BIRDS -JUDITH WRIGHT

Judith Arundell Wright 31My 1915- 27June 2000 Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.. born in Armidale, New South Wales the eldest child of Phillip Wright and his first wife Ethel, but spent most of her formative years in Brisbane and Sydney. After graduating, Wright studied philosophy, English, Psychology and history at the University of Sydney.

Judith Wright was a Queensland resident for over thirty years and came to Brisbane as a young woman In Brisbane she met and fell in love with philosopher Jack McKinney, and in 1945 they bought a tiny cottage on Mount Tamborine. They later moved to a nearby house which they named “Calanthe”, after a white orchid which blooms on the mountain at Christmas time. They shared twenty happy years together on Tamborine, until Jack’s death in 1966.

Judith Wright has been called “the conscience of the nation”, for her early, ongoing and passionate commitment to Australia’s environment and the Aboriginal people. Wright's first book of poetry, The Moving Image, was published in 1946 while she was working at the University of Queensland as a research officer. At this time she also worked with Clem Christesen on the literary magazine Meanjin. She was the second Australian to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, in 1992. She started to lose her hearing in her mid-20s, and became completely deaf by 1992

Judith Wright was the author of several collections of poetry, including The Moving Image, Woman to Man, The Gateway, The Two Fires, Birds, The Other Half, Magpies, Shadow and much much more. She was a lover of nature too. She deals with the relationship between settlers, Indigenous Australians and the bush, among other themes. Her images characteristically draw from the Australian flora and fauna. Her poems have been translated into Italian, Japanese and Russian.

Awards and recognition In 2003, the National Library of Australia published an expanded edition of Wright's collection titled Birds. 1994 - Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Poetry Award for Collected Poems. The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley is named after her. Wright died in canberra on 26th june 2000, aged 85.

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