Tom Thompson - correspondence with Judith Wright and related papers, 1995-1997

MLMSS 8652

fonds

1995-1997

423664

0.05 metres of textual material (1 folder)

Judith Wright was born in New England, in regional New South Wales, and came to Brisbane as a young woman. She worked as a statistician at the University of Queensland while she wrote the first of the poems that were to make her famous, among them “Bullocky” and “The Moving Image”. In Brisbane she met 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.

During the 1950s and ’60s Judith’s fame as a poet grew, although she also wrote children’s stories, books of criticism, and Generations Of Men, a novel about her grandparents who were early settlers in Queensland’s Dawson Valley. Her deep love of the Australian landscape, and her growing distress at the devastation of that landscape by white Australians, led her in the mid-sixties to help form the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, an early and powerful conservation group. The battles to save such places as Cooloolah, Fraser Island, and the Great Barrier Reef radicalised her, and after Jack’s death she increasingly threw herself into active environmental work, which continued until the last decade of her life.

Along with her deep awareness of environmental problems came a new understanding of the terrible wrongs inflicted on the Aboriginal people. In 1975 Judith moved south, to Braidwood in New South Wales, and soon after she and Nugget Coombs helped form the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, an organisation dedicated to helping spread the word about the need for land rights and a treaty among white Australians. Judith continued to fight both for the environment and for Aboriginal land rights until her death in June 2000, at the age of 85.

Reference:
http://www.judithwrightcentre.com/01_cms/details.asp?ID=66 (accessed 13/08/2012)

Correspondence, 1995-1997, between publisher Tom Thompson of ETT (Editions Tom Thompson) Watsons Bay, Sydney, relating to the publication of 'Tales of a Great-Aunt: a Memoir' (published by ETT Imprint in 1998). Also includes typescript manuscripts of chapters of 'Horses' and 'Trees and Gullies' and typescript and galleys of 'Tales of a Great-Aunt'.

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