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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (28 June) . . Page.. 2107 ..
MR STANHOPE
(continuing):Judith Wright's poems are proclaimed for their lyric beauty, brilliant craftsmanship and emotional honesty. Her poetry provides an insight into the incredible woman that she was. I will read a short paragraph from The Oxford History of Australian Literature about her impact in Australia. It says this:
Judith Wright's first book, The Moving Image (1946) was a major event in modern Australian poetry: it won immediate recognition and is probably the most often reprinted single volume of Australian poems in the last thirty years. It had the same kind of impact that the paintings of Nolan, Boyd and others had in the art world. It presented the facts of Australia-its past, convict and Aboriginal, its war time and post war present, and thoughts about its future-in an immediately recognisable way. Wright had clearly read and assimilated influences from Eliot, Pound, Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas. She was able to bring fairly modern techniques to bear on her Australian subject matter in the same way that the painters were able to assimilate various overseas techniques and influences and apply them for their own purposes. She also had the advantage, in writing about Australia, its landscape and its past, of being able to write at one and the same time about her own pioneering family which had such a close relationship with and a sense of responsibility for the land.
Judith Wright was a long-time resident of Braidwood and in recent years was a not infrequent visitor to Canberra. She was a contributor to Canberra's life. I was always pleased to see that she was a reasonably frequent contributor of letters to the editor of the Canberra Times. Many of us had come to regard Judith Wright as not just the great Australian that she was but as one of us here in Canberra and in this region. I often drew some quiet pride at the fact that Judith Wright had chosen to spend the last two decades of her life amongst us here in Canberra. Perhaps some of that quiet comfort that I received bore a relationship to the fact that one of my earliest memories of my time at primary school was being asked to learn to recite some of Judith Wright's early poetry. The one that springs to mind that perhaps most of us here remember was The Bullocky, perhaps Judith Wright's most famous poem. I am not sure whether it deserves to be her most famous, but I think it was regarded as such. I have distinct memories of being required to learn it by heart when I was at primary school. I will conclude my short contribution to this debate with one stanza from The Bullocky which I think is very relevant here today:
Oh, 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.
MR MOORE
(Minister for Health and Community Care): For 40 years I have enjoyed, studied and taught the poetry of Judith Wright, so I stand today to add my voice to express the regret at her passing. I cannot think of a better way of doing it than quoting two of her poems. The first one I would like to quote is The Company of Lovers:We meet and part now over all the world;
we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night, forget
the night in our brief happiness, silently.
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