Judith Wright's Poetry and The Turn To The Post-Pastoral: Terry Gifford
Judith Wright's Poetry and The Turn To The Post-Pastoral: Terry Gifford
Judith Wright's Poetry and The Turn To The Post-Pastoral: Terry Gifford
to the Post-Pastoral
TERRY GIFFORD
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After Kohn’s analysis the poem begins to read as an anti-pastoral poem, in the
tradition of poetry that seeks to act as a corrective to the idealisation of the
pastoral, such as Stephen Duck’s response to Pope in The Thresher’s Labour (1736)
in which he points out, in Pope’s own poetic form, that some people have paid
a price for that ‘rich Industry’ in hard physical labour: ‘In briny Streams our
Sweat descends apace, / Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face’. Three
years later, of course, Mary Collier corrected Duck’s anti-pastoral by pointing
out that another section of the working population had been omitted from
Duck’s account when she published her own poem, The Woman’s Labour: An
Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck (1739). The earnest bitterness of some anti-pastoral
poetry propels irony into sarcasm, for example in the case of George Crabbe’s
lines from The Village (1783): ‘Can poets sooth you, when you pine for bread, /
by winding myrtles round your ruin’d shed?’ In ‘Bullocky’ Judith Wright’s anti-
pastoral irony is so subtle that it can be mistaken for pastoral by readers who
need a vision of Australia as a Promised Land. But even the term ‘anti-pastoral’
seems inadequate for a poem that is more complex in recognising that need, at
the same time as denying it. The poem is not a straightforward corrective since
it is more ambivalent towards the human capacities for adaptation and dream,
as is so much of Wright’s poetry. ‘Ambivalent’ is a word that commentators on
Wright’s poetry frequently find themselves using. This is surely derived from
Wright’s deep sense of settlement as invasion: ‘those two strands—the love of
the land we have invaded, and the guilt of the invasion—have become part of
me’ (Wright, Born of the Conquerors 30). Perhaps this is where we need a term
such as ‘post-pastoral’.
The American ecocritics Leo Marx and Lawrence Buell might argue that such
a term is unnecessary due to the adaptive abilities of the pastoral mode itself.
Marx has argued that ‘the wholly new conception of the precariousness of our
relations with nature is bound to bring forth new versions of pastoral’ (Marx,
‘Does Pastoralism’ 222). Buell has suggested that American pastoral has persisted
beyond ‘the specific set of obsolescent conventions’ (‘American Pastoral’ 23)
because, as he put it in a later coinage, it is ‘more strategised than mystified’
(Environmental Imagination 44). Recognising that ‘pastoral’s ideological valance
has become increasingly complicated’, Buell believes that the ‘US pastoral
imagination can embed or prepare the way for ecocentric thinking’ (The Future
145). Both critics point to the recent resurgence of American nature writing as
the current extension of the US pastoral tradition. From a British perspective,
however, Leavis’s attack on the Georgian nature poets in New Bearings in English
Poetry (1932), together with Raymond Williams’ landmark book The Country and
The City (1975), have rendered ‘pastoral’ a pejorative term, as, indeed, it is used
by Jenny Kohn in her phrase ‘the pastoral past’. Leo Marx’s potentially useful
attempt to separate ‘complex’ from ‘sentimental’ pastoral has been ignored as
much in the UK as it has by his fellow American critics of pastoral literature (The
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Machine 32). To deal with texts that Marx might have referred to as ‘complex
pastoral’ I offered the term ‘post-pastoral’ in 1994 to indicate that some texts
could escape the closed circuit of the idealised pastoral or the corrective anti-
pastoral (Gifford, ‘Gods of Mud’ 134). This new term offered to the American
belief in an adaptive pastoral continuity a set of provisional criteria (the six
questions above) by which to distinguish texts that lapsed back into a pastoral
of the past and those that problematised their engagement with land.
I would now like to consider whether Judith Wright’s poem ‘The Eucalypt and
the National Character’ engages with questions one, three and six in particular
of my definition of the post-pastoral. Such a mode of approaching the poem may
provide not only a route of elucidation of the poem’s nuances, but also require
an alert evaluation of some of its strengths and weaknesses. Jenny Kohn has
indicated that Wright herself might have hoped that readers could distinguish
pastoral and post-pastoral qualities in her poems. Do her poems celebrate ‘a
simple valorising of the pastoral past’ in land, or is land suggested to be an
uneasy site of dispute as a result of a history of invasion? Indeed, might the
subtle play of a single poem express the tensions between these two rather
starkly stated positions? In this case might the eucalypt tree be celebrated, for
subtle qualities we would do well to note, without being simply idealised for
nationalistic purposes? Can a tree represent a national identity?
Since Wright’s poem has its origins in the international context of a UNESCO
conference, and also because I will argue that the poem has global implications
for our environmental crisis, it may be worth noting the tendency for colonialists
to seek a new national identity in a tree: Canadians in the maple leaf, New
Zealanders in the tree fern. This may represent a colonial duplication of the
‘naturalisation’ of desired national characteristics in the home country. In Britain
the oak tree has long been associated with national identity. The poet Geoffrey
Grigson has pointed out that ‘anciently pre-eminent among European trees, the
Oak was sacred, sacredness reinforcing its strength, and strength reinforcing its
sacredness’ (250). He mentions a high point of oak veneration in Britain as the
creation of a Royal Oak by Charles II in 1660 and its association with national
character in the song ‘Hearts of Oak’ that dates from before the Napoleonic War.
More recently British nature writer Richard Mabey has collected many examples
of the important role of the oak in the folklore of Britain in his monumental
Flora Britannica (72-77).
Perhaps of more significance to Wright’s poem, the importance of individual
trees to the mental and emotional health of those who have a relationship with
them has a long literature of endorsement in Britain. One of the most perceptive
is by Fraser Harrison who writes of personally living with a ‘conker tree’ and
elaborates upon the idea that ‘it is impossible not to sense a close correspondence
between our family household and the vegetable life of the chestnut’ (29). Most
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to the character of the human species for a contemporary reader of the poem.
The climate variations currently being experienced by Australia might be seen
as typical of those to be experienced by the rest of our species in the decades
to come. Perhaps we need to learn from the eucalypt an ‘asymmetrical artistry’,
as the penultimate line suggests, in our developing a [inter]national character
in order to turn from being capitalist crooks to planetary survivors. Judith
Wright’s poem offers several crucial lessons from the eucalypt that might be
suggested by that combination of ‘artist’ and ‘asymmetry’: a non-Western way
of knowing that is beyond dualisms; a pattern of understanding climactic change
that is other than the four European seasons; a ‘tough care’ and an ‘economical
tenderness’; an artist’s way of intuiting knowledge; a flexible bending of values
towards the changing conditions (‘What is the good life?’). The final possibility
is that poetry itself, as in the final challenge of this poem, might bring the writer
and the reader closer, in Wright’s words, to ‘know ourselves no longer exiles,
but at home in a proper sense of the term’ (Preoccupations 123).
Of course, the nature of our global ‘home’ has changed as a result of climate
change, and if the Australian experience of it is to be regarded as typical,
Wright’s poem about national character may have, as I have suggested, more
prescience than she could know. Libby Robin concludes her book How a
Continent Created a Nation with an observation that could be a commentary on
the potential international contribution of Wright’s poem:
Why has Australia’s exceptional nature figured only trivially in the
rhetoric of nationhood? While difference and distinctiveness are forged
‘culturally’, through Australian sporting prowess and war efforts, the
potential for Australia’s environmental difference to contribute seriously
to global knowledge remains unrealised (215).
I owe to Kate Rigby the observation that the ‘Australian exceptionalism’ of the
eucalypt, in being able to deal with unexpected climatic conditions, is what
is going to be needed by the rest of the world in the coming decades. Indeed,
the second stanza of Wright’s poem might now be heard as a vocalization of
tree (in Val Plumwood’s terms); as what humans might learn from a tree; as a
celebration of Aboriginal living with Australian land; and as a challenge to the
contemporary international reader of the poem:
Ready for any catastrophe, every extreme,
she leaves herself plenty of margin. Nothing is stiff,
symmetrical, indispensable. Everything bends
whip-supple, pivoting, loose, with a minimal mass.
She can wait grimly for months to break into flower
or bloom willingly bloom in a day when the weather is right.
Meagre, careless, indifferent? With the toughest care,
the most economical tenderness, she provides for seed and egg.
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Works Cited
Brady, Veronica. ‘What are Writers for in a Destitute Time? Judith Wright and
the Search for Australia.’ Global-Local 3 (2007). 12-18.
Buell, Lawrence. ‘American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised.’ American Literary
History 1.1 (1989). 1-29.
—. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
—. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Gifford, Terry. ‘Gods of Mud: Hughes and the Post-Pastoral.’ The Challenge of
Ted Hughes. Ed. Keith Sagar. London: Macmillan, 1994. 129-141.
—. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999.
Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. London: Readers Union, 1958.
Hamilton, Ian. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. Oxford: OUP,
1994.
Harrison, Fraser. The Living Landscape. London: Pluto, 1986.
Kohn, Judith. ‘Longing to Belong: Judith Wright’s Poetics of Place.’ Colloquy 12
(2006). <www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue12/kohn.pdf> Accessed 4 May
2010.
Mabey, Richard. Beechcombings. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007.
—. Flora Britannica. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996.
Marx, Leo. ‘Does Pastoralism Have a Future?’ The Pastoral Landscape. Ed. J.
Dixon Hunt. Hanover: UP of New England, 1992. 209-25.
—. The Machine in the Garden. New York: OUP, 1964.
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