Judith Wright’s fine evocation of a vanished Australia, first published in 1946, gives full rein to her intense feeling for landscape and for the past of her people. There is decay here and desolation, and the sense of a heritage under siege, conveyed through images of winter and darkness and forgetfulness, but there is also resilience and a note of defiance. ‘No one is listening’ – this reflects Judith Wright’s fear that no one was paying attention to those issues that concerned her all her life: the wrongs of the colonial past, Aboriginal land rights, the environment. But of course, as the poem proves, someone was listening, and now the stories that went walking in her sleep are passed on to walk in ours too.
‘that tableland’: this refers to Judith’s home country, a region of the Great Dividing Range in northern New South Wales where she was brought up.
‘medlar’: a kind of tree yielding an edible fruit, usually eaten when bletted, i.e. in a softened state beyond ripeness.
‘Droving that year’: this refers to cattle droving, which was central to Judith’s family life. The first anecdote concerns a time of drought, when sixty cattle were lost at a river crossing and a sulky – a kind of horse-drawn cart – came into camp carrying a dead driver with flies announcing the death.
‘Charleville’: a town in Queensland.
‘the Hunter’: a river in New South Wales.
‘McIntyre’: the MacIntyre river in Queensland.
‘Bogongs’: an area of the high country of Victoria; this time the hazard is snow, and more cattle perish in blizzards: ‘we brought them down, what aren’t there yet’.
Tamworth: a city in northern New South Wales.
Thunderbolt: the name of a famous bushranger. The drover tips him off that troopers are on his tail.
‘True or not’: the factual accuracy of the anecdotes that the old man produces like a conjuror shuffling cards is less important to the poet than what he represents: the lore of her people, their ancient storytelling tradition.
South Of My Days
South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite –
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.
O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer
will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler-roses,
thrust its hot face in here to tell another yarn –
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy years are hived in him like old honey.
Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand –
cruel to keep them alive – and the river was dust.
Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we
brought them down, what aren’t there yet. Or driving for Cobb’s on the run
up from Tamworth – Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn’t wait long, Fred,
not if I was you. The troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny,
him on his big black horse.
Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards.
True or not, it’s all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days’ circle
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.
Judith Wright
David Sutton 