Australia 1970 Reflections

Many of Judith Wright’s later poems continue these themes of dispossession and environmental

waste. Her summary of the state of the nation, ‘Australia 1970’ (17), is a scathing condemnation of

European land usage and destructive agricultural and industrial practices. She turns the dream of the

sunburnt country into a nightmare vision of an ecological wasteland close to death:

Die like the tigersnake

that hisses such pure hatred from its pain
as fills the killer's dreams
with fear like suicide's invading stain.
Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood
that gaps the dozer-blade.
I see your living soil ebb with the tree
to naked poverty.

Wright feels close to the dying land, exhibiting an empathy unusual for white poets of her generation,

and uses the technique of naming animals, insects and plants that co-exist in this bleak environment;

the eaglehawk, the tigersnake, the ironwood, soldier-ants, scorpions and the “furious animal”.

Her country is fighting back against its exploitation, the elements and animals combining to drive out

those who would abuse the earth. Wright takes responsibility for her role as a white person in this

country; she is part of the “we are conquerors and self-poisoners”, rather than blaming the problem

on some distant ‘they’. She celebrates and lists the hardships which lead colonists to question

whether or not this land can ever be truly conquered:

I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust,

the drying creek, the furious animal,
that they oppose us still;
that we are ruined by the thing we kill.
Many of Wright’s more recent poems have concentrated both on form, and on studies of minute
detail of the features of the country she sees around her.

https://sites.google.com/site/poetrypoliticsplace/4-poets-witnesses/4-3-2-wright-environment