained by the fact that Australian poets, in their attempts to come to terms with their exiled consciousness in a "desolate country", found the Romantic mode quite handy for their purposes. As a result, nature or landscape receives much greater attention than the human figures and the images of light and dark, night and day, noises and silences persist frequently even in the poetry of the later period, and more so in the poetry of Judith Wright.

James Mcauley, Judith Wright's distinguished contemporary, has remarked about her poems that many of them "make high claims for themselves by the nature of their themes and language: they play for high stakes" [A Map of Australian Verse, 1975].

Her encounter with the natural environment and rural life is devoid of any urban bias; it is largely "meditative intuitive, emotional, with strong metaphysical searching." While a sense of immediacy and reflective intensity, coupled with a remarkable gift for image making, marks her earlier verse of the 40's and 50's, a movement towards the general and the abstract with a tendency to probe the metaphysical significance of experience has been noted by critics as a new development in her later poetry. "The surface change" in her poetry, as C. A. Wilkes puts it [in "The Later Poetry of Judith Wright," Southerly, A Review of Australian Literature, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1965], is that the main source of her poetic inspiration in her earlier period is the "finite world" available to the senses, while the effort of the later poetry is to reach beyond that world. However, there are a few themes that recur frequently both in her earlier and later verse; time as the moving image of eternity, the poet as the maker, love creativity and settlement, and the disappearance of the Aboriginal culture.

An effort is made in this paper to close-read a few of her poems dealing with the colonial experience of the white man in Australia particularly themes of colonisation, settlement and dispossession of the Aborigines. About four or five poems have been selected for a close examination for whatever light they may throw on the issue of colonial encounter.

The much anthologised piece, "Bullocky", that appeared first in The Moving Image (1946), as a familiar recreation of the Australian Dream in terms of the Biblical myth. The white man's colonising ventures in Australia recall the first settlement of the Jews in their Promised Land; the Bullocky man of the frontier days, thus, becomes a kind of "old Moses" and his "stubbourn team", the slaves that were led out of Egypt. Camping under the "half-light pillars of the trees" at night, the Bullocky man

filled the steeple cone of night
with shouted prayers and prophecies,

in order to overcome the terror of silence. The last two stanzas evoke the nature of the first colonial encounter with the vast bush and state how the pioneering ventures of the early settlers have transformed a desolate and intractable wild into "the promised Land" of the prophet Moses.

Grass is across the wagon-tracks,
and plough strikes bone across the grass,
and vineyards cover all the slopes
where the dead teams were used to pass.
O vine, grow close upon that bone
and hold it with your rooted hand.
The prophet Moses feeds the grape,
and fruitful is the Promised Land.

"Remittance Man", another poem of the same collection, concerns itself like "Bullocky", with the early white settlers. The remittance man was the "freak" who could never settle, who was content to go "tramping the backtracks" in summer haze and "let everything but life slip through his fingers." His easy-going habits led to his dis-inheritance and dismal end which are viewed in a matter-of-fact manner by his prosperous brother, the Squire.

That harsh biblical country of the scapegoat
closed its magnificence finally round his bones
polished by diligent ants. The squire his brother,
presuming death, signed over the documents, and
lifting his eyes across the inherited garden
let a vague pity blur the formal roses.

The well-known piece, "Nigger's Leap: New England", is unique for articulating a sharper sense of guilt, for offering a new perspective about the European adventure that has thrived at the expense of the primitive tribes of the land. Based on a particular incident of European reprisal, in 1844, in New South Wales, the poem recalls how the hapless Niggers, pursued to the top of the "Lipped cliff, "screamed falling in flesh" from those heights "and then were silent". The "bone and skull" lying securely under "the spine of range" and "the enveloping night call" for a "synthesis", for a revaluation of a historical relationship:

The sentiments recorded in these lines are a good example of what J. J. Healy [in "The Absolute and the Image of Man in Australian," Awakened Conscience, 1978] has termed as the "we-phenomenon", an expanded consciousness that acknowledges collective responsibility for a particular event of history, that sees the victim as a segment of the self-inflicted wound. Hence the call for "synthesis", for undoing a past injury.

It is interesting to note that Judith Wright's poetic mode of communication in all the poems dealing with the themes of settlement and usurpation is characterised by nature imagery of grass, rock, sea and dust. We have already seen how "Bullocky" [states its meaning] in terms of this basic imagery; here again, in ["Nigger's Leap: New England"], earth, wind and saplings play their own part in conveying what needs to be conveyed.

Never from earth again the coolamon,
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind… …
Night floods us suddenly as history,
that has sunk many islands in its good time.

Similar concerns of shared guilt that colonial encounter has entailed also inform, at a much deeper level, the long poem, "The Blind Man", originally published in the Woman to Man series (1949).

The issue of the white man's relationship with the land and its tribes is presented symbolically in the wider perspective of the dance of dust. And the dance of the "pollen-coloured dust" is none other than the eternal dance of birth and death. Jimmy Delaney, the blind man who sings under the Moreton Bay fig, "speaks in the voice of the forgotten dust". And his song carries much authenticity as a faithful narrative of the colonial venture since he himself, "is of that dust three generations made". The account begins with the pioneering efforts of the first generation Horrie Delaney who arrived at the place with his cattle and "shook the dust out of its golden sleep". However, he too had to shuffle across like "another shadow between the earth and the sun", and his adventure has culminated in being one with the tribes below the ground.

Deeper than the shadows of trees and tribes, deep
lay the spring that issues in death and birth.
Horrie Delaney with his dogs and his gun
came like another shadow between the earth and the sun
and now with the tribes he is gone down in death.

Then is recounted the venture of the second generation pioneer, Dick Delaney the combo, who cleared the hills and the bush finally for human settlement by dint of his sweat and labour:

Easily the bush fell and lightly, now it seems
to us who forget the sweat of Dick Delaney,
and the humpy and the scalding sunlight and the black
hate between the white skin and the black.

There is an important suggestion here that the adventure of the white man has both sides to it: the black hate involving the racial tension and the hard labour and sweat of the white man. It may be that both the labour and the hate lie hidden under the "marred earth" and its humble dust. However, whatever the outcome of the metamorphosis that has come over the pioneers, the vanquished tribe and the descendents of both, the dust has been performing its impersonal functions by keeping up the inexorable dance pattern of birth and death, growth and decay, in successive generations:

Dance upright in the wind, dry-voiced and humble dust
out of whose breast the great green fig-tree springs,
and the proud man, and the singer, and the outcast.

Admittedly, the colonial encounter, as presented in this poem, is not a simple tale of "came, saw and conquered"; it has wider ramifications of another kind of dance that the whirligig of time weaves in terms of dust, light and wind. This dance, assuming the pattern of generation, once sustained the green fig tree, the conqueror-dreamer and the dispossessed tribe. Assuming another form of negation and decay, the same dance has whittled them all into "shadows between the earth and the sun", into golden dust "driven by a restless wind":

The conqueror who possessed a world alone,
and he who hammered a world on his heart's stone,
and last the man whose world splintered in fear
their shadows lengthen in the light of noon,
their dust bites deep, driven by a restless wind.

The metaphysical overtones of this long narrative, of a blind singer's version of the Australian colonial experience, become clear and more pronounced as the account reaches its close. The speaker proclaims apocryphally with an assurance that is the outcome of an intent listening to the voices of the dark:

One feels constrained to ask the inevitable question: who are the two rulers of the world, the dreamer-explorer or the dispossessed tribal cherishing his own vanished dream? Clearly, the answer is in favour of the primeval elemental forces of birth and death, rather than the puny man. Perhaps, conquest, dispossession and defeat are altogether non-issues when they are placed in the wider perspective of decay and death, generation and degeneration—a pattern that the golden earth never tires of repeating at whatever level. This seems to be the note on which the blindman's song concludes: (that the "unregarded dust" is the ultimate conqueror).

Another longer piece, "Seven Songs for a Journey", belonging to The Two Fires (1955) series of poems, has a bearing on the colonial theme of settlement and adaptation under discussion in this paper. Here again, the core of the experience is presented symbolically through the basic and primary images of nature: this time of cliffs and creeks, moon and bone, sea-tides and mountain rocks. At the outset, the poet offers her song as a humble garland of word and phrase to the ageless rock and water of Carnarvon ranges and Creek. The song at once strikes us with its forceful bumping short rhythms of the Australian bushballad:

Carnarvon Creek
and cliffs of Carnarvon,
your tribes are silent;
I will sing for you—
each phrase
the size of a stone—
a red stone,

a white stone,
a grey,
and a purple;
… …
each word a sign
to set on your cliffs,
each phrase a stone
to lie in your waters.

All that the poet would ask in exchange from the cliffs are the "white orchard" from her slope and a fish from her waters.

The second section, "Brigalow Country", presents the tribal girl Margery as dancing "awkward as an emu" under the "metal-blue moon", with only the brigalow scrub on the slope and the far-off singing Dingoes to give her company. Her abject condition as a poor dweller of a fringecommunity is reflected in her bemoaning song she sings while dancing under the moon. The burden of her lament is that she has neither money nor sympathy and is as unregarded as the brigalow scrub on the slope, a silent companion in distress;

Living lost and lonely
with the tribe of the brigalows,
don't want to stay
but never can go.
Never get no money
for when I go hungry,
never get no kisses
for when I feel sad—
rooted like the brigalows
until I'm dead …
And the tribe of the brigalows
drop their shadows
like still black water
and watch her there

The third section addresses itself to Night, a favourite image and preoccupation of Judith Wright. The contours of Night, like the contours of Carnarvon mountain rock, have endured as lasting onlookers on the scene although these contours have been occasionally eroded by the moon's pale creek and the "floods of sunlight" and water. Night here emerges as the emblem of the mysterious dark, the unknowable, that somehow keeps up the phenomenal dance and negates all our dreams, including the "earth"s:

Night is what remains
when the equation is finished.
Night is the earth's dream
that the sun is dead.
Night is man's dream
that he has invented God—
the dream of before-creation;
the dream of falling.
Night blocks our way, saying
I at least am real.

The 4th section "The Prospector" takes up the theme of settlement and colonial history and the attendant displacement and injury they have caused in the bargain. Burdened by the uneasy awareness that she is an intruder on this scene, the poet watches the moon rise in her full splendour

on the range where no bird's speaking
except in the crow's voice—
on the land to be won by love only;

The awareness that the desolate landscape, in order to be one with the inner landscape, requires the mediation of love also includes the other knowledge concerning the aspirations of the old skeletons and bones dreaming on under the bright white moon:

Rise up and walk, old skeleton
But no; lie still.
Let no phase of the moon disturb you,
no heats recall.
Let the bones dream on, the kind dream
that was their last—
dream the mirage's river
has quenched the world's thirst.

It is with such a heavy and burdened heart that the poet realises what her own place is vis-a-vis the landscape and the scene:

Full moon's too bright for sleeping—
too white the sky.
And foreign to this country
restless I lie.
But you, moon, you're no stranger;
You're known here, moon,
drawing your mad hands over
rock, dust and bone.

It is not just the rock, dust, bone and moon that stand out as "witnesses against our lives" and as onlookers of recent history, for they have been "initialled by clumsy knives". But the sea, "anonymous pilgrim", "free of time and space" and history, carries no memory or any mark except the "unshaped bone and the splinter of raft". This is indeed a strange inference, for we know that the sea which has made its own contribution to the discovery and formation of Australian geography and history, cannot be relegated to a background figure as free of time and space. Perhaps, the poet's implication seems to be that the sea bears no concrete traces of human history except that it transforms and cleans whatever it receives from the human side.

At the end of this remarkable song for the human journey under debate, the only witnesses to the human aspirations and achievements that the poet has presented, are the tall Carnarvon cliffs and shallow creeks.—Unlike the sea, the solitary mountain, emerging finally as a "tall", sad "figure in an estranged landscape, drawing her biblical blue cloak across her shoulders," is presented as a mother figure, "virgin and widow", weeping her small pools of tears and with nothing "left for her to dream on". She at least seems to be a participator in human history, if not the neutral sea.

"At Cooloola", a short poem, is of a piece with the two long poems discussed here as far as its central preoccupation with the antinomies of antipodean exile is concerned. The operative symbols in this short poem are: the blue crane, the white swan, the clean sand and the drift-wood spear. Oppressed by "arrogant guilt" of usurpation which, as Judith Wright remarks in one of her published lectures, is a sore on the Australian's relationship with the land, she observes in her wanderings near Cooloola how the ancient "blue crane" has been fishing down the centuries with a calm and assurance denied to herself. She is aware that

He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
and he will wear their colours till he dies.

The outward scene turns the poet's attention inward, to an examination of her own relationship with the environment:

I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake
being unloved by all my eyes delight in
and made uneasy for an old murder's sake.

The third section of the poem glances backward at the mysterious beckoning which her grandfather received ninety years earlier from a ghostly black warrior. The past incident of crime and racial tension casts its gloom over the poet's present self-critical awareness. White shores of sand, says the poet, do "clear heavenly levels for the crane and swan" but not for her, smarting as she is under the burden of memory:

I know that we are justified only by love,
but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.
And walking on clean sand among the prints
of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear
thrust from water; and, like my grandfather,
must quiet a heart accused by its own fear.

The solution to the moral dilemma presented in the poem is the time-honoured one: that any meaningful relationship with the land of one's exile or conquest, and its earlier inhabitants, has to be based on love and understanding, the positives of human existence, rather than fear and hatred that are self-negating. Love, a redeeming experience, forms the basic link in any relationship between man and man, either black or white, or man and nature. And much of Judith Wright's poetry has this insistent theme: that love alone is the "dark gift" that helps man sustain not only his human creativity and identity but his inward peace as well. Perhaps, the opening piece of the Five Senses, "The Company of Lovers" (1946) provides a clue to the chief direction the metaphysical quest the poet has taken in her later verse:

we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night,
forget the night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all away
for this one thing, one only,
remembering that in the narrow grave
we shall be lonely.

To sum up, the colonial encounter in Judith Wright's poetry may be said to take the form of a quest for a genuine Australian identity, an identity that has rid itself of an adolescent nostalgia and emotional hankering for its ancestral home and tried to overcome the hampering effects of an exile consciousness. This quest, as in much of Australian poetry, has meant an imaginative effort to integrate the outer landscape, together with its trees and tribes, with a coherent and fulsome inner landscape, something wholly lived with rather than only observed from outside. In other words, the effort has meant a metamorphosis of a shipwrecked state into a situation of being really "at home"—of the kind described in James Mcauley's beautiful little piece, "Terra Australis"

It is your land of similes: the wattle
Scatters its pollen on the doubting heart;
The flowers are wide awake; the air gives ease
There you come home….
[The Penguin Book of Australian Verse, 1961]

This attitude towards the land "to be won by love only", as Judith Wright reminds us repeatedly, also partakes of an imaginative concern for the Aboriginals and their ancient culture, of a desire to strike a meaningful relationship with them in place of the earlier one based on "arrogant guilt." It is a measure of Judith Wright's integrity as poet and crusader for certain human values that she has voiced this concern not only in the few poems discussed in this paper but even in her two published lectures: "Aboriginals in Australian Poetry" and "The Voice of the Aboriginals" [published in Because I was Invited, 1975].

The first lecture, delivered in 1971 in Sydney, takes stock of the attitudes in Australian poetry towards the tribal people and goes on to assess the impact of the encounter with a primitive culture on the Australian imagination. A salutary fallout of the Jindiworobak movement, she notes, has been the birth of a rather belated recognition that "the long despised people had a value in themselves" and that their culture, based on complex but close ritualistic links with the land, had something to give to the whites and the wider world. She further notes that "the old attitudes of contempt and silence have been seriously undermined by the increasing publication of studies of Aboriginal culture and the Aboriginal plight." In the second lecture, "The Voice of the Aboriginals", delivered at East-West Centre in Honululu in 1974, she attempts a critical assessment of the Aboriginal protest and creative writing in English and shows how the process of the liberation of the Australian imagination from its earlier smugness and guilty silences has been further activated by the voices of the Aboriginal writers and thinkers themselves—Kath Walker, Davis, Gilbert, Johnson and the rest. Her genuine concern for the tribal culture deserves to be placed in the context of her wider and shared concern for the welfare of our planet, very much threatened by, what she calls, modern scientism and the predatory economic exploitation of our environment by our overgrown technological civilisation; and this concern is effectively voiced in all her writings on the Conservation Movement of which she herself has been an active campaigner. That her concern for the tribal people has been sincere and large-hearted is self-evident in the estimate she offers of the impact of the Aboriginal writers:

… Voices such as theirs can help to convince us that Aboriginals are capable of weighing their own choices, deciding their own problems and living successfully in their own way, if not in ours. If they are emerging at last, whether to accuse us, to demand a new respect and consideration, or to tell us their own stories, it is certainly none too early. The tragedy might rather be that it is, perhaps, too late.