Judith Wright

Who is Judith Wright?

Judith Wright is an Australian poet, critic, and short story writer born in New England. Her writing and poetry explores the issues of social identity and more specifically, women's roles in society.

• environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights.
• She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems.
• When Wright was in her 20s, she started to became progressively deaf.
• She lectured part-time at various Australian universities.
• Wright started to publish poems in the late 1930s in literary journals.
• She gained a reputation as a whole new voice in literature with
• a distinctly female perspective

-Wright's poetry was inspired by the various regions in which she lived: the New England, New South Wales, the subtropical rainforests of Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, and the plains of the southern highlands near Braidwood.

-She fought to conserve the Great Barrier Reef, when its ecology was threatened by oil drilling, and campaigned against sand mining.

-Judith continued to fight both for the environment and for Aboriginal land rights until her death in June 2000, at the age of 85.

-Judith has been called “the conscience of the nation”, for her early, ongoing and passionate commitment to Australia’s environment and the Aboriginal people.

-Nevertheless, it is for her poetry that she is best remembered

This is not I. I had no body once-

only what served my need to laugh and run

and stare at stars and tentatively dance

on the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun.

Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was gone

on my own currents, quicksilver, thistledown.

Can I be trapped at last in that soft face?

I stare at you in fear, dark brimming eyes.

Why do you watch me with that immoderate plea-

'Look under these curled lashes, recognize

that you were always here; know me-be me.'

Smooth once-hermaphrodite shoulders, too tenderly

your long slope runs, above those sudden shy

curves furred with light that spring below your space.

No, I have been betrayed. If I had known

that this girl waited between a year and a year,

I'd not have chosen her bough to dance upon.

Betrayed, by that little darkness here, and here

this swelling softness and that frightened stare

from eyes I will not answer; shut out here

from my own self, by its new body's grace-

for I am betrayed by someone lovely. Yes,

I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl.

Your lips in the mirror tremble as I refuse

to know or claim you. Let me go-let me be gone.

You are half of some other who may never come.

Why should I tend you? You are not my own;

you seek that other-he will be your home.

Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted with tears;

I lean to your kiss. I must serve you; I will obey.

Some day we may love. I may miss your going, some day,

though I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years.

Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too,

if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.

Naked Girl and Mirror

Naked Girl and Mirror is one of Judith’s most famous poems.

-The poem examines a girls changing appearance as she matures into a woman. The poem connects physical and mental changes.

-She feel her attitude and actions must also change.

-She shows both the inner child and the matured young lady's thoughts and perspectives

The poem is contrast the points of views between inner child and the emerging woman.

-As she looks in the mirror she feels like a stranger to herself with a notion of betrayal evident throughout the poem, she suffers loss of identity when her sexual maturity brings her desire for unity with a man.

-The change that puberty imbibes is seen in her fear of adolescence and what lies beyond that.

-She is not only revealing her naked body in the mirror, but also her soul.

-Her inner child cannot yet admit in process of becoming a woman that she must give up her sense of self being and can no longer indulge in the freedoms she once enjoyed as a child, without the worries of social identity.

Naked Girl and Mirror

By Judith Wright