'Judith Wright was an Australia national treasure, In the Cry for the dead, she creates a harrowing evocation of the difficulties faced by the early settlers and the suffering of Australia's Indigenous people.' (Publication summary)
With Love and Fury : Selected Letters of Judith Wright
Patricia Clarke
(editor),
Meredith McKinney
(editor),
Canberra
:
National Library of Australia
,
2006
Z1331209
2006
selected work
correspondence
Judith Wright, the great Australian poet, writer, environmentalist and activist for Aboriginal rights, was a prolific letter writer throughout her long life. Judith's first surviving letter, written as a girl of 10, is already vibrant with both the pleasure in language and the intense responsiveness to the natural world that formed the core of her being and dictated the directions of her life. The collection of letters presented in With Love and Fury serves to remind us of Judith's deep engagement with life, and of her love of the world (and of friends) and the fine fury that lead her to battle so courageously on the world's behalf - those sides of the single passion that shaped both her poetry and her life. (Publisher's website)
Sue King-Smith says: 'There are three main spectres in Wright's poetry that this article addresses. The first relates to the loss and separation Wright experienced when she became aware of the history of the land she had felt a profound sense of identification with since early childhood ... The second spectre relates to the traces of Aboriginal massacres and dispossessions. And the third is the spectre of the indigenous landscape that existed prior to British occupation, with a substantial number of indigenous species of flora and fauna now extinct.
'This article will argue that these spectres are intimately linked in Wright's writing and that her poetic and private relationships with the Australian landscape are constantly mediated by the need to acknowledge these ghosts.' (pp.117-118)
