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Unsettling sight: Judith Wright's journey into history and ecology on Mt Tamborine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2015

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Abstract

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.

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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2015 

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References

Endnotes

1 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.

3 Wright, Judith, Collected poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), p. 29.Google Scholar

4 Hartman, Geoffrey H., Beyond formalism: Literary essays 1958–1970 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 228.Google Scholar

5 Wright, , Collected poems, pp. 3940Google Scholar

6 Wright, quoted in Clark, Gary, ‘The two threads of a life: Judith Wright, the environment and Aboriginality’, Antipodes (December 2006), 156.Google Scholar

7 Wright, , Collected poems, pp. 140–1.Google Scholar

8 Clarke, Patricia and McKinney, Meredith (eds), With love and fury: Selected letters of Judith Wright (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), p. 276.Google Scholar

9 Cooke, Stuart, Speaking the earth's languages: A theory for Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), p. 41.Google Scholar

10 Wright, Collected poems, p. 176.

11 See Retallack, Joan, The poethical wager (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).Google Scholar

12 For example, see Wright, Judith, Because I was invited (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 170–1.Google Scholar

13 Wright, Because I was invited, p. 31.

14 Wright, Judith, Preoccupations in Australian poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), p.129.Google Scholar

15 Murray, Les, Translations from the natural world (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 21.Google Scholar

16 See Murray, Les and Wright, Judith, ‘Correspondence’, Southerly, 63 (1) (2003), 162–80.Google Scholar

17 Murray and Wright, ‘Correspondence’, 172.

18 Murray is most likely writing about the Superb Lyrebird, which, while relatively similar, has distinctive performative and physical characteristics to the Albert's.

19 Wright, Collected poems. p. 287

20 Harrison, Martin, Who wants to create Australia? Essays on peetry and ideas in contemporary Australia (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2004), p. 75.Google Scholar

21 Harrison, Who wants to create Australia? pp. 76–7.

22 Mead, Philip, Networked language: Culture & history in Australian poetry (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008), pp. 318–19.Google Scholar

23 Mead, Networked language, p. 320.

24 Wright, Collected poems, p. 300.

25 Wright, Collected poems, p. 308.

26 Wright, Collected poems, p. 354.

27 Clark, ‘The two threads of a life’, 158–9.

28 Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and philosophy: The revolution in modern science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1958]), p. 139.Google Scholar

29 Heisenberg, Physics and philosophy, p. 140.

30 Mead, Networked language, p. 328.