REMEMBERING JUDITH WRIGHT.

The ancient war between poetry and philosophy can be traced back to classical Greece. In the Republic, Plato writes disparagingly of poetry as corrupting, swaying the populace by base appeal to the passions rather than to reason, which he considered the purest and most valuable element in human thought and life. Thus begins the three-millennia old tradition of splitting and opposing reason and nature, reason and emotion, philosophy and poetry, where poetry represents, as Judith tells us, `the voice of feeling and empathy'. Correspondingly, we see in this rationalist tradition the development of a narrow concept of reason and philosophy -- as Judith notes, one increasingly reduced to `a linguistic and solipsistic area of disputation', unable to provide reconciliation and explanation, and divorced from `any realm of direct human experience'. This ancient split empowering destructive and disengaged forms of knowledge and rationality, dissociated from heartfelt practices of care, has much to do with our present predicament in postmodernity and the global market.

Judith Wright's life and work helped to show how false these rationalist oppositions are. Judith wrote passionate poetry that expressed sophisticated philosophical ideas as well as intense experience of and love for living nature. In an age when both philosophy and poetry are academicised, she integrated her poetry with the key social concerns of the age and her philosophy with the way she lived her life, allowing each most admirably to inform the other. In the persona of the writer, she positioned herself as critic and healer of the intellectual culture that fragments knowledge and wisdom into tiny territories whose guardians jealously defend their piece of turf from intruders, to the detriment of any understanding of the whole. Judith's integrative life practice has been in many of these respects a model for me, as I am sure it has for many other people.

I got to know Judith in general terms by letter and telephone in mid-seventies exchanges on activist issues related to forests well before I met her in the flesh. I remember her as generous of her time and effort in this as well as so many other progressive causes. As a national literary figure, she was a key initiator and spokesperson on many important environmental and indigenous causes right across the country, working with national organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, as well as local groups. She was a true activist who used her fame and whatever power it brought her in the best possible way, to rouse others in support of key issues and causes.

A few years later, when she moved to 'Edge', her bush home in the Braidwood district, our acquaintance deepened. At this stage I was teaching and writing in environmental philosophy at Macquarie University. Judith would quiz me closely about my work in this area, among other things. She had a powerful and fiery sense of the injustice of white society towards Aboriginal people, and she did not confine her anger to abstract, impersonal targets. She believed that white environmentalists needed to be made much more aware of Aboriginal entitlements and issues. For this reason, she was particularly incensed about the environmental community's continued use of concepts of wilderness and nature which she thought were tinged by racism. She was never reluctant to say what she thought about these things even if her comments could give offence. Her anger was part of her passion for justice. Her ideals were demanding of herself and others and were uncompromised by the accommodating `realism' of the political scene in the mean, competitive, work-obsessed society ours has increasingly become.

Judith must be recognised as herself a pioneer thinker in environmental philosophy in this country, `helping to clear a track to unknown water' unknown, that is, to the conquerors. From the fifties onwards she wrote poetry and essays that helped at the difficult early stages to get across the new conservation message that this land is not just ours to exploit for our own ends, but belongs also -- indeed primarily -- to the Others who were here before us. Her philosophical poetry gives us a sense of the world as dialogical partner, and of the complexity and poignancy of each of the earth's lives. Her work expresses a very direct challenge to the human-centredness and self-enclosure that underpins so much of Western society. Judith's thought combined powerful rejection of the disaster of our colonial land culture and its projects of conquest with powerful insights into the sacred aspects of our experience of the natural world that emerge forcefully in so much of her poetry, (for example in her poem `Night Herons').

I especially loved her bird poetry, and one of my most treasured gifts from Judith is an autographed copy of her 1962 volume Birds, in which the poem `Night Herons' appears. I admired not only the poetry but also the wonderfully deep relationships with and knowledge of wild creatures, especially birds, on which they were based. I remember Judith's delight in the birds in her daughter Meredith's garden at 'Yuin', where I envied her intimacy with the Grey Shrike Thrush, a bird of remarkable powers I have always wanted to know better. I remember her commitment to the environment -- Judith at a party recycling a little tray of fibreglass packaging while everyone else ate off throwaway cardboard plates. I remember her disgust at my daffodils, which she considered an example of colonial sensibility. Most of all I remember, and commend to you, Judith's passionate impulse to lead a just and reflective life, to fuse that life with her ideals, to fuse thought with feeling in her poetic philosophy. I know her spirit lives on in her work, in all the movements and ideas she fostered, and in the many wonderful places she fought to save.