10. Judith Wright: from The Moving Image to Fourth Quarter

Judith Wright published eleven volumes of poetry; The Moving Image (1946) was the first, appearing when she was thirty one.  It’s an astonishing collection, mature in its voice and assured in its methods, both personal and social in subject matter and the outlook expressed, or offered as sharing-points by the writer to her readers.  If I had to nominate the most notable feature of the book, I would say that it is the writer’s certainty that her viewpoints will be available, accessible, to her readers; this requires confidence, certainty in the language being used, and this comes most easily to people sure in their social class.  Wright came from a family that had been adventurous in Australian settlement, and even, occasionally, successful.  In an earlier essay in this series (‘Judith Wright: the basis of our nation? The Generations of Men (1959) and its themes reconsidered in The Cry for the Dead (1981)’, I referred to the way in which Wright described her family’s pioneering in New South Wales and Queensland, then, twenty years later, revised what she’d previously said in order to do justice to the aboriginal people’s experiences of the same happenings.  This was an extraordinary revision of her family’s story. [read more]