Judith Wright was born on 31 May 1915 at Thalgarrah Station, near Armidale in New South Wales. Between 1934 and 1936 she attended the University of Sydney, and early in her career had poems published in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bulletin and Meanjin Papers. Her writing career then spanned 40 years until her death on 25 June 2000. Wright was politically active and passionately committed to conservation. Her political acts include returning her Honorary Doctorate of Letters to the University of Queensland after Joh Bjelke-Petersen was also awarded one. She served as president for the Wildlife Preservation Society and was also active in the Aboriginal rights movement. She was a keen student of philosophy and was heavily influenced by Carl Jung.
Wright is probably one of the few Australian poets who is truly a household name. Her most popular poems, “Bullocky” and “South of My Days”, both dealing with nationalist origins and identity. have been read widely, particularly through school curricula. “Woman to Man” is a similarly famous poem about feminine sensuality. The central ideas to Wright's work are nature, love, the imagination and language. These themes are remarkably consistent throughout her entire oeuvre. In her work she continually explored the human relationship with nature.
Her first volume of poetry, The Moving Image, was published by Meanjin Press in Melbourne in 1946. The Moving Image was written during the realities of war, and placed an emphasis on personal vulnerability and the disintegration of traditional values. In this volume she expresses a specifically Australian experience of time, death and evil, yet remains optimistic about the direction of the human race. The Moving Image begins her fascination with the concept of continuity. In this instance, the continuity relates to humanity: the cycle of birth and death, generations of family, and the continuity of myth and spirituality. There is also what was to become Wright's trademark emphasis on language and its use in communicating reality.
Woman to Man followed in 1949, published in Sydney by Angus and Robertson. This volume celebrates heterosexual love and procreation, and also takes up Wright's themes of continuity and cycles, and the relationship between men, women and nature. Her symbolism in this and other volumes is simple and direct. Wright produced several more volumes of poetry, including Birds: Poems (1962), Fourth Quarter and other Poems (1976) and Phantom Dwelling (1985). Students are directed to the Austlit database for a full list of Wright's publications.
As well as a large corpus of poetry, Wright has also written children's books, short stories, and broadcast for the ABC. Her most notable prose is The Generations of Men (1959), a pioneering saga of her family, who can be traced back to the original settlement of the Hunter Valley. Wright's literary criticism remains relevant; Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965) continues to be used as a resource in universities.