Judith Wright and Emily Carr: Gendered Colonial Modernity 9781350188204, 9781350188228, 9781350188211

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

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Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Professorial Fellow, Norwegian Study Centre, University of York; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/ American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard Chicago and the Making of American Modernism, Michelle E. Moore Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron

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Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Late Modernism and the English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman Modernist Lives, Claire Battershill The Politics of 1930s British Literature, Natasha Periyan Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and the Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks than Kicks’, John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism, Jonas Kurlberg Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology, Joshua Powell Samuel Beckett in Confinement, James Little Katherine Mansfield: New Directions, Edited by Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson Modernist Wastes, Caroline Knighton The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence, Elliott Morsia Samuel Beckett and the Second World War, William Davies Upcoming Titles Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr Gendered Colonial Modernity Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones, 2021 Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii–xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3501-8820-4 978-1-3501-8821-1 978-1-3501-8828-0

Series: Historicizing Modernism Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To my mother and father For their song and story A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams . . . . . . yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. (John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance)

Anne ∼ To the memory of my parents, Bessie and Laurie Jones, who loved reading and encouraged me to do the same. Dorothy

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

x xii xiii 1

1

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

15

2

The Artist as a Young Colonial Girl

29

3

Death of the Mother

45

4

The Voyage Out

61

5

Many Roads Meet Here

79

6

Jack McKinney: The Equal Heart and Mind

97

7

Darkness

115

8

Lawren Harris: Where the Soul Penetrates

131

9

Shadow Sisters: Kath and Sophie

143

10 Late Love, Late Style

161

Conclusion: The Dream is the Truth

185

Epilogue: Thinking Back Through Our Mothers

193

Notes Works Cited Index

241

201 255

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List of Illustrations 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10

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12 13

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Emily Carr, Sunshine and Tumult, 1939, oil on paper, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Bequest of H.S. Southam, CMG, L.L.D, 1966. Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio with One of Her Paintings Behind Her, 1939, negative, 6.8 × 6.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft, VAG 2014.55.1 a–b. Emily Carr, Untitled (Self-portrait), 1924–25, oil on paperboard, 39.4 × 44.9 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.50. Emily Carr, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935, oil on canvas, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.15. Emily Carr, The Little Pine, 1931, oil on canvas, 112.0 × 68.8 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.14. Emily Carr, Totem Mother, Kitwancool, 1928, oil on canvas, 109.5 × 69.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.20. Emily Carr, Tree Trunk, 1931, oil on canvas, 129.1 × 56.3 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.2. Street Photographer, Judith Wright in Sydney, c. 1938, courtesy of Meredith McKinney. Emily Carr, Indian House Interior with Totems, 1912–13, oil on canvas, 89.6 × 130.6 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.8. Charles Blackman, The Family, c. 1955, Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Gift of Barbara  Blackman  2000. © Charles Blackman/ Copyright Agency, 2020. Emily Carr, Untitled (Forest Interior, black, grey and white), c. 1930, oil on paper, 88.2 × 60.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.56. Emily Carr, Abstract Tree Forms, 1931–32, oil on paper, 61.1 × 91.1 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.54. Emily Carr, Cumshewa, 1912, watercolour over graphite on wove paper, mounted on cardboard, 52 × 75.5cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Photo: NGC.

List of Illustrations

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14 Emily Carr, Big Raven, 1931, oil on canvas, 87.0 × 114.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.11. 15 Emily Carr, Portrait of Sophie Frank, c. 1908, watercolour on paper, Collection of Jane Williams, image courtesy of Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. 16 S.F. Morley, Emily Carr and her caravan ‘The Elephant’, 1934, Image D-03844, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives. 17 Emily Carr, Cedar Sanctuary, 1942, oil on paper, 91.5 × 61.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.71. 18 Emily Carr, Among the Firs, c. 1931, oil on canvas, Collection of Glenbow, Calgary, Canada, 56.2.2. 19 Emily Carr, Lagoon at Albert Head, c. 1940, oil on paper, 51.5 × 72.5cm, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Thomas Gardiner Keir Bequest, 1944.005.003.

Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late nineteenth- to twentiethcentury literary modernism within its historical contexts. Historicizing Modernism therefore stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival materials) in developing monographs and edited collections on modernist literature. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and genetic criticism, documenting interrelated historical contexts and ideas, and exploring biographical information. To date, no book series has fully laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. While the series addresses itself to a range of key authors, it also highlights the importance of non-canonical writers with a view to establishing broader intellectual genealogies of modernism. Furthermore, while the series is weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone modernists whose writings are open to fresh historical exploration are also included. A key aim of the series is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. It is our intent that the series’ emphasis upon the contested selfdefinitions of modernist writers, thinkers, and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘modernism’ itself. Indeed, the concept of ‘historicizing’ is itself debated across its volumes, and the series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors hope that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

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Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making. We have travelled the world, much time spent in the dimly lit interiors of libraries, museums and art galleries, but time too spent in the glorious Autumn gardens and forests of Vancouver Island and a memorable ferry trip and seaplane flight across the island-studded waters of the Georgia Strait. We have eaten and drunk much good food and wine together; talked a lot, written a lot, disagreed very little. It has been a companionable adventure into the sometimes challenging but always rewarding work of co-authorship. We have many people to thank: First, our family, friends and colleagues who have given up asking when the book will appear, but who have always encouraged and supported what sometimes must have seemed a bizarre undertaking. Why on earth would you attempt to create a relationship between a poet and a painter who lived in countries ten thousand miles apart, whose creative output barely overlapped, and who never met? Why indeed. But our belief in its value has never faltered and neither has the enthusiastic support we have received from so many people and institutions. The list is long. We thank our School (of The Arts, English and Media) and Faculty (of Law, Humanities and The Arts) of the University of Wollongong. The names and structures have changed numerous times over the period we have been researching the book but their financial support for travel and publication expenses has been unerringly generous. We also thank the many libraries, galleries and museums who have opened their doors, shelves, stacks, boxes, cabinets and drawers to us and have kindly given us permission to reproduce visual and text material. They include The Vancouver Art Gallery; The Glenbow, Calgary; The Art Gallery of Greater Vancouver; The British Columbia Provincial Archives, Royal BC Museum, Victoria; The University of British Columbia Archives, UBC, Vancouver; The National Gallery of Canada, Toronto; The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (and Copyright Agency Ltd); The National Library of Australia, Canberra; and The Art Gallery of New South Wales. In particular we thank some individuals who have been unerringly helpful, generous and friendly: Danielle Curry, Vancouver Art Gallery; Stephen Topfer, The Art Gallery of Greater Vancouver; and Sharon Gallagher, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. xiii

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Acknowledgements

All third-party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book is done so on the basis of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research’ only in accordance with international copyright laws, and is not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners. We hereby acknowledge Harper Collins for permission to quote from Judith Wright’s Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994) and the University of British Columbia Press for permission to quote from Dear Nan: Letters of Emily Carr, Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms edited by Doreen Walker © University of British Columbia Press 1990 (All rights reserved by the Publisher). We also acknowledge the journals in which we published our early research on Judith Wright and Emily Carr, some of the content of which appears in the book. The journals include: Kunapipi, Mosaic, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Australian Studies, Southern Hemisphere Review (Japan) and Australian Literary Studies. Our heartfelt thanks go to the art galleries that so graciously accommodated our requests for permissions and images that allowed us to reproduce some of the colour and grandeur of Emily Carr’s work. The book would be so much less without them, in fact, unthinkable. Thank you to Trevor Mills, photographer of Emily Carr’s paintings held by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Special thanks from Dorothy to Aritha van Herk for her hospitality; ‘in particular for taking me to see the Emily Carr paintings in the Glenbow Library in Calgary and introducing me to the rare book librarians at the University of Calgary Library who gave me access to the library’s holding of early editions of Emily Carr’s books.’ From Anne – a special thank you to Judith Wright’s daughter, Meredith McKinney, who has always responded with such kindness and care to my queries and requests, and has shown interest in the project from its outing at the ‘Two Fires Festival’ in Braidwood, NSW. Thank you for taking me to see Edge and thank you for permission to quote from collections of Wright’s letters: With Love & Fury, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006) and The Equal Heart and Mind, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004). Finally, a special thank you to our colleague, Carmel Pass, who proof read and offered gentle critique. Thank you to our indexer, Tanya Izzard. Thank you to Ben Doyle, the commissioning editor, whose immediate interest in our book, untiring effort to accommodate our wishes and always prompt response to our queries is very much appreciated.

Acknowledgements

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We hope those who love Judith Wright’s poetry or Emily Carr’s painting and stories will find pleasure in the connections we have made between them; we hope those who have not heard of either or both will be inspired to read and look further. Go, litel bok, go . . . And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non miswryte the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. And red wherso thow be, or ells songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche!1

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Introduction

There’s an essential music still, a moon where no man’s landed, drawer of the heart and music of all our passion and our art.1 In this book we present a comparative portrait of two modern female artists – Australian poet Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871–1945). Both women were born into colonial worlds struggling to assert idiosyncratic national identity in the face of artistic, social and political ties that bound them alike to the mother country and a Eurocentric angle of vision. Malecentred groups like the Bulletin and Heidelberg School of the 1890s in Australia2 and the Group of Seven in the early twentieth century in Canada3 were influential in forging a national consciousness in each country. But both Wright and Carr, while participating in this creative process, challenged the dominant position of males in the fields of visual and verbal arts with such success that they became national cultural icons of the twentieth century. This book charts their respective battles for recognition of their art and vision by pointing up significant moments of similarity in the lives and work of the two women. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity is similar, primarily because they were white settler women, bent on forging artistic careers in a world that agitated against such choices. What is surprising is their shared interest in the conservation and appreciation of the natural environment and indigenous cultures, both of which not only inform but are integral to their art. Judith Wright and Emily Carr broke new ground not only for women, but for the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights4 that have shaped Australia and Canada of the twenty-first century. They also influenced the trajectory of artistic modernism in the ‘new world’. Judith Wright is one of the pre-eminent English-language poets of the twentieth century. Technically skilled and beautifully wrought, her poetry reflects upon the complex philosophical and political challenges of the twentieth 1

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

century – the diaspora and dispossession of peoples as a result of nineteenthcentury colonization and twentieth-century world wars, the threat of nuclear war, the environmental devastation created by rapid population growth and the indiscriminate use of new technologies. Wright meets these challenges with personal commitment and awareness of moral responsibility, and a belief in the importance of achieving a balance of intellect and feeling. Wright’s understanding of the world is complex but her poetry – characterized by emotional intensity, strong visual imagery and a personal voice – has immediate and lasting appeal. Wright’s literary reputation was initially established with the publication of her first volume of poetry, The Moving Image, in 1946 and reinforced by her second, Woman to Man, in 1949. Poems from these volumes were introduced into the Australian school curriculum and came to represent ‘Australian poetry’ for generations of school children. Wright would go on to produce numerous volumes of poetry, publishing her last volume of new poems, Phantom Dwelling, in 1985. She won the Robert Lee Frost Medallion in 1975, the Christopher Brennan Award in 1976 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1991. Her Collected Poems: 1942–1985 was published in 1994, winning the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Poetry Award for that year. A great public intellectual, Wright’s legacy can be found not only in her poetry, but also in the example of her untiring work for policy and social change documented in the published and unpublished archive of her correspondence, essays and historical/biographical writing. Here we can read the degree to which Wright’s identity was so utterly entangled in the natural world into which she was born that its degradation across the course of her lifetime became an open wound that poetry of itself could not assuage. Wright campaigned for the protection of Australian wildlife and against the wilful destruction of Fraser Island (southern Queensland) by sand mining and the Great Barrier Reef when threatened by plans to mine it for limestone and oil.5 But Wright’s relationship with the land of her birth and her associated sense of belonging were deeply troubled by her recognition of the damage done to indigenous peoples and culture by the actions of her colonial forefathers and mothers. Much of her life’s work was dedicated to righting the wrongs of the past through social, political and legal action. She championed the imperative need for a treaty between the Aboriginal nations and the settler invaders, and campaigned for Aboriginal land rights.6 Her politics are integral to her person and indeed, became more important than her art. In the latter years of her life, with energy depleted and burdened with the weight of moral obligation and a prophetic sense of urgency, Wright ceased writing poetry to dedicate herself to her causes. Replying to a

Introduction

3

letter from Pam Bell in March 1989, Wright affirms her belief that ‘poetry doesn’t compromise with power and influence’ but follows up with the confession that she herself is not writing poetry now, ‘since what I have to do is push my barrows, hoping that one at least will get unloaded in the right place, and very few people read poetry . . .’7 Here then Wright affirms the uncompromising nature of her poetic art – it ‘speaks truth to power’8 – but recognizes the pressing need to speak that truth to the majority of a population that does not read or understand poetry. Where Wright is an essentially moral being, the central force of Carr’s person and art is spiritual. Emily Carr was a painter of enormous courage and imagination. Her huge canvases of Canadian west coast forest shocked audiences of her day: the language of colour, light, movement and energy was so bold, powerful and unabashed. Her forests are stripped naked of any pretensions to old-world sentiment and style: they bare her self as much as they bare the wonder and beauty of the natural world. In Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist, Carr records the joy of her intensely affective relationship with ‘the beloved Earth’: Listen, this perhaps is the way to find that thing I long for: go into the woods alone and look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, lived ground . . . Feel this growth, the surging upward, this expansion, the pulsing life, all working with the same idea, the same urge to express the God in themselves – life, life, life, which is God . . . So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul, down among dark and silence, let your roots creep forth . . . take firm hold of the beloved Earth Mother. Push, push towards the light . . . Rejoice in your own soil, the place that nurtured you . . .9

Carr believed she had discovered an affinity between her own deeply felt connection to the natural world by which she was nourished and what she understood to be ‘the Indians” relationship to the land and the sacred in their art. On returning to Vancouver after years spent as a student of a European art tradition, Carr remarks that: I was as Canadian-born as the Indian but behind me were Old World heredity and ancestry as well as Canadian environment . . . I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce. The Indian caught first at the inner intensity of his subject, worked outward to the surfaces. His spiritual conception he buried deep in the wood he was about to carve . . . I learned a lot from the Indians . . .10

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Carr’s dedication over the course of her lifetime to the representation and thereby national recognition of the value of indigenous art (primarily totem poles, grave and house posts) supplanted a patronizing settler view of ‘Indian artefacts’ with an acknowledgement of Native art as culturally and aesthetically significant. Her ‘Indian-inspired’ paintings are emblematic of her commitment to what she saw as distinctive and integral to her personal world and important to the sacred relationship between human civilizations and the earth that sustains them. Carr admired and learned from First Nations art – and her testimony to its transformative power is evident throughout her writings as well as her painting. She was as well known, if not better known, in her day, for her writing. Publication of her memoir, Klee Wyck, won the Canadian Governor General’s award in 1941. In his introduction to the 1951 edition, Ira Dilworth (her friend and literary mentor of later life) writes: Emily Carr was a great painter, certainly one of the greatest women painters of any time. It has been said that for originality, versatility, driving creative power and strong, individual achievement she has few equals among modern artists . . . Emily Carr is now also recognized as a remarkable writer . . . there is in her writing the quality of immediacy, the ability, by means of descriptive words chosen with the greatest of accuracy, to carry the reader into the very heart of the experience she is describing . . . so swiftly as to give an impression almost of magic, of incantation.11

Klee Wyck was followed by many other volumes of stories that are in large part autobiographical – recording her impressions and reflections on Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Major collections of her paintings and drawings are held in Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia on permanent revolving exhibition. Yet, despite remarkable artistic achievement that garnered national and international recognition in their lifetimes, Carr and Wright railed against a common ‘problem’: the ‘problem’ of being a woman. Discovering as a university student in the 1930s that Australian literature ‘had been silently disdained’ in the Sydney English Department,12 Wright found herself ‘rebelling against the masculine order of things which ruled both the world and its future, the Australian journals and their choices in literature’.13 When, in her early twenties, she began sending poems to magazines, she simply signed ‘J. Wright’ because she feared ‘a female name would damn them from the start’.14 Criticized for editorial decisions she made in the compilation of the anthology, Poetry 1948, Wright explains:

Introduction

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That annual anthology . . . had included an unusual number of women poets and poems, and its reception by the reviewers had convinced me that, if feminism were to get underway in Australia, it would not be through poetry. Some reviews had almost suggested that I was undermining the established views of poetry in Australia, and should be thoroughly slapped down for so doing.15

Over forty years later, Wright confides to a friend: ‘Constantly reviewed along with Alec [Hope] and Les [Murray], I long for a decent women’s paper, but they alas, don’t exist here or elsewhere’.16 In 1993, she writes to another friend about an impending newspaper interview which will include discussion of her book of essays Going On Talking as well as her poetry: so I hope to be able to escape the trap of being a mere female poet for once. They do try to put women down, you know, and poets in particular, so I have to try to impress my intellectual achievements on them. Not that I have much to go on, but being a poet is really hard to take at times.17

Gender has also been a factor in the critical response to Wright’s choice of subject matter. In 1964 for example, Max Harris criticized Wright’s collection Woman to Man for its ‘highly personal concern with birth, sex, ecstasy, fear and feminism’.18 Male writers who undertook the process of defining national identity in their work tended to regard women participants in this endeavour as intruders. But, by confining themselves to appropriately feminine subjects, women were likely, on that account, to be dismissed as peripheral or insignificant. Vincent Buckley’s notorious comments on Judith Wright point to the problem: When she is content to be a woman, enduring the profound incidents of a woman’s life, she is able, paradoxically enough, to transcend her womanliness and be a very fine poet. When she attempts to be not a woman, but a bard, commentator or prophet, she becomes a bit of a shrew – which is the worst and most unwomanly of all things a woman can become.19

Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t, it seems impossible to win. As Wright comments acerbically over thirty years later: ‘Womanliness, whatever womanliness is, has to be transcended if a woman is to be regarded as a fine poet: nevertheless women must stick to the distaff and loom, out of the way of licensed bards, prophets and commentators’.20 Carr too struggled against gender-biased attitudes towards women artists and ‘women’s art’. Published posthumously in 1966 under the title of Hundreds and Thousands, her journal records the myriad cuts of this very personal battle. In the winter of 1927, anticipating her first meeting with the Canadian Group of

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Seven, Carr acknowledges the group of male artists as ‘very interesting and big and inspiring, so different from the foolish little artists filled with conceit that one usually meets,’ and declares her desire for ‘a share’. But she is also unsure how the men will react to her work, feeling that they will perhaps be ‘dissatisfied’.21 A day later she considers the difference gender makes, writing: ‘I wonder if these men feel, as I do, that there is a common chord struck between us. No, I don’t believe they feel so toward a woman.’22 Even when founding group member Lawren Harris acknowledges her as ‘one of us’ she responds with delight but also with self-doubt: Will they know what’s in me by those old Indian pictures, or will they feel disappointment and find me small and weak and fretful? Have the carps and frets and worries that have eaten into my soul, since I returned from Paris full of ambitions and then had to struggle out there alone, made me small and mean, poor and petty – bitter?23

Here Carr counts the cost of the gender struggle. She has stood alone not only because she is unconventional as an artist but also because she is a woman – a woman who painted in unwomanly fashion. It was only a decade before her birth that art critic Leon Légrange prescribed the form and scope of art best suited to the male and female sex respectively: Male genius has nothing to fear from female taste. Let men conceive of great architectural projects, monumental sculpture, and the most elevated forms of painting . . . In a word, let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art. Let women occupy themselves with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits, and miniatures.24

Even the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, an organization of professionally ambitious women artists established in Paris in 1881, did not move much beyond the feminine art prescribed by Légrange. The first president of the Union, Madame Leon Bertaux, called on women artists to create l’art féminin – an art intended to ‘console the heart, charm the mind and appeal to the eye’.25 Carr’s journal reveals the stress inherent in her choice to strive for an artistic greatness in scope and skill when such greatness was perceived to be masculine and the prerogative of men: it was a stress that contributed to periods of severe depression, and ultimately undermined her health. In October 1933 Carr rails against local painter Max Maynard’s prescriptive pedantry in his assessment of her art. She describes with disgust how Maynard picked on ‘footling unessentials’, and records his observation that ‘women can’t paint; that

Introduction

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faculty is the property of men only.’26 On viewing Carr’s work in 1930, Maynard had been ‘bowled over’, claiming he was ‘never so moved by paintings in my life’;27 and yet he could not account for Carr’s art within the realm of ‘women’s work’, hence Carr’s sarcastic addendum: ‘He is kind enough to make me an exception.’28 The dictum that ‘women can’t paint, women can’t write’ resounds in the mind of Virginia Woolf ’s female artist protagonist of To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel that formulates the thesis she will propound the following year in a series of lectures delivered to the women of Girton and Newnham colleges at the University of Cambridge. Published as A Room of One’s Own in 1929, the lecture material considers the surprising feat of the successful female artist who creates in spite of the conditions under which she struggles to survive. Considering why it was that in England in the time of Elizabeth I, ‘no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet,’ Woolf surmises that ‘imaginative work . . . is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground’, rather, she likens it to a spider’s web that is attached to life at all four corners. These webs, she continues,‘are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.’29 After delivering her finding that, Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. Women have always been poor . . . Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own,30

Woolf records her sense of the inadequacy of the proffered solution, and the likely failure of even the most privileged women to achieve something that seems, on the surface, so small: I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own.31

Wright and Carr could lay claim to rooms of their own – rooms understood as physical and mental spaces in which they could move with less restraint than many of their sisters; but the struggle to achieve this measure of freedom can be read in their letters, diaries, essays, stories, autobiographies and poetry. Released

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

into the world, the work of art might appear to glow with the light of singular completeness, but the shadow of that struggle to create is never fully cast off. It is our belief that emotional and intellectual understanding of a painting or a poem gains intensity and nuance the more we recognize that ‘suffering human being’ and value the life of the creative artist. This book then seeks to identify those points of attachment from which the web is spun and consider their residual or shaping trace within the oeuvre of each artist. The book follows a braided biographical trajectory that identifies significant markers in the lives of the two women as a means of illuminating correspondence in their art that is determined to a large extent by their gender and by the tension between mother country and colony, colony and nation. The women are located within their time and place, particularly in relation to contemporary attitudes towards women, indigenous peoples and the natural environment in Australia and Canada. The book is divided into ten chapters, beginning with a discussion of self-portraiture. Each chapter that follows takes as its focus a biographical marker like a colonial childhood, the death of their mothers, a relationship with an influential male figure or female friend, a significant journey. The poems and paintings discussed in each chapter are not chosen for their chronological fit, but rather to demonstrate and explore the impact of that moment. So for example, in the second chapter, ‘The Artist as a Young Colonial Girl’, Wright’s poetry and Carr’s paintings are not selected from juvenilia but are drawn from later work: Wright’s poem ‘Child and Wattle Tree’ was published in her second volume of poems, Woman to Man (1949) and Carr’s painting, The Little Pine is dated 1931.32 Both works of art represent the artists’ reflection on the spirit of childhood and the relationship of the young child to the natural world – a world specific to their land of birth, signified by the wattle of Australia and the pine of Canada. This is not evidence of a deliberate appeal to nationalism or a politics of regionalism, although there is something of that in both artists’ sense of their artistic mission (Carr more overtly than Wright). Rather, their signature use of native fauna is evidence of intense emotional connection to a local natural environment. It is their signature of artistic honesty, artistic integrity. The women are also located in relation to shifts in artistic and literary fashion – from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. An influential female modernist writer and literary critic of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is the third (minor) strand in our braid. She serves in part as the (British) point of triangulation between Australia and Canada – symbol of ‘mother country’ to her daughter colonies, but also a sister artist doing battle

Introduction

9

with the Victorian female virtues of ‘the Angel in the House’.33 Woolf reminds us of the complexity and conflicted nature of colonial and postcolonial relations, and for us as women writers, we heed her call to think back through our mothers.34 We recognize that art is never created and released into the world by a single, isolated individual. No matter the genius, the artist always works in relation to a community and a number of significant others – sometimes in harmonic relationship, sometimes antagonistic. The epigraph for this introduction is drawn from ‘Unpacking Books’, a poem by Wright, dedicated to the St. Lucian poet and Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott.35 Published in Fourth Quarter, Wright’s penultimate volume, the poem signals a sense of ending that is at the same time a new beginning. The poem reflects on Wright’s move from the summer of sub-tropical Queensland where she shared a life and home with her first partner, Jack McKinney, to the dry stony eucalypt country of southern New South Wales where she envisages the winter of life as pared back to a ‘root’s endurance’.36 In her new home, books are piled in rocking towers on a dusty floor – ‘word-cities of civilization’s greying geography’. Her books are a mirror of her aging self. As all book-lovers know, the books we have read and the books we keep are the remnants of our past selves and reminder of who we are – our past and our present. The books we pack and unpack as we move habitat remain our habitus. They keep us anchored in the world while allowing us the freedom of escape from this world into other worlds. As books are unpacked, old friends, unremembered but not forgotten, are called to mind – revivified at the loving touch of a hand, the contemplative turn of a page. From among the dusty volumes of a past life, Wright’s eye and hand alight upon a volume of Walcott’s poetry. Fragments of his poems are given a new life in her own poem: I pick you up, poet of loves and pities, and from green Caribbean nights again you sing ... Yes, yes and yes, my blood answers, takes up the tune and dances.

Walcott’s poems generate reflection on the quality of that company of poets in which Wright situates herself, and the value of their art: ‘poets keep an oath to hold and praise / what lives beyond the power-dreams’ of nation states and empires. ‘Sweet naked Anadyomene drifts into shore again / through oil-slicks, plastic discards, in our days.’37 The poet here is aligned with Venus, the Ancient Roman goddess of love, rising from out of the sea. In the twentieth century, the

10

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

sea is polluted, and in many cultures material values of the secular world have replaced the values of the older religious world. But Love, embodied in female form, is still reborn with every new generation of lovers, poets and painters. Passion and Art, ancient and modern, are here co-joined. The tone of the poem is regretful but not resigned; wry but still hopeful. Wright turns from Derek Walcott, a twentieth-century postcolonial poet to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, Thomas Traherne (c. 1636–1674). Though with increasing age she laments ‘too few answers to beauty’s sight and touch / too many words’, Wright takes strength from Traherne’s example of resolute belief in the felicity of truth and beauty, and the power of poetic word to express Love. Traherne opens his Centuries of Meditations with these words: An Empty Book is like an Infants soul, in which any Thing may be Written. It is Capable of all Things, but containeth Nothing. I hav a Mind to fill this with Profitable Wonders. And since Love made you put it into my Hands I will fill it with those Truths you Love, without Knowing them: and with those Things which, if it be Possible, shall shew my Lov; To you, in communicating most Enriching Truths; to Truth, in Exalting Her Beauties in such a Soul.38

In the last poem of Fourth Quarter, Wright also declares her commitment to ‘poetry’s ancient vow to celebrate lovelong / life’s wholeness, spring’s return, flesh’s tune’. The spiritual, intellectual, emotional and corporeal cannot be separated: if felicity is to be achieved, they must sing one tune. Art, be it poem or painting, must strive towards this felicity of expression and belief. In the winter of 1936, Carr is ‘running a race with the daylight’, painting with focused intensity yet never quite achieving what she feels she must. On the first of December she writes in her journal: Oh, I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing – harmony of life . . . Those woods with their densely packed undergrowth! – a solidity full or air and space – moving, joyous, alive, quivering with light, springing, singing paeans of praise, throbbingly awake. Oh, to be so at one with the whole that it is you springing and you singing.39

In the following year, Carr achieved this joyous singing in Sombreness Sunlit,40 but a painting that better represents the relationship between the artist and her art is Sunshine and Tumult, completed in 1939 (Figure 1). The colours are intense. Deep yellow sunlight swirls through the vibrant greens of the forest and the dark blues of the sky. The painting throbs with energy. A small pine spins in the

Introduction

11

foreground as a wind ripples the host of trees behind her, stirring them into a gathering momentum that moves both across the forest and upwards into a vertical thrust heavenwards. No tree is left untouched by the tumult of life. Darkness and light are gathered into one force. But the vertical thrust into the turbulent atmosphere does not pierce. A single tree, with slim bare trunk and soft upper foliage stands in the foreground reaching above her peers. This treetop is like an open hand – reaching out softly. The painting could be a visualization of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ when he begs to be made the instrument of the Divine wind: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!41

But Carr’s relationship to forest, wind and divinity is neither Autumnal nor fierce. There is softness to Carr’s painting, a femininity in its curve and swirl. In the same year Carr completed Sunshine and Tumult, Harold MortimerLamb composed a photographic portrait of the artist in her studio (Figure 2). Here the photographer places Carr in careful relation to her painting. Her seated figure is so placed that the lines of her body replicate the lines of the painting which hangs on the studio wall immediately behind her. The artist’s arm echoes the line of the forest trees, moving upwards to the top of the pine whose shape is exactly mirrored in Carr’s peaky head-covering. This unifying relationship extends to the dark colour of her head-piece that matches the dark of the pine peak. The rumple and the broken circles of her embroidered smock are matched by the broken circularity and swirling motion of sky. The upright line of the singular tree in the foreground of the painting rises through the upright of Carr’s body – an invisible line running through the right side of her upper body. Mortimer-Lamb has positioned Carr in perfect harmony with her painting such that painter and painting are one. The photograph is in itself a work of art, and a statement of exact relationship between subject and object – the artist and her art. If we understand Sunshine and Tumult as a self-portrait, it suggests that Carr stands in front and reaches above her peers: she is separate and different, yet connected by the colours and swirling energy of the scene. It might also suggest that her individual work is built upon the work of those who came before – the

12

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Figure 2 Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio with One of Her Paintings Behind Her, 1939.

massed trees behind are in effect a base upon which she reaches greater height. Rather than taking the stance of the Romantic genius, this understanding correlates better with T.S. Eliot’s Modernist reflection on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in which he claims that, ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’,42 or Virginia Woolf ’s assertion that ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.’43 These statements do not advocate the insignificance of the individual artist or the removal of the personal from the work of art, rather they remind us that art grows out of something much larger and more complex than the little life of this particular individual in this particular

Introduction

13

moment of time. Art is reflective of and responsive to the artist’s self – a self that is constituted by a range of forces (physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, biological, social, political, geographical, ecological) that impact in different ways and have various effects across the life of the artist. The chapters that follow offer a comparison of these effects in the visual and verbal art of Judith Wright and Emily Carr.

14

1

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

Self-portraits can be painted or written, with the mediums of paint and language often closely linked. Michel de Montaigne, addressing readers in 1580, assures them his Essais paint an honest self-portrait – ‘c’est moy que je peins’.1 In devising his unassuming persona, he emphasizes how openly he presents himself: ‘I want to appear in my simple, natural and everyday dress, without strain or artifice’. However, since neither he nor his society exists in a state of nature, social restraints prevent total self-revelation: Had my lot been cast among those peoples who are said still to live under the kindly liberty of nature’s primal laws, I should, I assure you, most gladly have painted myself complete and in all my nakedness.2

Despite his apparent artlessness, decency forces Montaigne to cover himself, no matter how simply. As Louis Marin indicates, Montaigne’s description of painting his portrait in language and clothing himself in prose raises interesting issues about the nature of self-representation: The visual (painting and representation) and writing (reading and the book): these are the two fabrics that engulf the writing and painting subject . . . I in all of the transparency and opacity of my form and matter, at once plural and singular, have written myself so as to be seen, painted myself so as to be read.3

Connections between the pictorial and the written, together with problems of concealment and revelation, are also pertinent to Carr’s and Wright’s selfrepresentations. As artists, they are keenly aware of how the verbal and the visual complement one another. While portraying themselves through their art, both also wrote an autobiography and left behind a mass of personal correspondence, a body of work which in each case sums up the situation, experience and capacities of a modern, colonial, female artist. Although relatively unusual nowadays, comparisons between painting and poetry were once commonplace. In Europe, from the fifteenth through the 15

16

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

eighteenth century, humanistic theories of painting emphasized the relationship between the two, drawing authority from Horace’s words in his Ars Poetica – ‘ut pictura poesis’, as is painting, so is poetry – with mimesis the principal aim in each case. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings claim that, ‘Poetry aims to paint a world upon the mind’s eye, just as painting seeks to represent the mute objects of the world in a framework that will make them speak.’4 Throughout the nineteenth century the two arts came to be seen as far more divergent and with the advent of Modernism there were moves to free mimesis from its dependence on representation of the world or its meanings: The subject that a painting imitates becomes no more than a pretext for its exploration of its own nature, just as poetry comes to take the world of which it speaks as merely the pretext for focusing on the particular problems inherent in speaking of that world.5

Carr and Wright were both strongly influenced by Modernism, but in exploring the nature of their art they created what were in their eyes truthful images of the world around them, expressing their own response to it. Through art, each woman transforms a personal experience of nature into a powerful symbol. Carr first came to public attention and acclaim with the publication of Klee Wyck, a volume of autobiographical stories that won the Governor General’s award for literature in 1941. Her journals, begun in 1927 with her momentous journey to the East Coast to meet artists of the Canadian Group of Seven, record the degree to which she considered writing to be a stimulus to her art. She describes how ‘trying to find equivalents for things in words helps find equivalents in painting’.6 Wright never took up painting, but letters to her friend Barbara Blackman show she maintained a lifelong interest in it, visiting galleries whenever she could: Have you seen the French pictures yet? . . . They were terrific. Please if you are seeing them now give my particular love to the Derain with tree-trunks and the Vlamincks and the Roualts. The Picassos didn’t seem to me to do him justice, such as should have been done in that galere, and I wished there had been a Modigliani or two (perhaps there were, but I gather Brisbane gallery wasn’t big enough for everything.)7

Wright was greatly interested in contemporary Australian as well as European art – following the career of Barbara’s artist husband Charles, writing a foreword to Nancy Benko’s The Art of David Boyd,8 discussing the local art scene, attending exhibitions and even buying paintings when finances allowed. For Carr, words were a device used to clarify specific feeling about place that enabled an effective

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

17

translation of that feeling into paint on canvas, whereas for Wright, visual images drawn from nature were used to represent and evoke powerful feelings in poetry. Her poetic vision, though philosophic and political, is primarily visual and her writing might be said to have a painterly quality in its evocation of the world around her. She spoke of the language of poetry as the poet’s material of art, just as notes of music are for the composer and paints for the painter. In a discussion of the relationship between the work of art and reality, she uses still-life painting as her example.9 While Wright and Carr create their own self-portraits, both were also subjects of other people’s paintings. Though she herself painted portraits and sat occasionally for artist friends, Carr expresses deep distrust of portraiture, recognizing, like Montaigne, the risk of indecent exposure: I hate painting portraits. I am embarrassed at what seems to me to be an impertinence and presumption, pulling into visibility what every soul has as much right to keep private as his liver and kidneys and lungs and things which are coated over with flesh and hide. (He’d hate them hanging outside his skin. He’d be as disgusted as the public at the sight of his innards exposed.) The better a portrait, the more indecent and naked the sitter must feel.10

When she and her young protégé, Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, decided to paint one another’s portraits, Carr, conscious of presenting herself to the world, chose her clothes with care: ‘She put on her best black dress, a little bolero jacket and even pinned a cameo brooch at her throat.’11 A portrait by her artist friend Nan Cheney ‘gave her the pip’, even though she had originally agreed to the project. According to Hembroff-Schleicher, ‘Emily considered Nan’s portrait of her to be too much of a caricature and she didn’t like the background.’12 In 1942, she refused Lawren Harris permission to hang it with an exhibition of her own work in Toronto, writing to Ira Dilworth: ‘did I tell you he . . . is for having that filthy Emily Carr (portrait) of Nan’s hung . . . I kicked like a steer and he has given way, but without approving.’13 Judith Wright also sat for portraits, a process she seems to have endured rather than enjoyed. Writing to Dorothy Green, she remarks: As for the Archibald Prize, well actually both Andrew Sibley and Margaret Olley have Done me in the past for that and somebody else for the Portia Geach and there are more than enough portraits in existence, let alone hours of videotapes etc.14

But a number of Wright’s poems could also be described as portraits of people she has known, like her father’s brother, Arundel Wright, in ‘Bachelor Uncle’,15 or her aunt Weeta in ‘Remembering an Aunt’,16 while the chapter in her autobiography

18

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

describing her forebears is entitled ‘Portraits and Sitters’.17 Drawn from memory, such portraits often evoke the passage of time, an important theme in ‘Wedding Portrait 1913’ where a verse portrait recreates a pictorial one, the snapshot of her newly married parents – ‘this country couple/smiling confettied outside the family house’.18 Wright’s lines describing her mother ‘with her downward conscious poise of beauty’ and her ‘averted girlish face’ suggest she may also have been inspired by another bridal photo – a studio portrait of Ethel Wright standing alone, gazing down at her bouquet.19 After envisioning the wedding celebrations, Wright inserts herself into the poem, summoning up childhood memories of life with her parents. Yet, despite the filial love and gratitude they both inspire, their true natures remain opaque – ‘I look at you and wonder if I ever knew you’. Now much older than the pair in the photograph, Wright collapses past and present to imagine herself mingling with the wedding guests, proposing a poignant toast: I lift a glass as well – the greyhaired daughter whom you did not know. The best of luck, young darlings. Go on your honeymoon. Be happy always.

Incorporating family portraits into their work was a significant way for female artists to assert their lineage and affirm the significance of both family history and the domestic in women’s lives. The fluidity possible in a verbal portrait means writers can move a subject through space and time, choosing, if they wish, to place themselves in the picture as well. In an interesting analogy with Wright’s ‘Wedding Portrait 1913’, Marsha Meskimmon refers to how photographer Judy Dater’s Self-portrait with Parents (1981) places the artist underneath the photographs of her parents at their wedding to indicate history and the passage of time in her own life.20 The painted portrait, however, fixes its subject in a specific moment of time and only very occasionally includes the artist’s own image within the frame. Emily Carr’s portrait of her sister Alice shows her seated at a desk, her gaze focused on the notebook she writes in.21 Sunlight floods the room, casting a golden glow on the curtains and the map hanging on the wall behind while picking up auburn highlights in Alice’s hair and the gleam of her white blouse. Pots of red and yellow flowers contribute further to an air of brightness and warmth, with a little dog asleep on a stool in the foreground providing a homely touch. Like Judith Wright’s portrait of her parents, this is a tender expression of family affection, painted when the sisters were still relatively young, but recording a present moment rather than an image drawn from the past.

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

19

Even though Carr writes to Nan Cheney, ‘I have done very little portrait work’,22 she actually drew and painted a large number of portraits. Most were done early in her career, but she dabbled in portraiture from time to time throughout her life. In 1938 Cheney reports on Carr’s health to Eric Brown of the National Gallery of Canada: ‘She has started some portrait sketches & really they are awfully good. One of a little boy is particularly good. She got me to sit for her & in 2 hours she got a nice one’.23 While studying in England under John Whitely at Bushey and John Olsson at St. Ives, Carr filled sketchbooks with numerous drawings of people, hiring fisher children to pose for her,24 and several of her French paintings represent individual peasant women in their domestic settings. She also portrayed Native children encountered during her expeditions to their villages on the Canadian North West Coast as well as painting formal portraits of adults from indigenous communities, like William and Clara Russ and the Gitanyow chief, Mrs Douse.25 Narrative accounts of these three people in Klee Wyck (with William and Clara’s names changed to Jimmy and Louisa) provide another kind of portraiture. Klee Wyck also records Carr’s friendship with Sophie Frank, a member of the Squamish community at Ustlawn/North Vancouver Mission and her portrait of Sophie is reproduced as a frontispiece to the book’s first edition where the verbal and pictorial versions complement one another. As Gerta Moray comments on Carr’s paintings of her First Nations friends: Carr’s portraits often have a narrative quality – they make us think about the sitter’s life, circumstances and character – rather than creating a direct psychological address between sitter and viewer. In this respect they resemble the narrative vignettes of her later short stories.26

Although, in painting someone’s portrait, the artist remains outside the frame, her invisible presence is stamped on the image before us and in signing any painting, the artist transforms it into a ‘virtual self portrait’.27 All Carr’s portrayals of First Nations people represent a personal viewpoint, shaped by her own preoccupations and the social and political context in which she worked. Marcia Crosby, herself of Haida/Tsimshian descent, writes about William and Clara Russ in her Foreword to Gerta Moray’s Unsettling Encounters: A photograph of my parents standing in a procession at their wedding dance in Skidegate, Haida Gawaii/Queen Charlotte Islands, is taped to the wall behind my computer. Beside it is an enlarged image of the older couple who stand in the right foreground, leading the procession; and beside that are photocopies of the watercolour portraits that Emily Carr painted of the older couple during her sketching trip to the islands: Clara Russ (1928) and William Russ (1928).28

20

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Crosby here asserts her own lineage and the substantial web of communal memories of which the 1948 snapshot, reproduced in the Foreword, forms part. This image of William and Clara Russ in a formal social setting, with William wearing suit and tie and Clara a long dress with a lace bodice, is compared to Carr’s much earlier portraits of them in their work clothes. Crosby distinguishes between Carr’s personal memories and the shared memories in which the community members participate. However strong Carr’s sympathies for First Nations people, her perspective is inevitably that of an outsider. Carr might well have endorsed such a view, for it is as a social outsider or misfit she perceives and constructs herself in her writing and even in some of her paintings. An early self-portrait in charcoal and pastel (c.1905) is inscribed in large letters ‘The Rum Un and the Oddity’. The artist’s head is inclined towards that of her pet dog, so two pairs of eyes direct their serious gaze at the viewer in an image that emerges faintly from the paper.29 Another head and shoulders portrait, possibly painted about the same time, appears in the first edition of Carr’s autobiography.30 It is signed ‘Emily – Small’ and on its covering layer of tissue paper is printed the title ‘Small (Self Portrait)’.31 The artist, with head tilted forward, looks up suspiciously from under her eyebrows. Given her distrust of portraiture and her ultimate rejection of ‘this marrying business’ to pursue her career as an artist,32 Carr may well have felt ambivalent about perpetuating images of herself as an attractive young woman. While an art student in England, she often ‘got into trouble for drawing caricatures and rhyming’33 and there are many portrayals of herself among the abundance of caricatures and cartoons in her papers and notebooks. Although caricature is itself a kind of mask, these images frequently show the artist with face averted or appearing only in back view. A back view, however, can be surprisingly revealing, as in the series of ten small watercolours, each accompanied by some lines of doggerel, which Carr painted in 1901–2, presumably to amuse fellow students, while studying in England. In the first painting the artist stands before a clump of trees, with a canvas in one hand and a painting satchel hung over her shoulder. A large tamo’-shanter obscures her head and a prominent burn mark disfigures the back of her skirt. The nine subsequent paintings show her shape steadily changing as she layers one garment over another in attempts at concealing the defects of each. Her various accessories – a torn umbrella, shapeless mittens, heavy shoes and a large clock – are equally grotesque. In the final painting she stumps off through the trees watched by fellow students, who are also portrayed from behind, and the final verse reads:

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

21

These are the students Who laughed at her gear But now they have left Doth she wish they were here To jeer at the clock To tell her the time That ticks o’er the shoes In the wet she doth use Put on by the mitt Of no special fit That put on the cap That got wet through the gap In the side of the gamp For a rainy tramp That covered the cape Of an antique shape That covered the cloak With the seams all broke That covered the coat Of a date remote That covered the gown With a hole burnt brown That was worn by an Olsson student34

The figure’s final silhouette resembles the size and shape Carr’s body assumed in later years; the verse expresses her defiance of public opinion mingled with a yearning for acceptance; while her movement through the trees indicates the direction her art would eventually take. A 1924 self-portrait in oils also shows the artist’s back view as she sits, with right arm raised, painting a canvas (Figure 3). In a kind of mise en abime, we look at one canvas which directs us to another within the picture. Although its subject is indiscernible, this second canvas seems to glow with light. Light also falls on the artist’s hair, highlighting its vivid auburn tonings, picked up again in the wall to her right. Touches of red in her apron, echoed by red dabs of paint on the palette in her left hand contrast with her dark blue dress, all contributing to an atmosphere of richness and warmth. The figure’s body language reveals the powerful energy flowing into her art, and by portraying herself from behind, Carr prevents viewers reading her character in her face while simultaneously conveying total absorption in her work. This self-portrait, painted at a time when

22

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

she was suffering financial hardship and dispirited by widespread public rejection of her chosen style and subject matter, is nevertheless a strong assertion of her artistic vocation as Carr turns her back on both critics and an uncomprehending public. This work has been compared to another self-portrait by the seventeenthcentury Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi who also raises her hand to the canvas in a gesture of great force and determination.35 Although it is most improbable Carr could have seen this picture, it too reveals a woman devoting comparable energy to her work. In naming her painting ‘Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’, Gentileschi even identifies herself as the embodiment of art, taking as a prototype a renaissance emblem representing Pittura as a woman painting at an easel: ‘If Painting can be a woman, then a woman can embody Painting’.36 Even three centuries later, it was hard for women to claim the status of artist: ‘in the early part of this century, just representing oneself as an artist was a subversive statement for a woman’, so that, ‘A seemingly simple self-portrait of an artist at an easel can become a powerful evocation of female emancipation when the subject is a woman’.37 Women who sought to place their self-representations as artists within the domestic and maternal sphere found this was likely to bring their professional standing into question. While such subject matter might be deemed appropriate for women practitioners, male critics considered it both subordinate and peripheral. Yet when women artists ventured into male-defined territory, they were considered presumptuous or unwomanly, as some early critical commentary on Judith Wright demonstrates. While the deep eroticism of early poems like ‘Woman to Man’ originally raised a few eyebrows, most critics recognized their literary magnitude. Some condemned many of her later poems for their social commentary and political vehemence which James McAuley dismissed as ‘bardic pretensions’.38 Although in her ‘Advice to a Young Poet’, Wright dryly comments, ‘don’t take a prophetic stance, / you’ll be sorry for it’,39 she herself has no such qualms and her self-portrait in ‘Turning Fifty’40 identifies her as prophet and housewife both. The poem opens on a quiet domestic note: ‘With kitchen swept, cat fed’, the day’s work has already begun and the poet quietly drinks her coffee as she waits for sunrise. The tone is calm but austere as she reflects on the half century behind her: ‘I taste my fifty years / here in the cup’. Green birds outside wait to receive bread and water, the most basic form of human nourishment, but only sunlight will reveal the full brilliance of their plumage. Verse four, however, is angry in tone compared with the measured restraint of the previous lines as, like an Old Testament prophet, the outraged poet pins her colours to the mast by denouncing human destructiveness:

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

23

I’ll show my colours too. Though we’ve polluted even this air I breathe and spoiled green earth . . .

The poem turns on the word ‘polluted’, evoking sin, dirt and corruption, while the ‘spoiled green earth’ contrasts with the green birds of the previous stanza, for the colour traditionally associated with new life and growth is now blighted. What previously appeared an ordered, tranquil haven now threatens to become paradise lost, since humanity, although given the choice, is opting for death over life. Anger gradually subsides, however, as the sun rises, restoring a measure of calm. The poet’s cup holds the entire brew of fifty years’ experience, both negative and positive – ‘war and peace’, ‘loss and finding’, ‘time and love’. Raising it to her lips, she toasts everything life has provided, in a drink which, although neutral and clean, is also dark and bitter. As in so much of Wright’s poetry, there are distant biblical echoes, of Eden and the Fall, along with the bitter cup Christ prayed he might be spared. The poet, however, with somewhat guarded optimism accepts the sun’s gift of a new day, which is also her birthday, as she readies herself for whatever the future might bring. Wright was a formidable figure who, while deploring the iconic status conferred on her by public opinion, was always ready to use her literary and national prominence to forward the causes of indigenous rights and environmentalism in which she so passionately believed. While perceiving herself as an outsider – ‘I am a natural third-class Passenger through life’41 – she did not hesitate to write to Australian Prime Ministers and State Premiers reproaching them for policies she considered unjust and, more rarely, commending them for decisions she approved of. While Carr lacked this kind of self-assurance, her 1938 self-portrait42 reveals a substantial and impressive figure. Although dogged by serious illness at this point in her life, she was now established as a major artist with her paintings greatly valued by leading Canadian artists. Instead of turning her back, she confronts the viewer sternly and uncompromisingly in an assertive image, determined to be accepted on her own terms. Although there is no sign of palette or easel, the portrait gives an impression Carr has been interrupted in the midst of painting, possibly because she is wearing the spectacles just recently prescribed for this activity.43 Dressed in her characteristic loose smock, her hair covered by a net cap, she forms a solid and majestic shape filling two-thirds of the canvas. Clothed predominantly in shades of yellow ochre, the figure emerges from a similarly coloured background.

24

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

The many curved lines defining the folds in her garments are balanced by vertical streaks to the left of the painting, reminiscent of the upward sweep of the treetrunks in many of her forest paintings. Sharyn Udall relates this work to the solidity and power of Carr’s landscapes. She notes a journal entry where Carr describes a mountain she is struggling to paint, comparing it to a woman, and argues that in her self-portrait the artist ‘has become symbolically her own mountain – massive, rounded, striated with moving contour lines like those that describe the ribbed and lumpy face of her mountain. In colour and texture she is one with her background, rising and vibrating with it.’44 The same journal entry where Carr exclaims, ‘I hate painting portraits’, ends with the statement, ‘To paint a self-portrait should teach one something about oneself. I shall try’.45 Dated 31 December 1940, it makes no allusion to either her 1924 or 1938 self-portraits, and, according to Doris Shadbolt, ‘If she followed this advice to herself, the results have not so far come to light’.46 Self-portrayal, however, takes many forms. Despite the substantiality of Carr’s image in her 1938 self-portrait, and the epic scope of her landscape paintings, in her writing she regularly represents herself as small, naming herself ‘Small’ in the collection of stories based on her childhood, published as The Book of Small in 1942. Moreover, the book that documents ‘the growth of the poet’s mind’ – a portrait of the artist from baptism to the looming prospect of death and eternal life, is titled Growing Pains, as though she spoke merely of childhood dramas from the perspective of a ‘grown-up’. Corresponding late in life with her literary editor and friend, Ira Dilworth, Carr, now a large, ageing woman, constantly refers to herself as Small. It was, in part, a defensive strategy for coping with difficulties posed by adopting the ‘unwomanly’ role of artist. Throughout her journals, stories and letters, Carr swings from assured belief in herself and the rightness, indeed ‘truth’ of her artistic vision, and a tendency to diminish her potential and her achievement – a tendency to make herself small: not a mountain ‘of splendid power and volume’ but a ‘little tussock’.47 The persona of ‘Small’ allows her to diminish the antagonistic effect of an unacceptable, because unwomanly, Bigness. It was a persona which also found expression in her painting. Marsha Meskimmon claims that some twentieth-century women artists sought to discard the visual clichés and stereotypes imposed on women as subjects in painting by abandoning the idea of direct resemblance in their self-portraits. She observes that, ‘A number of women artists actually produced works entitled “self-portrait” which have no likenesses of the bodies of the artists at all.’48 Although Carr did not do this, some of her tree paintings, like Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935), certainly lend themselves to autobiographical reading. In the painting, a

Self-Portraits, Painted and Written

25

spindly tree stands alone in a logged area of forest where difference as identified with smallness ensures survival (artistic survival) (Figure 4). The tree is isolated and thus might be understood to be ‘lonely’, but it is also thereby rendered special. Interestingly, there are other trees of like kind spaced at distance in a diminishing sight line, suggesting others with whom the foreground tree (artist) might be aligned but to whom it (she) has no tangible relationship. A small tree that has been stunted by a lack of access to light in the vast mass of a crowded forest, is, by virtue of difference and its lack of use value, given special access to the heavens and radiates light. What might at first be interpreted negatively is found to be of positive value. Like Carr herself, the tree in the painting makes its claim to distinction through the deceptive aura of a ‘feminine’ neediness. It is deceptive because although Carr often represents herself in her writing as small in relation to the greatness of the task she has set herself and the enormity of her artistic and spiritual aspiration, the reader understands that smallness as big, and Carr clearly expects the reader to interpret it as such. In a journal entry for 7 March 1934, she writes: To paint one must make the supreme effort, I mean the effort of emptying oneself, the effort of abandonment . . . Oh, that great, big, huge, enormous something supreme that my stuff lacks so entirely, that oneness and unity, the thing that lifts one above rot, that completeness! I think if one could find that they would stand face to face with God. How could one ever hope to be holy enough to paint that way?49

Carr’s claim to smallness can often be read as a kind of humility. The ‘effort of emptying oneself ’ is an effort towards the paradoxical state of the infinite, the achievement of which will render her a nobody and a somebody – she will be nothing and everything. Not chosen by the loggers Carr might be ‘scorned as timber’, that is, scorned as unfit for the uses of human society, but she gains stature in the knowledge that she is ‘beloved of the sky’ – beloved of God. Small is thereby raised up to become one with the Divine; her smallness of ego represents a largeness and this largess of spirit that emanates from self but is ‘not self ’, overflows into and is productive of art. The painting conveys a sense of divine immanence through evoking the relationship between sky and earth. It is dominated by a great halo of light like a Catherine wheel generating energy, and the earth beneath is dwarfed by an immensity of sky. Slender verticals lead the eye upwards to the spinning green top of the central tree against the radiant sky and then downwards to the echoing contours of dark and solid earth dotted with

26

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

tree stumps and small clumps of foliage. In this painting the eye finds no rest; it is continually caught up in a movement that is both upwards and downwards, outwards and inwards. The tree acts as a kind of divining rod, a living means of transportation from this earthly world to the heavenly. Carr often personifies trees in her writing, considering them far preferable to people as subjects for her art. Hembroff-Schleicher records that as Carr painted her portrait, ‘she would occasionally burst into song’: Oh! Would that you were a tree-ee-ee, Oh! Would that you were a tree.50

Writing to Nan Cheney, Carr herself describes the sessions when she and Edythe painted their self-portraits: I had not done a head for generations & find it difficult & entertaining, it’s the model that worries me. I really felt I studded [?] out on my own mug. I could make it as frightful as I chose & no complaints And after all it is flesh & blood & as good as a tree to work from you don’t think of it as you.51

Yet Carr paints trees almost as if they were people, and, through long-standing cultural tradition, the identification of trees with human beings has a certain familiarity: The Western religious imagination tends to perceive trees anthropomorphically, in its own image, as bodies corresponding to the microcosmic human frame, male or female, as well as macrocosmic systems enclosing dreams of pattern, order and reciprocal relations.52

Trees also figure largely in Wright’s poetry, often symbolizing artistic creativity and sometimes representing the poet herself. ‘The Wattle-Tree’53 invokes a mood of exaltation similar to Carr’s Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, as Wright rejoices in nature’s force and energy. The poet contemplates the beauty of the golden flowering tree, yearning to participate in its creative power until ultimately tree and poet are imaginatively fused into a single entity. By recreating the magnificence of this one tree, Wright asserts the power and authority of her poetic calling through a spiritual vision which glorifies Nature rather than the Divine. The wattle tree is a material object, embodying ‘earth, water, air, and the fire of the sun’ – the four elements from which people once believed all matter was formed. By unifying these ‘four truths in one’ the tree represents the essence of all existence, even within a single seed – an image reminiscent of W.B. Yeats’s ‘great-rooted blossomer’ of whom he asks, ‘Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?’54

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27

Wright insists on the spiritual splendour of the material world. Her wattle tree resonates both with the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and other ancient myths representing the earth’s axis as a great tree uniting heaven, earth and what lies beneath. The flowering wattle encompasses all of nature ‘in one great word of gold’ – the word of creation – echoing the opening of St John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the word’. It is this word the poet longs to comprehend, believing it will ensure immortality: ‘O let me live for ever, I would cry’. Trees have traditionally symbolized immortality through their constant ability to renew foliage fruit and flowers, just as Wright’s tree ‘renews itself and is forever tree’. Yet, paradoxically, as material object and part of the natural cycle, the wattle tree’s death is inevitable and only if its ‘great word of gold’ is perpetuated through the poet’s words, can both tree and poet hope to survive. Somehow, the poet must incorporate the tree within her imagination – a rapturous union in some ways comparable to that great halo of light which surmounts the tree in Carr’s Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky: Then upward from the earth and from the water, then inward from the air and the cascading light poured gold, till the tree trembled with its flood.

The poet can now take her own immortality from ‘the world’s four elements’ and enter into the truth, putting forth buds which break ‘into a million images of the Sun, my God’ – the creative energy which sustains all living things. Through her self-portrait as the flowering wattle tree, Judith Wright proudly claims for herself the authority of artist, bard and prophet. While the different self-portraits Carr and Wright create are not always consistent with one another, in each case they reveal the artist’s multi-faceted nature and her commitment to her art. Accompanying the paintings of the one and poetry of the other is a great mass of written material – letters, essays, short fiction, autobiography – which also offers up various forms of self-portraiture. The two women create further self-portraits through autobiographical works written in the final years of their lives. All Carr’s books are predominantly autobiographical, but one, Growing Pains, is actually subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, though, at the author’s request, it was published posthumously, not appearing till 1946. Wright’s Half a Lifetime, which records her life from early childhood until her husband’s death in 1966, came out in 1999, the year before she died. Like most private correspondence, autobiography is a literary contrivance designed

28

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

to present the reader with a carefully constructed self-image. ‘When we settle into the theatre of autobiography, what we are ready to believe . . . is that the play we witness is a historical one, a largely faithful and unmediated reconstruction of events that took place long ago’, writes Paul John Eakin, ‘whereas in reality the play is that of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of the present’.55 Much the same is true for a painter’s self-portrait, as Marsha Meskimmon remarks: ‘Like the tests of historical verisimilitude which pervade readings of autobiography, self-portraits have been subject to tests of “truth” or “accuracy” ’.56 Both genres must be approached with caution. Wright describes the pitfalls of writing one’s life story in her penultimate chapter: ‘the person who wrote the early part of this autobiography is clearly not the person who lived it’.57 She acknowledges there is no such thing as a unitary subject: ‘ “I” is a shimmering multiple and multitude, it seems’. Truth also proves elusive: ‘I don’t know what a “fact” is for one thing’ and ‘reality’ is impossible to define.58 Biographers and critics have chided Carr for discrepancies between her version of events and historically verifiable ‘facts’, some going so far as to characterize her as ‘unreliable, a distorter of the truth through fictional intervention, a person given to excessive concealment, and even a liar’.59 Carr, however, having taken courses in shortstory writing and sent out her early efforts to various magazines, almost certainly regarded The Book of Small, together with her other autobiographical works, as collections of stories. In their autobiographical writing, both Carr and Wright, however, record a remarkably similar experience of ways in which growing up in colonial/postcolonial Canada and Australia shaped them as artists. Although each identified strongly with the region of her birth, and felt a deep love of its landscape, issues of belonging preoccupied both women from childhood on. Neither could fully conform to family expectations, nor comply with the restrictions society sought to impose on her as an artist and each actively sought, or else found herself cast in an outsider role.

2

The Artist as a Young Colonial Girl

Virginia Woolf begins her attempt at autobiography with these words: ‘Two days ago . . . Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old. I should be eighty-five, and have forgotten.’1 At the time of penning ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf was in fact only fifty-five but more than old enough to be aware of the difficult relationship of truth to memory, and indeed, memoir. She reflects upon the several difficulties the writer of a memoir must inevitably encounter and accommodate, among which are ‘the enormous number of things I can remember’ and ‘the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written.’2 She begins with her first memory: This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground – my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories . . . It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives.3

Woolf ’s use of qualifying words like ‘I think’, ‘must have been’, ‘I suppose’, ‘perhaps’, ‘more probably’, indicate the haziness of early memories and thus the writer’s attempt to relay this indeterminacy truthfully. ‘A Sketch’ – a form suggestive of a draft or an outline – is perhaps all that can in truth be realized. Memory is fallible. Memories are notoriously slippery – difficult to retrieve, vulnerable to distortion and easily manipulated, consciously or unconsciously, to serve current purposes; hence Woolf ’s admission of the ordering of memory by ‘importance’, and the temptation to deliberately alter a memory to serve a writer’s needs: ‘It is more convenient artistically to suppose . . .’ 29

30

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

In their respective autobiographical works Carr and Wright both shape a remembered past to serve present needs, demonstrating how childhood experience helped determine their development as artists, particularly through their response to place and nation.4 Despite their distance from one another in time and space, both women’s accounts of growing up as artists in colonial societies not only reveal similarity to each other, but also similarity to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a modern künstlerroman whose influence can be traced in the biographical work of other (post)colonial writers.5 Of particular relevance to a comparative discussion of Carr and Wright in this context is Joyce’s representation of his colonial hero/artist not only in terms of portraiture, thus uniting visual and verbal arts,6 but also as an insider/outsider who struggles to escape the nets of ‘nationality, language and religion’ only to find himself so thoroughly entangled as to make escape impossible.7 Woolf had many challenges with which to contend, but the problems specific to the colonial subject were not among them. Despite international affiliation and influence, Joyce, like his hero Stephen Dedalus, and like Carr and Wright, is bound up in the ferocity of a colonial politics that makes almost insurmountable demands of its artists. Joyce’s portrait of Stephen is so closely linked to the known facts of his own life as to make a claim to autobiographical status. Yet Portrait is a work of fiction and its protagonist, even if sometimes recognizable as a caricature of an innocent and more egocentric Joyce than the Joyce who draws the portrait, is nevertheless a fictional character. The idea of ironic portraiture – the portrait of self at an angle and at a distance – is of relevance here to an understanding of the contested nature and the pitfalls of autobiography into which unwary writers and readers might fall. Wright is neither unwary nor unwitting. She begins Half a Lifetime, the account of her first fifty years, with the surprising statement – ‘Autobiography is not what I want to write’8 – justifying this reluctance with claims that the genre itself drives authors to arrogance or excessive introversion. But the multiple drafts of individual chapters among her papers archived in the Australian National Library suggest she found difficulty in recording her own life. She had already entrusted the task of writing her biography to an academic specialist in Australian literature, Veronica Brady, who acknowledges that ‘Judith Wright . . . first thought of this book and throughout has shared her time, her memories, her papers and her inspiration’.9 Clearly, however, Wright still wanted to produce her own version, although this involved collaboration with her daughter Meredith McKinney and her editor Patricia Clarke. Work on both her biography and her autobiography proceeded at much the same time, with Brady’s South of My Days appearing in 1998 and Half a Lifetime the following year.

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Carr’s principal account of her childhood is The Book of Small (1943), although early memories are also incorporated into Growing Pains: An Autobiography (1946) and The Heart of a Peacock (1953).10 Like Wright, she worked and reworked many sections of her books long before their final publication, relying in the end on editorial help from Ira Dilworth. But she requested Growing Pains be published posthumously because her remaining sister Alice had reproached her for The Book of Small and The House of All Sorts, claiming ‘I had exploited the weaknesses of our family dead to build up my writing reputation’ and had been ‘making fun out of Edith & Lizzie’s smug hypocrisy’. Carr, however, believed honesty was required, asking, ‘how could I write unless I write as we were?’11 Artists or literary figures who recount their own life stories have, as model, the traditional literary form of künstlerroman, which focuses on the protagonist’s artistic development and eventual mastery of his or her craft. Both Carr and Wright follow this pattern, presenting themselves as developing artists whilst surveying their early lives across an expanse of decades. Each constructs herself as a child in the way a fiction writer might create a character. Wright, however, emphasizes the distinction between past and present selves, contemplating the child she once was with a certain wry detachment, just as she refers to herself in her poem ‘The Marks’ as ‘A three-year-old, related / to me by memory only’.12 Carr, on the other hand, seeks to relive the past, immersing herself and her readers in childhood memories. In her journal, she says of one story ‘The Cow Yard’: ‘I’ve put all I know into it, lived the whole thing over, been a kid again in the old cow yard’.13 The invention of her childhood persona, Small, was not only a useful literary device to distinguish herself from Middle and Bigger, the two sisters nearest her in age, but it also enabled her to express a side of herself society expected her to repress. Even in correspondence with Dilworth towards the end of her life, she writes sometimes as Small and other times as Emily. This bifurcation of her self allows Carr the emotional extravagance (‘she shall be as naughty as she pleases’), naivety, irreverence and freedom from responsibility (‘she knows not what she does’) of a child, that would otherwise be frowned upon, just as, in The Book of Small, she encourages readers to relish and endorse her childhood mischievousness and rebellion. In the story ‘How Lizzie Was Shamed Right Through’ she represents her four-year-old self at a birthday party as wild, exuberant, dirty, passionate and unruly – an embarrassment to her politely behaved sisters who admonish her: ‘“I’m going to tell Mother . . . about grabbing the jelly cake with your mouth full” ’.14 As a character, Small mediates the past, translating distinctions between now and then, indicating that Carr’s autobiographical stories are not unalloyed

32

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

reminiscence, nor direct descriptions of the author’s ‘original’ self, but configurations of memory, recreations of a former self. Exploring the significance of place in shaping artistic development meant looking to colonial origins, as both writers associate their childhood with life in what would have been described by its colonizers as a ‘young nation’. Wright makes the point in Half a Lifetime: To begin with, in Australia, who am I? None of my genes is indigenous. How did I get here, and why? The place to find clues is not in the present, it lies in the past: a shallow past, as all immigrants to Australia know, and all of us are immigrants. The history of our arrival holds a history beyond itself. It begins in another hemisphere.15

The book’s opening chapter, describing her forebears’ arrival in Australia and their settlement there, follows on from its author’s earlier works of family history, The Generations of Men (1959)16 and The Cry for the Dead (1981).17 Although Carr lacks the same long family association with Canada, she scatters references throughout The Book of Small to her father’s travels from England and throughout the Americas until he finally settled in British Columbia. Born in 1871, the year the Province was incorporated within the Canadian federation, Carr neatly links her childhood story to the development of its principal city, Victoria. The Book of Small comprises two sections, the first recounting the child Emily’s immediate family experiences, while the second, entitled ‘A Little Town and A Little Girl’, provides a more general view of Victoria and its society, though still perceived from a child’s perspective. Such links between childhood and colonial origins indicate the adult writers’ assessment of an historical past, but for both authors the child’s initial awareness of place is situated firmly in her immediate family, represented as a secure, if somewhat troubled enclave, with insiders sharply distinguished from outsiders. Fine social distinctions also existed within the two households in which both relied on servants. The Carr family employed a Chinese servant, Bong, and a ‘Native Woman’, Wash Mary. Carr recalls,‘Our Chinaboy, Bong, was not pretty – he was pockmarked; but Bong was a good boy and was part of our childhood. He came to Mother at the age of twelve, green and homesick, without one word of English’;18 and of Mary she writes, ‘She was gentle, had a crinkled-up skin and was so small she had to stand on a block to reach her washtub’.19 For Emily both are objects of interest and fascination. As a child, Wright spent much time in the warmth of the kitchen with the ‘Girls’, orphans whom her grandmother had brought from England and trained as domestics. While bemused by class boundaries, however, children moved across

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them relatively freely. Wright notes further social distinctions at her grandmother’s house, where the few business people who came to visit and the hawker ‘with horse and cart and goods for sale’ were to be ‘treated with either a subtle or obviously different level of manners’. Even more perplexing was the status of two partAboriginal families living on her grandmother’s land.Wright recalls how ‘Something about them – what, I wasn’t sure – made them different from the Girls . . . or the station manager, Jack Medhurst’.20 Family life followed a distinct order of precedence – ‘we in the main house were ourselves a hierarchy leading from Girls to us children, my mother and, recognizably its summit my father’21 – and in both the Wright and Carr households hierarchy was reinforced by gender distinctions, with the father as the principal source of power and authority. Judith says of her father, Philip Wright: ‘As a child I believed him to own and manage everything and everyone’, while Emily writes of Richard Carr: ‘Our family had to whiz around father like a top round its peg’.22 Both writers are clearly impressed by paternal authority and power, though Carr’s respect and regard for her father is far more qualified than Wright’s, and both women find the constraints of femininity problematic. Each had an invalid mother. Ethel Wright, who never fully recovered her health after catching Spanish flu in 1919, died when Judith was only twelve: ‘Even in my first memories, my mother was often ill’. Carr’s mother was tubercular – ‘Mother was very delicate and could not get up early or walk the two miles to church’ – dying in 1886 when Emily was fifteen.23 Nevertheless, some female power and authority continued within each family. Wright recalls how her father’s mother, though living on a separate property, ‘had plenty of say’ in the affairs of her son’s household, while the younger Carr children were sternly disciplined by their elder sisters. Both writers draw attention to the maternal domain, which they see as significantly nurturing their creative impulses. Ethel Wright encouraged her daughter to read, of which Wright observes: ‘This opened the door to another and much more comprehensive outer world’.24 Inspired by Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career (1901), whose heroine ‘refused to get married . . . had left her home and decided to be a writer’,25 Judith Wright early recognized that books offered a possible path to independence. Her older self muses: ‘Perhaps I was really looking for power, as I read and internally chanted the words and rhythms of poetry. It was a power I felt I might be able to command in a world in which males dominated . . .’26 Ethel Wright also ‘loved verse’ and supported her daughter’s early poetic efforts: ‘She had ambition for me as a poet and my small success, when the verses and letters I sent to the Sydney Mail’s children’s page won praise from its editor “Cinderella”, gave her a good deal of pleasure.’27

34

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

According to Growing Pains, it was Carr’s father who first encouraged her art work, admiring her drawing of a dog, done, when only eight, with a charred stick taken from the grate, while her mother exclaimed over how dirty the charcoal had made her.28 Nevertheless, although Carr’s mother did not actively encourage Emily’s artistic talent, she sympathized to some extent with her unconventional behaviour, approving her childhood singing, for example, even though it was ‘joyful noise rather than music’.29 In The Book of Small, singing is an expression of creative energy and Carr, as a child, delights in overhearing her mother and a visiting friend singing the English songs of their youth in ‘rusty little voices’, even though she considers her own songs as ‘new, fresh grass’ compared to the ‘cudded fodder’ of the ladies’ songs. Small’s singing represents something wild and unconstrained, an inner feeling which must be expressed, even if it contravenes all conservatively defined notions of beauty: ‘They called her singing a “horrible row”’.30 Significantly, other family members claim it shames them before the neighbours. Although she makes no direct link, it is quite possible that, in her own mind, Carr associates this response to her singing with the later disquiet and hostility her paintings initially provoked within a conservative local community. Some of her delight in childhood exuberance, despite the restrictions placed on it, is recaptured in Carr’s 1931 painting The Little Pine where a young tree, with its swirling foliage seems to spin in a forest clearing, its upward thrust echoed by the sweep of light in the sky behind (Figure 5). Mystery emanates from the mature trees standing like sentinels in the background, their sombre hues a contrast to the vivid yellow-green of the little pine’s foliage, which is lit with a joyful inner glow. The painting celebrates natural energy, vitality and life. The young tree pirouettes like a ballerina in what is almost a stage set, with its dark green side-curtains and backdrop. Still smaller saplings seem to form an audience in the foreground, while, to the right, three young trees line up behind like a corps de ballet. For Carr, the forests and their trees are unmistakably female. In a 1934 journal entry she describes another logged clearing with young pines growing in it: There are lots of frivolous little pines, very bright and green as to tips. The wind passes over them gaily, ruffling their merry, fluffy tops and sticking-out petticoats. The little pines are very feminine and they are always on the swirl and dance in May and June. They snuggle in among the big, young matrons, sassing their dignity, for they are very straight and self-respecting.31

As children, Carr and Wright had access to extensive territory surrounding the family home, finding it a source of immense delight. Richard Carr owned

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nine acres of land, including a cow paddock and a garden, while the Wrights farmed a large pastoral property in the New England district of New South Wales. Wright uses the terms Inside and Outside (always capitalized) to indicate life within the house and the world beyond, comprising the family’s pastoral station and the landscape where it was situated. She writes of a childhood divided in her mind ‘between the problems of Inside and the freedoms of Outside.’ Inside, children were expected to move quietly and be ‘as little of a nuisance as possible’. Inside was also the woman’s realm presided over by her mother, while Outside, which the young Judith greatly preferred, was male territory where she might be taken ‘on mustering trips or inspections of fences or with timber-clearing gangs’.32 For Carr, the distinction between inside and outside is a little less clear cut, partly because her father dominates the household as well as the surrounding property. The first two stories in The Book of Small, however, ‘Sunday’ and ‘The Cow Yard’, strongly contrast routine domesticity with the exterior world of plants and animals. The house, especially on Sundays, is a place of rules and constraint, while the cow yard is a predominantly female space: ‘Above it constantly hovered the spirit of maternity’.33 It is also a place where Emily can sing loudly and vigorously and, as part of the natural world, it is less amenable to human regulation. For example, no domestic work is permitted in the Carr household on a Sunday, but Bong must still milk the cow night and morning, and he too sings in the cow yard. Carr recalls how ‘Bong, sitting on his three-legged stool, sang to the Cow – a Chinese song in a falsetto voice’.34 She perceives the garden and cow yard as an intermediary realm situated between the house and a more remote outside world no longer directly under her father’s control. On the family’s regular afternoon walks round the estate, Emily reflects, ‘I came last and wished that our Sunday walk was not quite so much fenced. First there was the thorny hedge and then the high pickets’.35 Richard Carr sought to transform his property into a simulacrum of what he had known before migrating to Canada. Emily recalls how her father wanted his place to look ‘exactly like England’ by planting cowslips, primroses, hawthorn hedges and ‘all the Englishy flowers’, and by demarcating his land with stiles and meadows that ‘took away all the wild Canadian-ness and made it as meek and English as he could.’36 His daughter clearly prefers the one field that was left ‘Canadian’: The underbrush had been cleared away and the ground was carpeted with our wild Canadian lilies, the most delicately lovely of all flowers – white with bent necks and brown eyes looking back into the earth. Their long, slender petals,

36

Judith Wright and Emily Carr rolled back from their drooping faces, pointed straight up at the sky, like millions of quivering white fingers. The leaves of the lilies were very shiny – green, mottled with brown, and their perfume like heaven and earth mixed.37

Wright also portrays gardens as intermediary areas between Inside and the true Outside comprising farm and the surrounding bush and hills. Her grandparents’ houses, Thalgarrah and Wongwibinda are surrounded by very English gardens. ‘Even now’, Wright muses, I think on what beauties and fruitfulness had been excluded from the gardens of my youth by the contempt with which the indigenous plants were regarded: native violets, lovely as they are, and those great one-flowered purple daisies that grew outside the garden fences were not seen as fit for cultivation.38

Like Carr, she seems drawn to native plants that, like the wild lilies, were either barely tolerated or else excluded altogether. Although Wright finds her grandmother’s garden enchantingly beautiful, its exclusion of Australian plants mirrors the various social exclusions she had early learned to recognize: Nevertheless, that enchantment was somehow troubling. Within the garden, the pine forest, the orchard, not one Australian tree or plant was to be seen. The assertion the garden made was one of exclusion, of pride, or nostalgia, even though my grandmother had never until her fifties seen the England of her grandparents. Eucalyptus and wattles might flower outside.39

Carr and Wright both link the world beyond their immediate household enclosures to what is native in the countries where they live, and their desire to move beyond the boundaries their families impose becomes an urge to identify respectively with Canada and Australia. Both women delighted in flowers, especially native flowers. Wright developed a keen interest in these through her friendship and shared botanical excursions with artist friend Kathleen MacArthur and they feature frequently in her poetry. Carr, late in life, while recovering from a stroke in hospital, began work on a book entitled Wild Flowers. It remained incomplete because news came that Klee Wyck had been accepted for publication so working on that took precedence,40 but her accounts of the individual flowers reveal both acute observation and intensity of feeling as when describing the trillium: Three white petals with a golden eye. The petals are so richly, creamily white they might be three big spots of clotted cream lying on a green plate. Trillium is opulent, each flower a queen in her own right, a bouquet and holder all in one. There is a stillness round her. The white flowers glow like untwinkling stars each

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separate in a sea of green. Each flower holds her tranquil perfection for a considerable time. When death comes to her she blushes a purplish pink and drops her petals. In her heart she has formed a berry. By and bye it will turn red as a drop of blood.41

For Wright Australian native flowers were often associated with yearnings to overcome a sense of separation from the natural world. While Carr’s painting The Little Pine celebrates youthful energy and growth, counterpointed by the more sombre trees in the background, Wright’s ‘Child and Wattle-tree’ sounds a darker note beneath its joyful portrayal of childhood happiness.42 We hear the child’s voice as she gazes at the wattle tree, delighted by its abundance of golden flowers yet saddened by a sense of distance from its beauty. In the end she will assert a blend of triumph and loss as she acknowledges the correspondence between her inner self and the flowering tree. Her tree embodies springtime warmth and beauty: ‘round as a sun is the golden tree.’ At the same time it follows the sun’s cycle, so that the blossom with its ‘honey dust’ is of brief duration. Although the flowering tree is an objective correlative of the child’s own lifeforce (‘my hot blood’), her separateness from it makes her sad at heart. In a stanza evoking the Greek myth of Daphne metamorphosed into a laurel tree by the god Apollo, the speaker yearns to be similarly transformed: Lock your branches around me, tree; let the harsh wooden scales of bark enclose me. Take me into your life and smother me with bloom till my feet are cool in the earth and my hair is long in the wind; till I am a golden tree spinning the sunlight.43

Wright’s golden tree spinning sunlight corresponds remarkably with the spinning movement and gold-tipped foliage of Carr’s little pine. Ultimately, however, the child, in asserting her own self-consciousness, must acknowledge her separateness from the tree that is capable of neither speech nor knowledge. As in the first stanza, her heart still lodges among its birds and shadows, resembling now not a sad bird, but a dark one, since self-consciousness entails the loss of innocence. Carr’s and Wright’s strong identification with native flowers and landscape also forms part of the way they both question and reject their families’ assumption that England was the only model for appropriate social behaviour, land management and even architecture. Wright notes how ‘things English seemed approved’,44 contributing to ‘layers of contradictory meanings’ in the household:

38

Judith Wright and Emily Carr England was one such layer, one to which the Girls belonged, which somehow made them more respectable than the Browns and Cohens, much as ‘English’ flowers in the garden were valued over native ones.45

Carr writes how her father ‘thought everything English was much better than anything Canadian’, and observes that the predominantly English population of Victoria ‘tried to be more English than the English themselves, just to prove to themselves and the world how loyal they were being to the Old Land’.46 Wright describes how, because of its southern aspect, her family home, Wollumumbi, froze in winter since it had taken a century for ‘ “pioneer” house builders to realize they were no longer in England and to face south was to let in the coldest winds’.47 Carr believes her father’s pride in the property he had created out of wild Canadian land arose from a sense of loss: ‘It was as though Father had buried a tremendous homesickness in this new soil and it had rooted and sprung up English.’48 Wright considers such longings for a lost Englishness as backward looking, preventing her own forbears from taking the ‘confident plunge into making something new’.49 In her book Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), she perceives her country, from a mid-twentieth-century perspective, as culturally divided by its sense of a lost English homeland and the prospect of creating a totally new alternative: Australia has from the beginning of its short history meant something more to its new inhabitants than mere environment and mere land to be occupied, ploughed and brought into subjection. It has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality; first and persistently, the reality of exile; second, though perhaps we now tend to forget this, the reality of newness and freedom.50

Entry into a world beyond the tightly defined boundaries which enclosed their childhood offered Wright and Carr realities of newness and freedom, while involving them in a paradoxical situation. Even as they yearned for outside, both were insiders by birth, brought up in socially and financially secure households. Although some family members, feeling exiled from England, may have considered themselves outsiders in relation to the ‘mother country’, each family, and particularly the Wrights, occupied a privileged position within its own immediate community. Wright recalls how, ‘For the most part we saw few people beyond our own concentric circles of employees and visiting relatives’: The world beyond us certainly existed, though I knew little or nothing of it except through reading the Sydney Mail . . . For in Australia, in my childhood, the pastoralist ruled the roost, and most of Australia’s export income came from the

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39

kind of background I knew. So the social reports, the articles and news items seemed to revolve around the kind of people we were and knew and the sheep and cattle they bred and lived among.51

Despite her prosperous, highly respectable bourgeois background, Carr’s family was less securely entrenched, not quite belonging to Victoria’s social and political elite. Gerta Moray suggests Carr wrote The Book of Small as a form of social manifesto to emphasize her own family’s part in the pioneering stage of Victoria’s history and to challenge attitudes expressed by Nellie de Bertrand Lugrin whose writing classes she attended in 1934 as she was beginning work on her childhood stories: ‘Lugrin’s own account of Victoria’s history . . . was redolent with upperclass English snobbery, adulation of social caste, and flagrantly racist assumptions’.52 Carr’s emphatic rejection of social pretension in The Book of Small, together with any veneration of England and Englishness, becomes an assertion of her own values. For all their insider origins, Carr and Wright both represent their child selves as outsiders, possibly indicating ‘a disturbed and disturbing sense of consciousness of inner disruption, paradox and contradiction’, which Angela Smith associates with growing up in colonial society and perhaps recognizing that someone conventionally defined as ‘other’ may actually correspond to something within one’s self.53 Each child often seeks the company of those perceived to be outsiders, as their interest in the family servants indicates. Emily is drawn to people and places her family deems improper, such as a chain gang of prisoners passing in the street, or saloon interiors glimpsed through their open doorways. The perceived outsiders, however, do not necessarily reciprocate the child’s interest or make common cause with her. Wright recounts how, when very young, she visited a nearby stockman’s family: After a long walk which entailed crossing the creek . . . I arrived at the cottage where I was disappointed not to be welcomed as a playmate for the boys. They stood round staring while Mrs Cundy politely served me tea and asked whether my mother knew where I was. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about this as in my experience my mother always knew what I was doing, so I replied that she did. It was not until I was escorted home, scolded and shut in the bathroom . . . that I understood everyone else in the house, had been scouring for me.54

As children, Wright and Carr noted the presence of indigenous people who were relegated to the outermost margins, but they formed only a very limited perception of how these ‘strangers’ fitted in to ‘their’ world. Both would come to question and indeed challenge prevalent social attitudes towards the indigenous

40

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

peoples, and to form a complex understanding of relationship to these ‘others’, something of which is apparent in the recollection of a disturbing marginality or an interesting difference. Wright remembers Aborigines from her childhood as ‘only a few dark shadows . . . visible occasionally on the fringes of our lives, part of the background of itinerant rabbiters, fencers, Gypsies, drovers and wanderers that lay at the lowest level of the New England community’.55 In The Book of Small Carr has scattered childhood memories of Wash Mary and of a First Nations’ crew in a regatta: The Indian canoe races were the most exciting of all the Regatta. Ten paddles dipped as one paddle, ten men bent as one man, while the steersman kept time for them with grunting bows. The men had bright coloured shirts and gay headbands; some even had painted faces.56

She also recounts the story of a Native couple rescuing a Chinese man whose fishing boat was in difficulties, bringing him to shore and offering him a cup of tea, though whether she observed this in childhood, or merely heard of it then or later, is unclear.57 Although sympathetic and sensitive to the lowly status accorded First Nations peoples, Carr does not see herself or her family as complicit in their dispossession. Wright, however, looks back on her childhood ignorance through the prism of an increasing adult knowledge of the unjust treatment received by Australian Aborigines and the realization that she and her family were in fact the real outsiders. In her autobiographical essay, ‘The Granite Rocks of New England’, she combines an account of the childhood delight she and her brothers experienced playing in their beloved House Creek with speculations on the importance this site once had for local Aboriginal people who, she believes, gathered and placed the boulders through which the creek ran ‘with a musical song that I can still remember’ and that the area had profound significance as a sacred site.58 Reflecting many years later, she perceives herself as a different kind of outsider, excluded from true knowledge of the land of her childhood: I remember those rocks of the valley as clearly as I remember any part of my childhood, but with a sense of my own exclusion from their meaning. I was born within their influence, but I do not have any right to their story.59

Both writers express their own childhood confusion about inclusion or exclusion through allusions, direct and indirect, to the Garden of Eden. Childhood is an Eden from which time expels the adult, but Wright links this expulsion to her earliest memory, describing her three-year-old self bleeding from a splinter as she clambers on the woodheap:

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I am suffering not only from the pain, but also from the knowledge of disobedience (I should not have been where I was). If I had known the Genesis story, it would have been appropriate to the occasion, for I had suddenly been cast out of the Garden of Eden, and retribution was, as I knew too well, on the way.60

The Fall, here, is the development of self-consciousness accompanied by growing awareness of pain and mortality. Emily Carr’s most delightful childhood haven, the Cow Yard, also has its darker aspect: ‘Now, the Cow Yard was not Heaven, so of course bad things and sad things happened there too’.61 Death is present in ‘the Killing Tree’ which, strangled by ivy, appears to menace other creatures like the sparrows nesting there. Even when it finally blows over in a storm, providing fuel for a bonfire, its sinister associations linger in the child’s consciousness. The family enclave, guaranteeing physical comfort and emotional security, is one version of Eden, but both writers rebel against its demands. While emotionally and imaginatively enriching, it fails to afford them sufficient intellectual and spiritual nurturance to develop fully as artists and human beings, so they must move beyond it at the cost of themselves becoming permanent outsiders – a less comfortable role in practice than it may have appeared in childhood. Wright recognizes quite early that, once grown up, she will no longer be able to move easily between the Inside and Outside spaces open to her in childhood. As a woman she would be expected to concern herself almost entirely with domestic matters Inside, while the farm activities of Outside would be directed entirely by male family members, so the surrounding landscape in all its beauty would no longer be readily accessible to her. She writes with sadness: What I loved, then, I would have to leave if I wanted to be free. Though Inside was emphatically not a life I loved, the life of Outside, too, would have to go – would in any case be taken from me. The slopes and trees and creeks and the whole little valley in which we lived was my most beloved place. The blues and purples of the range we called the Snowies closed it in to eastward; the creek we called the House Creek, where I had played and paddled and explored and been stung by bulldog ants and hooked by blackberries and feared snakes and found wildflowers, ran through it; its hills already gullied by increasing erosion and the sharp hooves of sheep and the lumbering cattle and all the life of it – these would be a male preserve unless I became a household fixture and semi-slave without a husband.62

This awareness was important in her decision to become a writer, and to live and attend university in Sydney. Emily Carr, eager to escape her elder sisters’ tyranny

42

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

after their father’s death, while acknowledging, ‘I was the disturbing element in the family’,63 struggled for permission to attend art school in San Francisco, and subsequently travelled to England and France for further artistic training. Although both women retained a close association with their families all their lives, the relationship was fraught with tensions. Wright and Carr were also marked as outsiders by a society that largely devalued their chosen careers as poets and artists. Wright observes of early twentieth-century Australia:‘No society can be as cruelly narrow and conventional as a small and isolated community intent on respectability and the acquirement of wealth’, and little had changed in this regard when she herself began publishing in the 1940s.64 Carr grew up in a comparably conventional and materialistic milieu. Both women also rejected standard assumptions that artists should take English or European models as their principal source of inspiration. Determined to become a poet, Wright was taken aback on discovering at university that ‘the English Department had no truck with Australian writing’. She also found herself ‘something of an oddity’ there, both for her choice of subjects and as the only woman from a pastoral background enrolled in Arts.65 Carr’s stay in England heightened her awareness of Canadian landscape and its beauties. Not intending to detract from the beauty of English scenery, she writes of England as ‘pretty and orderly’ but of missing the mountains and woods, surmising that ‘it is natural to prefer the scenes one has been accustomed to’.66 Her artistic experience in both England and France also reinforced her commitment to develop a style of painting appropriate for representing Canadian landscape: More than ever was I convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours, her depth, her height, her unbounded wideness, silences too strong to be broken . . .67

Identifying with a particular landscape and region, however, might also be understood (somewhat paradoxically) as a response to feelings of not fully belonging either in the family or society at large, but in their autobiographical writing, Carr and Wright both reveal how love of the local landscape infused their childhood, something they absorbed deeply within themselves so it eventually became a major source of artistic inspiration. In The Book of Small, Carr associates herself both with the city of Victoria and with wild landscape that she considers characteristically Canadian. Her expeditions to remote parts of British Columbia inspired many paintings, but a surprisingly large number of her famous and iconic works were painted within a relatively narrow radius of the city where she lived.68 Many of Wright’s poems celebrate the Queensland

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rainforest region where she spent much of her adult life, but her strongest identification is with the district of New England where her parents’ and grandparents’ properties were located – the ‘clean, lean, hungry country’ so frequently evoked in her poetry. Fellow poet A. D. Hope writes: Judith Wright’s first task as a poet was to create the heartland from which her poetry could speak with an unequivocal voice. She makes her background so that she can be recognizably herself against it.69

Wright’s relationship to a loved landscape in which she works to place and find herself is complicated not only (although perhaps primarily) by her recognition of indigenous claim to that land (‘We did not know that the lowest of the hierarchy of beings who made up Wongwibina had the only true claim to the land’70), but also by recognition of the difference gender makes in her gradual recognition she could never inherit any of her family’s land. For Carr the relationship between a beloved landscape and gender is less material and more symbolic, ‘father’ being associated with the fenced English garden imposed on the native land, and ‘mother’ with the field of wild native lilies and the freedom of the world beyond the garden gate. Since neither Carr nor Wright accepted the constricting limits set for women artists, gender marginalized them still further. Carr’s choice of subject matter and ideas also set her apart from most contemporary women painters, as she drew on ethnographic resources in museums to increase her understanding of Native American art and, quite unsuitably, and indeed hazardously for a woman on her own, travelled to remote areas for her subject matter. She ‘transgressed . . . gender boundaries by invading the masculine world . . . of the bushwhacker, the ethnographer and the speculator”.71 Living an outsider existence was exhilarating, but also painful. Carr frequently asserts pride in her artistic vision and achievements, but she also experiences grief over her sense of exclusion: I don’t fit anywhere, so I’m out of everything and I ache and ache. I don’t fit in the family and I don’t fit in the church and I don’t fit in my own house as a landlady. It’s dreadful – like a game of Musical Chairs. I’m always out, never get a seat in time; the music always stops first.72

It is somewhat ironic that two women who perceived themselves as outsiders, and were regarded as oddities by many compatriots, should have contributed so substantially to their respective countries’ sense of nationhood; but perhaps it is also to be expected if the (modern postcolonial) artist is conceived as necessarily different – different by nature – as portrayed by Joyce. This does however

44

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

highlight the issue of gender, for the difference gender makes acts to accentuate markers of colonial difference and sometimes to negate the often positive difference accorded the artist in Joyce’s work. Ultimately, a portrait of the artist as a young woman presents the artist and the audience with a difference that is not so easily accommodated, even by success. Towards the end of Growing Pains Carr recalls her sister’s angry accusation of disloyalty upon reading the first three draft chapters of the autobiography, and remarks that: It had been absolutely necessary for truth’s sake to include a short few pages on our home life which for me had not been happy after the death of our parents. I had to show what drove me to the woods . . . what caused the real starting point of my turn to Art. My family had never been in sympathy with my painting, nor entered into my life as an artist. My home life was always a thing entirely apart from my art life.73

Although covert in this instance, Carr’s autobiography makes clear how deeply gender is implicated in the necessary and often unhappy separation of home and ‘work’. Where Carr alludes to gender but does not speak its name, Wright makes overt reference to the tendency of woman’s mark to disappear. Drawing Half a Lifetime to a close, she returns once more to the fraught question of autobiography: An autobiography is in any case a self-indulgence even if the writer tries to hide behind pure checkable historical ‘fact’, and of this there can’t be much. The most public life is a multiplicity: the private life of a woman leaves less trace than the silver trail of a slug which dries and blows away.74

3

Death of the Mother

The outsider theme predominates in both Carr’s and Wright’s accounts of childhood where family life is contrasted with a wider world offering more adventurous possibilities. Both women felt the first promptings of vocation early and initially their artistic activity met with a measure of family approval. Eightyear-old Emily’s charcoal drawing of a dog was admired by her father and Ethel Wright encouraged her daughter’s childhood versifying. Both girls, however, grew increasingly aware of the powerful restraints defining and confining their role in the family, their place in society, and their artistic development which led ultimately to a sense of themselves as outsiders who, to practise their art, must eventually break through these boundaries and venture into new territory. While the family might have seemed a safely enclosed space, their mothers’ fragile health began to undermine that security. Both families were strongly patriarchal and the two mothers adhered to nineteenth-century ideals of women as submissive to male authority, with lives centred on the home. Emily Carr (senior) ‘brought her family up under the English tradition that the men of a woman’s family were created to be worshiped’.1 The older women’s lives were also constrained by invalidism. Emily Carr (senior) was tubercular, and Ethel Wright suffered kidney disease, forcing her to lead a largely solitary life indoors, while her daughter later reflects that ‘my own inability to be a good, normal little girl with an interest in domestic matters’ must have increased her isolation.2 Although Carr remembers her mother as her staunchest supporter within the family – ‘She knew I was her ugly duck’ – the patriarchal family structure, with all its judgements and prohibitions, remained strong and unshakeable.3 While still very young, Carr and Wright each had to cope with her mother’s early death. Wright was twelve when her mother died in 1927, though in an interview she gives her age as ten4 and in Half a Lifetime as eleven.5 Carr’s mother died in 1886 when Emily was fifteen, though in Growing Pains she claims to have been twelve.6 In understating her age, each woman is, perhaps unconsciously, expressing the intensity of loss felt at a key moment in adolescence. For Wright, 45

46

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

it was ‘the end of my childhood’.7 Both families were fractured and, in each case, the mother was replaced by another woman whom the daughter found unsympathetic. Carr’s father died soon after his wife, leaving the family in control of an elder sister whom Carr considered harshly authoritarian: ‘The biggest sister owned everything and us too when Father died’.8 Wright claims: ‘None of us quite recovered from my mother’s death’.9 Her unhappiness was compounded by Philip Wright’s remarriage to a stepmother she found uncongenial, and then by being sent away to school, of which she comments: ‘The usually sorry tale of asocial children committed to boarding school is not really worth telling’.10 Her sense of loss intensified in 1929 with the death of her paternal grandmother, May Wright, who had also been an important figure in her life:11 I felt . . . that I was now entirely on my own: nobody was going to love me or look after me. Just as well too, since I was then in my own mind the ‘Cat that Walked by Itself ’ and all places must from now on be alike to me.12

For both Carr and Wright, the loss of their mothers prompted not only grief, but also guilt at failing to conform to the socially accepted feminine role. Carr was deeply distressed by her sister’s later comment about their dying mother’s worry at leaving her, ‘because I was wayward and different to her other children’.13 Wright also suffered considerable self-reproach. Georgina Arnott observes that: Ethel’s death confirmed Judith’s worst feelings about herself, derived from her experience of being female. Whereas her brothers could openly grieve for their mother, Judith was left with the guilt that she had made Ethel’s suffering worse, and a sense of unfulfilled responsibility. She was also on the cusp of puberty, now more aware of her gender.14

Family disruption made both girls yearn even more strongly to leave behind the limitations imposed on them, although it would be some years before they could avail themselves of such freedom. For both, the world of nature, from which they drew so much inspiration, was deeply infused with maternal presence, and personal relationships with their own mothers continued to be of key significance for their art. Each woman demonstrates Virginia Woolf ’s claim that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’.15 At times motherhood is associated with plenitude and beauty as in Wright’s account of the orchard at Wallamumbi: Planted, evidently, years before I was born, it was in its full beauty of flower and fruit in my early memory. From mid-spring to the fall of the last pears and apples, it was a kind of Eden, with more variety than the first reported garden

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had. Cherries, peaches, apricots, yellow and brown-skinned pears, sweet red Jonathan apples and green cooking apples all grew there in the innocent days before the Fall and the arrival of fruitflies and other pests which spoiled its harvests . . . my mother and her children picked and picked until all the house’s baskets were full, and our hands and faces sticky with juice.16

Here is an Edenic image of mother–child relationships before the Fall and its ensuing corruption – fruitflies and other pests – had arrived to damage them. It also suggests what Wright, as a child, perceived as the bounteous and rewarding world of Outside, representing the free, independent life she determined to pursue at all costs, as opposed to Inside which permitted only the limited existence considered appropriate for young women of her social background. Carr also cherished memories of Outside, represented by the cow yard and the field of native wild lilies associated with her mother. Despite being firmly ensconced Inside then, each mother is linked, if only briefly, to nature’s abundance, even assisting her daughter in some measure to move into wider regions Outside. Carr describes a picnic shortly before her mother’s death when the two walk together through the lily field to the boundary fence where Emily Carr (senior) takes out a key and unlocks the gate: I stepped with Mother beyond the confines of our very fenced childhood . . . Beacon Hill Park was just as it had always been from the beginning of time, not cleared, not trimmed.17

The mother leads her daughter into land ‘not cleared, not trimmed’, representing an existence beyond narrow domestic confines and an introduction to the wild nature which eventually provided so much of Carr’s artistic subject matter. Mother and daughter are here strongly identified: ‘I was for once Mother’s oldest, youngest, her companion-child’.18 Wright’s mother unlocks a gate, metaphorically, by encouraging her daughter to read: ‘This opened the door to another and much more comprehensive outer world, beyond the problems I was finding in my role as a girl’.19 Although Wright acknowledges her mother’s sentimental taste in poetry ‘did not mesh with mine’,20 she obviously provided some imaginative stimulus: ‘pointing out birds or pansies’ eyebrows’.21 Near the end of her life, Wright claims: Without my mother’s interest and the beautiful landscape I grew up in, I might not have become a writer at all, let alone a poet. My grandmother too was an inspiration, sending us to sleep with nursery rhymes and poems.22

For both Wright and Carr, mothers and maternity were associated with the power of nature and its recurring cycle of life, death and renewal, although

48

Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Wright, perhaps, lays more emphasis on how life yields inexorably to death. In the poem ‘Wedding Photo, 1913’, her mother’s bridal image becomes a constant reminder of mortality: That was the most important thing she showed us – that pain increases, death is final, that people vanish. She never thought of that, her second bridegroom, standing there invisible on her right hand.23

This elegaic poem reflects on ‘the fluid and shifting relationship of parent and child which is the basis of human continuity’.24 Marriage, birth and death intertwine, as the child of that union, not even conceived when the photo was taken, salutes the bridal pair, herself now an ageing woman for whom death inevitably awaits. Awareness of life necessarily giving way to death is an important theme in Wright’s poetry, of which Shirley Walker comments, ‘There is no birth without a corresponding death; both are aspects of the same process’.25 In The Book of Small, Carr celebrates the energy and joy of childhood, which she sees as a major source of her later development as an artist, just as, in her poetry, Wright often represents the child as a ‘symbol of the continuing renewal of life and love’.26 Even in childhood, however, Carr experienced intimations of a close association between motherhood, birth and death. Although the cow yard appeared a fertile, maternal space where she could behave boisterously, free from the more usual female experience of ‘being shut and buttoned up and obeying countless rules’,27 even here the child is aware of menace inherent in a dead tree she calls the killing tree: It was not a very big tree, but the heavy bunch of ivy that hung about it made it look immense. The leaves of the ivy formed a dense dark surface about a foot away from the bole of the tree, for the leaves hung on long stems. The question was – what filled the mysterious space between the leaves and the tree? Away above the ivy, at the top, the bare branches of the tree waved skinny arms, as if they warned you that something terrible was there.28

While relationships with their mothers were deeply important to Wright and Carr as children, each grew up in times when young women were expected to follow a standard trajectory of marriage and motherhood, so any other vocation could be pursued only with extreme difficulty. Their own potential as mothers was an issue for both women. Despite her childlessness, Carr clearly had strong maternal yearnings expressed partly through encouraging young protégées, like

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Carol Pearson and Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, and partly in caring for a large number of pet animals. Her journals reveal moments of regret at never having given birth: ‘motherhood is great. I wish I had felt it in this life’.29 She also speculates whether bearing a child might have increased her artistic insight: Three new pictures are on the way, an immense wood, a wood edge and a woods movement. These woods movements should be stupendous, the inner burstings of growth showing through the skin of things, throbbing and throbbing to burst their way out. Perhaps if one had felt the pangs of motherhood in one’s own body one could understand better. Until people have been fathers or mothers they can hardly understand the fullness of life.30

Carr, however, considers the role of artist imposes maternal responsibilities: I am an expectant mother making clothes for the baby that is coming. Whether I feel like it or not I must paint every day, so that when the child comes, I will have something to clothe her in. Suppose she came and I had nothing ready and my body had to go naked and died of exposure and cold? It behooves me to make them fine and careful, these coverings, that my child may not be dressed in sackcloth and slovenly workmanship and people will laugh and turn away from the ugly thing. And oh, if it were stillborn – if the idea I have been searching for so long materialized in my mind and I let it die there and did not bring it further with expression, but, idle and indifferent, let it face and dwindle prematurely, that would be worst of all.31

As Gerta Moray points out, ‘Carr’s images of artistic creation through metaphors of birth and maternal nurturing contrast with metaphors of the paintbrush as penis that have so frequently been used by twentieth century modernist painters.’32 Wright who, unlike Carr, did bear a child, adopts a similar attitude, reminding fellow poet Rosemary Dobson, how they met at a party in Sydney ‘after we’d both had babies’ and discussed ‘how poetry and babies came from the same place’.33 She writes of the late 1940s when: ‘Babies and small children seemed everywhere. I looked at those babies with envy and longing’.34 Longing for a child, however, was accompanied by anxiety, as a youthful riding accident had left her with a twisted pelvis which meant that childbirth ‘was likely to be a dangerous exercise’.35 Moreover, she and her lover, Jack McKinney, were unable to marry since his wife refused a divorce. Nevertheless, Wright went ahead with a pregnancy she had partly feared, partly encouraged, and her daughter, Meredith, was born in 1950. The irregularity of her situation marked her yet again as an outsider, although the chores of housekeeping and child rearing now saw her plunged into standard domestic activities conventionally expected of young mothers:

50

Judith Wright and Emily Carr I’m a member of the Parents and Citizens Association and apparently accepted as a respectable member of society, or at least one whose cakes are not despised. I find this rather funny, but it can’t be helped.36

Bonds of love between mother and daughter proved deep and lasting – many years later, Wright proclaimed, ‘That child was and is the joy of my life’.37 Wright and Carr draw on personal experience of mothers and mothering in developing images of a primordial, mythic figure, often presented as an embodiment of Nature or as arising from the earth itself. Although immensely powerful, associated with both birth and destruction, such images may also communicate the sense of a mother’s tender affection for her child. Wright’s poem ‘Ishtar’38 is one example, invoking the ancient Assyrian love goddess of that name: Ishtar . . . appears as the Evening Star, bringing man and woman to bed: she appears as the Morning Star, waking men to go fighting in wars, a decidedly violent goddess, a wielder of weapons, as well as the goddess of love.39

Presiding over both the Evening and Morning Star, Ishtar is associated with the passage of time and is also a vegetation deity responsible for the earth’s annual renewal: In Mesopotamia ‘Mother Earth’ was the inexhaustible source of new life. Consequently, the power manifest in fertility in all its forms was personified in the Goddess who was the incarnation of the reproductive forces. It was she who renewed vegetation, prompted the growth of the crops and the propagation of man and beast.40

Initially in Wright’s poem the speaker senses Ishtar’s presence at a human birth without being able to see her: ‘the room was full of your glance who had just gone away’. Being present when ‘the mare was bearing her foal’ brings her closer to the goddess who still remains concealed: ‘I did not see your face’. As the poem moves from its starting point of human and animal birth, the speaker begins to realize Ishtar’s significance in her own life: When in fear I became a woman I first felt your hand. When the shadow of the future first fell across me it was your shadow, my grave and hooded attendant.

The goddess remains hooded, but the young woman now feels her touch, the weight of her hand. The tone of the lines is solemn, even sombre. The future casts a shadow and her hooded attendant is ‘grave’ – the word carrying associations of

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death as well as seriousness. The goddess is now her constant companion, determining the speaker’s fate regardless of any action she herself may take: ‘It is all one whether I deny or affirm you’. Faith in the human heart and mind fades into insignificance before her: You neither know nor care for the truth of my heart; but the truth of my body has all to do with you.

Ishtar exists in ‘the realm of the absolute event’, those inexorable processes of birth and death that completely overwhelm the individual experiencing them and which intellect is powerless to control. Gradually, in her progress through life, the speaker moves closer to Ishtar, finally gazing on her face: Then why is it that when I at last see your face under that hood of slate-blue, so calm and dark, so worn with the burden of an inexpressible knowledge – why is it that I begin to worship you with tears?

In a moving confrontation, the speaker recognizes she herself is part of nature’s cycle. All life, her own included, will end in death, yet this is also a moment of artistic vision. To know the goddess is to participate in her power, just as W.B. Yeats describes the encounter between Leda and Zeus: Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?41

Putting on the god’s knowledge, however, can only bring foreknowledge of death: ‘The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / and Agamemnon dead’.42 In Wright’s poem, the insight, gained through lived experience, transforms awe into sympathy for the goddess and all she represents. Ishtar’s face – calm, dark and worn – reveals suffering imposed by ‘the burden of an inexpressible knowledge’. Her hood signifies her mysteriousness since people can never accurately predict when they will be drawn into her realm of the absolute event. Its colour blue may indicate some slight connection with the Virgin Mary, but slate-blue suggests the sky at dusk as light gives way to darkness.43 The speaker’s tears acknowledge both Nature’s power and her maternal tenderness, while recognizing the transience of each individual life. Carr describes herself as mothered by Nature through life and even in death: ‘Dear Mother Earth! I think I have always specially belonged to you . . . When I die I should like to be in you uncoffined, unshrouded, the petals of flowers against my flesh and you covering me up’.44 The creative process resembles a

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

resurrection, with artists thrusting roots deep into the motherland of earth to emerge into light and glory: So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul, down among dark and silence, let your roots creep forth, gaining strength. Drive them in deep, take firm hold of the beloved Earth Mother. Push, push towards the light. Draw deeply from the good nourishment of the earth but rise into the glory of the light and air and sunshine. Rejoice in your own soil, the place that nurtured you when a helpless seed. Fill it with glory – be glad.45

The great surge of paintings produced after Carr’s meeting with the Group of Seven in 1927 contains a number of ‘monumental female figures in the guise of Native carvings, images both of mothers with children and of Dzunuk’wa, the Kwakwaka’wakw wild woman of the woods’.46 These formidable images, drawing on the artist’s long held fascination with the part played by Native women in establishing powerful communal bonds,47 represent a less comforting view of nature than that found in her journal entries. In Klee Wyck Carr describes her 1928 visit to Gitanyow/Kitwancool where she was received by a formidable figure who, in some ways, resembles Judith Wright’s Ishtar. The ‘tall, cold woman’, Mrs Douse – a chief in her own right married to another chief – questioned her motives in coming there: ‘Her eyes raked my face to see if I was talking “straight” ’.48 After scrutiny, Carr was accepted temporarily into the Douse household and assent was given to her project of sketching and painting the local totem poles.49 She painted a portrait of Mrs Douse whom she saw as ‘a powerful figure of maternal authority’50, a quality she also perceived in many of the carvings: The sun enriched the old poles grandly. They were carved elaborately and with great sincerity. Several times the figure of a woman that held a child was represented. The babies had faces like wise little old men. The mothers expressed all womanhood – the big wooden hands holding the child were so full of tenderness they had to be distorted enormously in order to contain it all. Womanhood was strong in Kitwancool . . . I sat in front of a totem mother and began to draw – so full of her strange, wild beauty that I did not notice the storm that was coming, till the totem poles went black, flashed vividly white and then went black again.51

Painting images of mother and child totem poles enabled Carr ‘to exalt an aspect of femininity that she revered, and from which she felt excluded – that of motherhood’.52 The carving portrayed in Totem Mother, Kitwancool, painted in 1928, formed the base of a totem pole, although only the image of mother and child appears in the painting (Figure 6). Carr emphasizes the substantiality and

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weight of the strongly sculpted figure holding a baby against her body and the red-brown of the wood glows warmly against a cool blue background. The central image forms a tight rectangular shape, emphasized by verticals on either side, giving a sense of compressed energy, as if the figure is about to burst its bounds – an effect further reinforced by the strong frontal gaze as enormous eyes stare out of the canvas. Maria Tippett explains: She knew that the small figure made the larger appear greater in comparison, that by stressing the relief of the larger figure’s eyebrows, mouth and cheeks, and by exaggerating the size of the head, she could enhance its wild beauty.53

Although Carr notes how the original carvers distorted the big wooden hands to convey maternal tenderness, the child, looking straight ahead in the painting, is cherished, but firmly enclosed – possibly even trapped – within a smaller rectangle formed by the larger figure’s arms and hands. As Wright’s ‘Ishtar’ suggests, the individual is held fast within nature’s grip, ‘in the realm of the absolute event’. Carr’s fierce image of totem mother and child also derives strength through its striking contrast to traditional images of Madonna and child so prevalent in Western art. She writes in her journal of how a parson reacted when she showed him the painting: ‘ “I’d hate to dream of her,” ’ to which in response she exclaims: ‘Oh those that gab about beauty and can’t see it!’54 Equally important to Carr as the mother and child totems were the poles and carvings representing the mythic figure of Dzunuk’wa to whom she devotes an entire section of Klee Wyck, describing different versions she came across in her journeys to Indian villages. She seems to have first stumbled on the image during her 1912 visit to Guyasdoms/Gwa’yasdams as she struggled along a slippery plank among head-high nettles: ‘My feet slipped and I shot headlong to her very base . . . the great wooden image towering above me was indeed terrifying’. Carr gives a graphic account of its overwhelming effect: Her head and trunk were carved out of, or rather into, the bole of a great red cedar. She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart, and the carver had only chipped away the outer wood so that you could see her. Her arms were spliced and socketed to the trunk, and were flung wide in a circling, compelling movement. Her breasts were two eagleheads, fiercely carved . . . The eyes were two rounds of black, set in wider rounds of white, and placed in deep sockets under wide, black eyebrows. Their fixed stare bored into me as if the very life of the old cedar looked out, and it seemed that the voice of the tree itself might have burst from that great round cavity, with projecting lips, that was her mouth.55

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Carr’s painting of this figure, Guyasdom’s D’Sonoqua, completed between 1928 and 1930, is as dramatic as her prose account.56 The round mouth and staring eyes, with their thick, black bands of eyebrow, are startling in their intensity and the figure’s outstretched arms appear to draw all comers towards her. The picture’s composition suggests the carved figure must be circumvented by anyone who wishes to reach the village behind. Carr’s description of her growing within the heart of a great red cedar tree is reinforced by the way this Dzunuk’wa appears to grow out of the green and blue vegetation, with its yellow highlights, swirling around her legs – its spiky tips corresponding to the sharp points of eagles’ beaks protruding from her breasts. Carr may have been influenced here by the story of another carving from a different Indian village, Tsaxis/Fort Rupert. ‘Indian Tom’ tells her that D’Sonoqua is the wild woman of the woods who steals children, carrying them off to her caves. ‘When she cries “OO-oo-oo-ooeo”, Indian mothers are too frightened to move. They stand like trees, and the children go with D’Sonoqua’.57 Those spiky breasts form an uncomfortable, disquieting image. The Tsaxis Dzunuk’wa formed part of a house pole. Carr describes her as particularly terrifying with shouting mouth and deep eye-sockets: Those sockets had no eye-balls, but were empty holes filled with stare . . . The whole figure expressed power, weight, domination, rather than ferocity . . . A man could have sat on either huge shoulder. She was unpainted, weather-worn, sun-cracked, and the arms and hands seemed to hang loosely. The fingers were thrust into the carven mouths of two human heads, held crowns down. From behind, the sun made unfathomable shadows in eye, cheek and mouth. Horror tumbled out of them.58

Like Wright celebrating the Assyrian goddess Ishtar, Carr draws on the ancient world for reinforcement, with her Dzunuk’wa figures a means of expressing anger born of being woman in a man’s world, and celebrating female power in her art. Like Carr, Wright often represents Nature as female – cherishing its inhabitants and nurturing them emotionally: I looked and saw under the moon’s cold sheet your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart.59

In her poem ‘The Watcher’, the land’s voice becomes that of a mother soothing her child by offering her own body as shield and nourishment. Love transforms even the harshest terrain into a refuge. ‘I am the garden beyond the burning wind, / I am the river among the burning sand’.60 The nurturer also assumes a monumental presence, similar to Carr’s Totem Mother:

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I am the woman-statue of the fountain out of whose metal breasts continually starts a living water; I am a vase shaped only for my hour of holding you.61

Wright’s vision of nature, however, is not always so tender. In ‘Cyclone and Aftermath’62 she is a violent force, as terrifying as Dzunuk’wa, when cyclonic winds lash the land to create ‘a universe of weeping’, destroying beauty she herself has created. The tall rose gums, implore and gesture – bent on the wheel, spring up in a moment’s mercy and with flung arms accuse her, betrayer, destroyer, from whose inescapable injustice the hooded shadows fly.

There can be no pity for ‘the old witch is furious still’, deluging the landscape: This is her cruelty – that she has hung decay like lace over the laughing brides of summer. Fungus and mould spread their webs in the hush when the wind has fallen and the tree fallen . . .

The poem enjoins us, however, to accept that nature readily destroys what she herself creates: ‘she is not one thing nor the other’. Life and death are indissolubly linked and the poem concludes with an image reminiscent of ‘Ishtar’: She is that figure drawing the twilight’s hood about her: that wise woman from the land past joy or grief.

Several of Emily Carr’s paintings present nature, in the form of dense, overwhelming forest landscape, as a frightening, if not menacing force. Strangled By Growth contains a hooded figure – a totem almost completely obscured by forest.63 One red eye glares out from foliage draped around a fierce, blue-shaded face. The mouth is stretched in a rictus, emphasized by red streaks outlining its upper lid. One hand emerging from a gap in the foliage appears to be holding a staff. It is unclear whether the carved figure, whom Carr believed to be another Dzunuk’wa, represents the spirit of the trees, or whether it is in the process of being absorbed into the depths of a forest which steadily swallows all evidence of human endeavour. Johanne Lamoureux remarks that: Access to the totem poles was not always easy, and Carr turned this to her advantage by showing them partially hidden . . . By smothering the objects in

56

Judith Wright and Emily Carr vegetation . . . her exaggerated fusing of the artifacts and their environment . . . also points to the partial concealment of the view and the oppressive conditions of the forest experience.64

Carr writes in her journal: I want the pole vague and the tangle of growth strenuous. I want the ferocious, strangled lonesomeness of that place, creepy, nervy, forsaken, dank, dirty, dilapidated, the rank smell of nettles and rotting wood, the lush greens of the rank sea grass and the overgrown bushes, and the great dense forest behind full of unseen things and great silence . . .65

For Carr and Wright, Nature was an immensely powerful force, both dangerous and nurturing, determining the processes of life and death. In their work they represent their land of origin as mother, so that Mother Nation blends with Mother Nature. Each seeks to cherish the land which bore her. The mother gives birth and the woman artist in turn nurtures and reveres that mother. To contemplate mothering, however, can also involve contemplating death. Wright’s poem ‘Waiting Ward’66 relates to the end of a difficult pregnancy when she had to spend time in hospital because of threatened eclampsia.67 It describes a gynaecological ward where a young woman is dying amidst others waiting to give birth. She ‘carried death like a child’ while, All the other women overmastered by life contained besides their terror that terror’s gentle answer . . .

The young woman is transformed, in the poet’s memory, to a formidable stone figure, not unlike Carr’s portrayal of some of the totem carvings: Ageless face of stone beaten by senseless air, no birds come any longer to nest in your hollows. The sun that rises on you cannot undo your night.

In her imagination, the dead woman also becomes a feature of the natural landscape: ‘Face of grey stone / I have turned you into a mountain’. She will remain for the poet a constant opposing presence in face of a world devoted to triviality, to winning and losing.

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In representing such monumental female figures, Carr and Wright pay tribute to the power of women, whilst affirming themselves as artists. The images are also a way of thinking back through their mothers and of contemplating motherhood. Each woman, prompted perhaps by memories of her own mother’s early death, shows an awareness of maternal vulnerability for thinking back through one’s mother can engender grief as well as strength. Children can lose their mothers prematurely, while mothers may have to face the death or possible death of their own children. Carr, who believed First Nations women were ‘ideal examples of motherhood’, had to confront this situation through her friendship with Sophie Frank in whom she may have seen some resemblance to her own mother: ‘Both were nurturing and affectionate, self-effacing, and patient in suffering, and both had lost many babies’.68 Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one. Her little graves were dotted all over the cemetery. I never knew more than three of her twenty-one children to be alive at one time. By the time she was in her early fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry.69

In comparing her own mother with Sophie, Carr affirms the love she feels for both. She makes no distinction between the love, patience and suffering of the respective mothers despite their considerable difference in social status. For better or worse, Carr’s love is class and colour blind. There is a politics at work here; but Carr’s equation of the two very differently placed women is devoid of the kind of political awareness that suffuses Wright’s work. Many children no matter their class, died before the age of five in the nineteenth century, but Carr does not acknowledge that the suffering endured by Sophie – the deaths of so many children – is the direct result of poor living conditions among First Nations People, displaced and dispossessed by the violence of colonization. For Wright the political is personal and the personal cannot help but be political. As a new mother herself in the 1950s, Wright was aghast at the shadows a prospective nuclear war was casting over life on earth: There had been awed speculation over the possibility of chain reactions ripping the world itself apart and over its possibilities for weapons development. Technological advances had made the bombing of English and European towns more horrific than the guns of World War 1.70

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, when her daughter was just over two months old, prompted intense horror.71 In her poem ‘Two Songs for the World’s End’ the threat to a beloved child also embodies the terrifying prospect of universal annihilation:

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr Bombs ripen on the leafless tree under which the children play. And there my darling all alone dances in the spying day.72

Wright perceived it part of her responsibility as a poet to warn of the dangers by encompassing such dark visions in her work. In ‘Request to a Year’,73 we see the poet thinking back through her mother and great-grandmother to compose a poem about her great-great-grandmother: Later my mother left me an exercise-book of great-grandmother’s, containing stories and reminiscences of her childhood in Switzerland, including a tale I later used as the source of a poem (Request to a Year).74

The setting is distanced in time and place as we observe a nineteenth-century family picnicking in a precipitous Swiss landscape, where the mother sits on a high rock watching her son drift helplessly down the river on a small ice-floe headed for a waterfall ‘that struck rock-bottom eighty foot below’, while his sister, ‘impeded, / no doubt, by the petticoats of the day’, reaches out an alpenstock which he fortunately grasps. The poem, however, focuses on their mother, a ‘legendary devotee of the arts’ whose eight children leave her little time ‘for painting pictures’. But, observing her son’s danger ‘from a difficult distance’, she practises her art: Nothing, it was evident, could be done; and with the artist’s isolating eye my great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene. The sketch survives to prove the story by.

The poet then positions herself as both mother and artist: Year, if you have no Mother’s day present planned; reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

Artists must maintain ‘a difficult distance’ from their subject, requiring both passionate involvement and ‘the isolating eye’. Yet the poet considers such detachment is the greatest gift she could receive as a mother. There is a sense here also that Wright, like Carr, regards her works of art as children for whom she is responsible, no matter what suffering is involved. She makes her request to the year since only through time and experience will she develop the skill and emotional control necessary to nurture her art. Motherhood, and its associations both positive and negative, was a profoundly significant part of childhood for both Carr and Wright, resonating throughout

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their lives and generating potent imagery for them to draw upon artistically in later life. Both women explored their memories of the childhood which had fashioned them in their autobiographical writing as well as in their art and for both the need to move beyond the boundaries which had confined them as children was made easier in some ways by their own mothers’ death. The early removal of a mother on whom they might have modelled their future selves and lives gave both Carr and Wright an altered world-view – one that afforded them the opportunity of escape from a prescriptive patriarchal inheritance. The loss of a mother not only encouraged a more conscious dwelling on what motherhood meant but also an inclination to explore what might be available to women beyond biological prescription. The family enclosures of childhood had made Carr and Wright aware of themselves as outsiders and the difficulties attendant on that status. But escape from those enclosures was no real escape. As adults they found themselves contending with outsider status as they struggled to pursue their chosen profession in a male-dominated milieu which sought to confine women artists within narrowly circumscribed boundaries. Male artists and poets seeking to define national identity in their work were likely to regard as intruders any women who sought to participate in this endeavour. On the other hand, women who confined themselves to appropriately feminine subjects, were likely, on that account, to be dismissed as peripheral or insignificant. Vincent Buckley’s notorious comments on Judith Wright point to the problem with his conclusion that a woman writer assuming roles of bard, commentator or prophet becomes unwomanly – a bit of a shrew, the worst thing any woman can be.75 Yet, choosing to represent woman’s body and sexuality from within, rather than as viewed object, was also unacceptable to those male artists and critics who acted as gatekeepers of appropriate subject matter. Moray points out how Carr began producing her massive paintings of female totems almost immediately after meeting the Group of Seven. Although this encounter formed a highlight of Carr’s career, invigorating her as an artist after long years of self-doubt when she produced comparatively little work, she was uncertain whether the Group fully accepted her as a fellow artist and if they would consider her work a worthy contribution to their project of shaping national identity through portraying Canada’s landscape, but she doubted their full acceptance.76 Carr had struggled to be accepted by fellow artists, in her home province. She claims male artists, particularly, were jealous because her work was stronger and ‘more like a man’s’ and that in BCSFA exhibitions they hung her work ‘under the shelves or on the ceiling’.77 Harry Gibb, the artist she studied with in France, ‘could never let me

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

forget I was only a woman. He would never allow a woman could compete with men’.78 Although her social situation as a single woman was less anomalous than Wright’s as an unmarried mother, she experienced ‘lifelong perplexity at the boundaries constructed by gender codes’,79 while her determination to work as a professional artist, disregarding the subject matter and painterly style considered appropriate for women, reinforced her sense of being an outsider. Wright had realized when very young the secondary role assigned to women in her immediate social environment, through discovering that only her brothers could inherit the family property which meant so much to her and, at university, found herself ‘rebelling against the masculine order of things which ruled both the world and its future, the Australian journals and their choices in literature’.80 Sending poems out for publication in her early twenties, Wright, like the Bronte sisters in the mid-nineteenth century, removed the feminine from her signature. As Charlotte Bronte defends the sisters’ assumption of non-gender specific names because ‘we had the vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice’,81 so too Wright explains how she chose to sign ‘J. Wright’ because she ‘feared a female name would damn them [the poems] from the start’.82 Later Wright was criticized as editor of the annual anthology, Poetry 1948 for including the work of too many women, to which she responded: I wasn’t resiling from the view that those poets were among the best writers in Australia, but there were few of them as yet. Maybe it would take a long time for them to be accepted as writers.83

The often lonely road of the female artist was long and hard, but frustration, anger and sometimes bitterness would be mitigated by the satisfaction of accomplishment and delight in the honing of skills that would enable the highest achievement of artistic expression.

4

The Voyage Out

When Rachel, the protagonist of Woolf ’s first novel, The Voyage Out,1 leaves the sheltered protection of two English middle-class maiden aunts she encounters ‘the ways of men’ (sexually, socially and intellectually) and is deeply disturbed by the impact they have upon the person she is and the person she might become. Rachel’s death from fever contracted in South America might be understood as a death of the self, or the death of a dream, brought on by the realization that a young woman of the early twentieth century cannot hope to marry and pursue a professional career as a musician. St John Hirst considers marriage to Rachel: It immediately suggested the picture of two people sitting alone over the fire; the man was reading, the woman sewing . . . He tried all sorts of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his . . . but he saw them always, walled up in a warm firelit room. When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world . . . All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and knew best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men.2

Marriage, even to the most liberal-thinking of men, threatens to reduce a woman to prescribed roles and modes of behaviour that are inimical to the singleness of purpose demanded of intense creative production. For eighteen-year-old Emily and Judith, the first voyage out – San Francisco for Carr in 1891 and Sydney for Wright in 1934 – is the separation from the protection of family and a relative freedom from the constraints of gender and class expectations as understood by the family. It is an exciting period of selfdiscovery for each – as woman and as artist. But the voyage out also brings painful recognition that the creative flowering of a woman’s potential and pursuit of artistic ambition, indeed, a profession, comes at a cost. Where Wright would take the radical step of living with the man she loved (a married man) and bearing his child out of wedlock, Carr felt she must choose between marriage and profession. 61

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

In her autobiography she recalls English women’s ‘horrid’ attitude towards ‘this marrying business’, reflecting that ‘They seemed to think the aim of every girl was to find a husband’.3 Carr’s decision to choose the life of a single woman could be understood to be as radical as Wright’s to ‘live in sin’. Although Wright chose to live in relative isolation in the Tamborine Mountain district of Queensland, removed some distance from family (her daughter reflecting on the shared discomfort of visits home to pastoral New England), and although she would suffer what Meredith refers to as ‘the pains of differentness’,4 she was bolstered by a class-born confidence and more importantly, the support of an ‘equal heart and mind’ in Jack McKinney.5 In addition, although attitudes towards women’s sexual freedom and recognition of their intellectual capacity could hardly be called liberal in post-Second World War Australia, Carr’s coming of age in the last decade of the nineteenth century places her firmly within the more rigid strictures of Victorian womanhood that, like the bone stays of the corset, severely limited the expression of difference. Yet, where ‘the others were prim, orthodox, religious’, Carr obstinately maintained her position as ‘the disturbing element of the family’.6 Although their circumstances and choices were different, both women achieved a perhaps surprising degree of artistic and personal freedom that was surely enabled by the fluctuating values of the 1890s through the first decades of the twentieth century. This shifting ground opened up something of a gap in the fence through which an unorthodox girl of sufficient will might struggle. The symbolic language Carr uses to describe the moment of release as a child when she is enabled to pass through the fence that demarcates the gendered spaces of Inside and Outside, conveys the momentous significance of so seemingly small an act. When her mother fits the ‘big key’ into the padlock, ‘the binding-chain fell away from the pickets’, the pickets that ‘had always separated us from the tremendous world’. Carr relates how ‘Mother and I squeezed through a crack’; how ‘bushes whacked against our push’; but how their joint efforts were rewarded by entry into Beacon Hill Park and ‘a grassy opening, filled with sunshine.’7 Beacon Hill Park and the greater wilderness of Vancouver Island beyond would become the tremendous world of Carr’s canvas, a world to which she held the key. But the struggle for the freedom to be herself as artist and woman, the struggle to possess this key to ‘bigness’, was a life struggle. Throughout her writing, Carr portrays herself as different – a difference understood as inherent to the artist and essential for artistic vision and creation. But this difference is constantly belittled, derided and punished. In the chapter of Growing Pains in which Emily records the death of her mother and the miserable period that followed under the difficult (and from

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Carr’s point of view, tyrannical) rule of her elder sister, Carr asserts her difference from her siblings – a difference allied with naughtiness and refusal to conform. She moves on in the chapter that follows, entitled ‘Drawing and Insubordination’, to track the relationship between ‘difference’ and an artistic temperament. In this vignette, Emily’s talent for drawing is recognized (at the age of eight) and charily praised by her father, but understood merely as a hindrance to personal cleanliness and domestic order by her mother and sister Alice.8 Carr represents her realization as an artist as largely self-determined despite antagonistic or merely unsympathetic forces ranged against her. The construction of an easel out of cast-off cherry-tree prunings is an early example of the self-proficiency, doggedness of purpose and creativity required to accomplish a much-desired end. Carr comments that ‘With this easel under the dormer window of our bedroom I felt completely an artist,’ but notes the inability or refusal of her sister Alice to recognize the personal importance of this achievement to Emily: ‘My sister Alice who shared the room complained when she swept round the legs of the easel.’9 At school, Emily is not ‘another good Carr’ like her sisters, but is rather, a disappointment, always ‘getting into a great deal of trouble for drawing faces on my fingernails and pinafores and textbooks.’10 The woman who would be an artist troubles the social and moral order of her day – not with any particular intention to do so, but merely by nature of her calling. Carr suggests that to be a woman artist is to set oneself against and outside the norms of what she describes as mid-Victorian orthodoxy11 – the professions of woman (with her associated roles of devoted daughter, loyal sister, wife and mother) and artist being conceived as utterly incompatible. Given that the representation of her feelings and behaviour as a child through adolescence and young adulthood are the result of reflection and assessment over a long period of time, it is difficult to disentangle Carr’s understanding of her ‘natural’ personality as insubordinate and wilful, and her representation of this young self as ‘a portrait of the artist as a young woman’ – the modern artist necessarily being insubordinate and wilful. Either way, the most significant feature of the chapters relating to the young Emily’s response to her artistic talent is determination and, despite bouts of despondency, belief in herself. Most significantly, Carr records the momentous assertion of her ‘right to exist’12 in the form of her decision to request the permission of her guardian, James Lawson,13 to ‘go away from home’ to the California School of Design in San Francisco. This act necessitates the flouting of her sister’s authority and is thus conceived as a daring and wilful first step towards independence and the pursuit of her chosen profession. It is a step that aligns Carr with the Outside

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

world of men and action. San Francisco is reputed to be big, bad and dangerous; but Carr recalls that ‘the wickedness of San Francisco caused me no anxiety’.14 This lack of anxiety is in part due to her ignorance, but also, she implies, due to an awareness that ‘evil’ thrives within ‘the best’ of homes as it does in ‘the worst’. Carr suggests that the appellations of ‘best’ and ‘worst’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not class- or means-based, but rather the clothes that often cover the truth of the body and soul. This search for truth, this desire to discover and represent the life beneath the surface, will become the driving force of Carr’s life and art. Although Doris Shadbolt claims that ‘Nothing had happened at the school to enlarge her awareness of art and life’, basing this claim on Carr’s apparently unchanged ‘straightforward representational approach’ to her artistic subjects,15 and although this claim is reiterated in Carr’s own assessment of her work from this period as ‘humdrum and unemotional – objects honestly portrayed, nothing more’,16 something very significant did in fact happen: Emily became convinced of the profession she wanted to pursue, of her ability as an artist, and was strengthened in her determination to work towards that end. Although Carr does not manage to entirely escape the wider protection of family in this voyage out, she does manage a measure of independence that encourages and sustains her self-belief and self-confidence. ‘The year that my family spent in San Francisco,’ recalls Carr in the story ‘Sisters Coming – Sisters Going’, ‘my work had practically been at a standstill. I did attend the Art School but joined in all the family doings, excursions, picnics, exploring. No one took my work seriously.’17 But once left ‘all alone among San Francisco’s wickedness’, Carr writes that she enjoyed her independence and worked very hard: ‘The harder I worked the happier I was, and I made progress.’18 Carr, like nineteenthcentury poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, makes clear that art is a serious thing – serious as life itself.19 For Carr, study in San Francisco would lay the foundation for the future life and work of The Artist.20 But although Art School is a serious undertaking for Carr, she records the degree to which for many of the girls at the school the study of art is merely a moment of respite (‘To have fun and escape housework’) before the real life of marriage and motherhood begins: it ‘passes the time between school and marriage.’21 Although Carr respects her guardian and is grateful to him for her release, she surmises that he had given his permission for the voyage out because he believed she would be ‘tamed and taught to appreciate home.’ For him, ‘Art was as good an excuse as any.’22 Carr’s voyage is ultimately brought to an end with a letter from her guardian who thought she had ‘ “played at Art” long enough,’ and must come home to ‘start Life in earnest’.23

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But for Carr, Art is Life in earnest. Both Emily and her student companion, Adda, are united in their commitment to Art. Carr, in particular, appreciates the freedom from bullying offered by the School. When the Art School moves to a new building – described by Adda as ‘a perfectly clean mansion’, Carr is sorry for the loss of the old dilapidated building which for her represents a kind of ‘outside’ that allows for space and freedom. ‘It is the underneath of it that I love,’ she declares. ‘We can splash and experiment all we like. Nobody grumbles at us. Our work is not hampered by bullying, “Don’t, don’t”.’ Carr moves on to align the real students of art with pigs who would ‘far rather root in earth and mud than eat the daintiest chef-made swill out of china bowls.’24 Her friend finds this notion repulsive, but Carr recognizes that this underneath world is a kind of protected outside place that allows the students a necessary freedom to play, hidden from the watchful disciplinary eye of conventional Victorian society. Carr’s ‘underneath’ bears close resemblance to Wright’s recollection of childhood escape beneath the tank stand. In Half a Lifetime Wright recalls: ‘I often retreated with the current book to the hidden corner of the tankstand, beside the kitchen wall and out of sight, to avoid the accusation that I “wasn’t doing anything” and directions to do something else.’25 Interestingly, Wright’s notions of Inside and Outside and their associated relationship to women’s and men’s work, have a parallel in Carr’s discussion of the difference between Landscape class and Still-Life class – ‘Outdoors’ and ‘Indoors’. ‘Indoors,’ writes Carr, ‘we munched and chewed our subjects. We tested textures, observed contours’, but sketching outdoors is described as ‘a fluid process, half looking, half dreaming . . . as much longing as labour.’26 Outdoor work requires a reciprocal relationship between space and mind: ‘awaiting invitation from the spirit of the subject to “come, meet me half way” ’27 requires a kind of concentrated passive attention – what Romantic poet William Wordsworth called ‘a wise passiveness’28 and John Keats described as ‘negative capability’.29 Although the Outdoor and Indoor study of art is not differentiated by gender, it is clear that few women had the opportunity to invest so much of themselves in the process demanded by the Outdoors. Carr observes that, unlike the vegetables and casts of still life that can be touched and ‘bullied’, things of the outdoors ask to be felt ‘not with fingertips but with one’s whole self.’30 But if an investment of the whole self is required, even demanded, by the art to which Carr feels most attracted, where does this leave the other expected, or even merely anticipated, life of woman – the life of wife and mother? Carr explores the dangers of attempting to combine the two ‘professions’ through the story of ‘Mrs. Tucket’. Here she makes clear that a Mother cannot fail

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

her Child by giving it less than her full attention; and equally (although she does not say as much), that Art is a jealous mistress and will not suffer divided loyalties. Mrs Tucket is a woman who neglects her children (to whom she refers as ‘my encumbrances’) for Art’s sake; and although her devotion to Art is rendered absurd (because she bases her belief in the importance of her art on praise given to a single sketch in her youth), the choice that needs to be made is nevertheless a real choice for Carr. The night Emily is left in sole charge of Mrs Tucket’s dying child, she rages, ‘Art I hate you, I hate you! You steal from babies!’31 Carr recalls that she refused to go to school for a week, and spent her time with Mrs Tucket’s boy ‘feeling very tender towards the child and bitter towards Art and the woman.’32 The inclusion of the story in Carr’s autobiography suggests that the experience had an impact on the decisions Emily would make later in life. The later story of her failed relationship with Mayo Paddon is not represented purely as the failure on her part to love him as he loves her (she implies that she feels no sexual attraction), but a question of choice – the choice that must be made between marriage and ‘work’. Of this choice, Maria Tippett, comments: ‘Possessing a low sexual drive and realizing that a permanent liaison with Paddon, or any other suitor, would end in disaster, she focused her attention on her art.’33 In offering a diagnosis of sexual frigidity, Tippett is playing into a misogynist tradition of representing women’s sexual disinclination as dysfunction, but perhaps more importantly to this discussion, her summative dismissal of Carr’s artistic ambitions as reactive rather than generative and pro-active sits in contradistinction to Carr’s purposeful and ambitious life-trajectory. Carr herself represents the decision to refuse Mayo somewhat differently in the story entitled, ‘Martyn’ (a story clearly based on the visit Mayo made to London in September of 1900). To Martyn’s last proposal of marriage, Emily replies: ‘I can’t marry you, Martyn. It would be wicked and cruel, because I don’t love that way. Besides – my work;’ and to Martyn’s promise of support (‘Hang work; I can support you’) she responds, ‘It is not support; it is not money or love; it’s the work itself. And, Martyn, while you are here, I am not doing my best. Go away, Martyn; please go away!’34 Martyn takes his leave in despair and disgust, exclaiming, ‘Always that detestable work!’ Art for Carr, like Poetry for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is accorded the status of work – not ‘mere’ women’s work but ‘real’ work. Additionally, Carr makes clear her belief that Art requires not only exclusive devotion but a complete freedom of will (something for which Mrs Tucket envies the young, unattached Emily).35 Reflecting on the benefits and the disadvantages of motherhood in her journal of 1937, Carr remarks, ‘It was the life-long building up and tying down to another’s will, not being free, that bothered me.’36 It is not clear here whether the

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other will to which she is referring is that of husband or child, but what is clear here and elsewhere throughout Carr’s stories, letters and journals, is the total absorption of body, mind and soul she believes is required by Art. Carr does not conceive of herself as a small player. She demands the best of herself; and that best is big. In a journal entry dated 14 October 1933, Carr comments on the disappointing response of a parson, invited to supper with the view to showing her pictures after: He enjoyed his supper enormously and the pictures not at all . . . The further back to my old canvases I got the better he liked them, just skin-deep pictures, full of pettiness and detail . . . while the struggle for bigness, simplicity, spirit, passed clean over his head . . .37

Carr’s reflection on the difference between the earlier pictures that are merely skin-deep and the later pictures in which she struggles to express the spirit of life that lies beneath surface clothing, suggests that the young Emily was impressed and indeed persuaded by the argument for depth of vision forwarded by a student of the Life Class. In the story, ‘Difference Between Nude and Naked’, Carr is loath to attend the Life Class, despite being declared ready. Her prudishness is explained as the product of her ‘Early Victorian’ family background: ‘Their idea of beauty was the clothes that draped you, not the live body underneath.’38 The Nude, if it was ever to be discussed within her family circle, which it was not, would be associated with ‘loose life in wicked Paris’, not with Art, particularly not with the Art of ‘new clean countries like Canada and the United States’.39 When Emily is adamant that she will never draw from a nude model, the response of the student from the Life Class is remarkably similar to the language of Carr’s mature declarations about the integral relationship between life and art. In a journal entry of 25 July 1933, Carr expresses her frustration with paintings that don’t ‘rock and sway with the breath and fluids of life . . . knowing that I myself have not swayed and rocked with experiencing when I confronted them. It was but their outer shell; I did not bore into them, reach for their vitals, commune with their God in them.’40 A few months later she admonishes herself: Do not forget life, artist. A picture is not a collection of portrayed objects . . . nor is it a show of colour nor a magnificence of form . . . It is a glimpse of God interpreted by the soul. It is life to some degree expressed.41

Some forty-five years earlier the student of the Life Class at the Art School makes the claim that Emily ‘will never be a true artist’ until she learns to look

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beneath. ‘Surface vision is not Art,’ she declares. ‘Beauty lies deep, deep; it has power to draw, to absorb, make you part of itself.’42 This is close to the observation Carr makes about the Outdoor Life Class, in which she speaks of longing, of invitation, of a necessary meeting of spirits – that of the artist and that of the ‘atmosphere’. When the student speaks of ‘the subtlety’ that can only be acquired by drawing from the nude – ‘the tenderness of flowing line, spiritual quality, life gleaming through living flesh’ – the words are again reminiscent of Carr’s early remark on the ‘fluid process’ of the outdoor sketch. It is clear that Emily is in fact convinced that, like the dead things of the Still-Life class, statues are inadequate material for the woman who would be a true artist: ‘Statues are beautiful,’ concedes the Life Class student, ‘but they do not throb with life.’43 A number of years later, at the Westminster School of Art in London, Carr would insist, in the face of opposition, that she attend Life Class. This suggests that she successfully overcame the inhibitions of her Victorian moral guardians; and more importantly, that she will apply the argument advocated by her student-teacher for the necessity to study from ‘the nude’ – the necessity to look beneath the clothing of surface – to her study of the forest and her representation of tree form. The painting, Tree Trunk of 1931, reflects the shift that occurred in Carr’s attitude towards nakedness, and in particular, the representation of womanly form (Figure 7). While, obviously, this is a painting of a tree, not a woman, it is an intimate, erotic portrayal of femininity. This ‘nude’ drawn from life, evokes a smooth, supple female body. The tree’s branches flow down either side like hair or a cloak. But more significantly, the overlapping curvature of the tree’s roots, painted in soft pinky browns, resembles female genitalia reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings.44 The shimmer of light down the length of the tree trunk effectively removes the outer bark to reveal the loveliness of internal feminine structure. Given Carr was introduced to O’Keeffe and her work on her visit to New York in 1930, it is not unlikely that she was influenced by the boldness and beauty of what she saw. But Ruth Appelhof observes that: In an era in which Freud – and [D.H.] Lawrence . . . had made sexual issues a commonplace theme, the paintings of both women were labelled sexually implicit; however, since both were extremely private people and would have thought any reference to sexual themes demeaning, they repudiated these interpretations.45

Rather than placing undue emphasis on the sexual or erotic nature of Tree Trunk, we might better understand this painting in relation to Carr’s desire to reveal what lies beneath – ‘rude, natural, without apology’.46 Her first glimpse of work

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by members of the Group of Seven in 1927 as recorded in Hundreds and Thousands, is an ecstatic response to seeing ‘a world stripped of earthiness . . . purged, purified’. What she saw in those very modern paintings of the Canadian landscape was the revelation of ‘a naked soul, pure and unashamed’.47 Tree Trunk is a nude in the sense that it strips back the outer layers of fashion and sensibility to lay bare body and soul in utterly female form. The years between Carr’s voyage out in the early 1890s and the painting of Tree Trunk in 1931 see the development of the artist from girl to woman, but the seed of what was realized in the mature Tree Trunk had been planted in the disturbed earth of that first push through the fence into the testing ground of unfamiliar territory. The shift from girl to woman, the difficult relationship between soul and body, and the representation of dialogue between them in art, is sensuously realized by Wright in the mirror of a poem, included in her 1966 volume, The Other Half. The naked pubescent girl sees a body in the mirror that is her and not her: 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 . . .48

This womanly body pleads to be accepted – ‘recognize / that you were always here; know me – be me’; but the girl feels betrayed, ‘shut out here / from my own self, by its new body’s grace’. Yet she bows to the inevitable, recognizing that she has no choice – ‘I must serve you; I will obey’ – but nevertheless declaring that ‘I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years,’ and more surprisingly, ‘Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too, / if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.’ Although it is difficult to decipher where Wright speaks ‘in character’ and where ‘for herself ’, it would appear that she here suggests that the body has no voice; does only the soul or spirit speak? In this ‘dialogue’ between girl and woman, the essential unchanging self, or that which might be understood to constitute the soul or perhaps the mind, is placed in opposition to the sexualized body;49 much as the young Wright herself positioned her unlikely prospects to attract a lover against the promise of Art. Recalling the awkwardness of puberty and early teen years, Wright remarks on her discovery that,‘games and boys were evidently to be of the first importance’ and her own reluctance and indeed, inability to perform as required: ‘I already knew [at ‘the ugly age of fourteen’] I would be second always [to her cousin Tina]. The only thing I had to treasure was poetry and the knowledge that I was going to be a poet.’50 The status derived from sexual attractiveness is juxtaposed

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

to the satisfactions to be derived from an artistic calling: the life of the body is juxtaposed to the life of the mind. ‘At fifteen I was set on going to university. My obvious failure with most things except languages and literature, including attracting the opposite sex, made that choice easy.’51 Experience of the new freedoms for women available in the modern city and university of the early 1930s would change not only Wright’s attitude towards sex and her own sexual attractiveness, but also the apparent inflexibility of the choice that had to be made between the professions of wife and mother, and poet. Where Carr portrays her mother as instrumental in opening her eyes to the ‘tremendous world’ beyond the restricted world of Victorian middle-class girlhood, for Wright, although her mother was a keen advocate of her early literary endeavours, the real key to the world beyond the picket fence would be provided by her grandmother, May Wright, in the form of a bequest. This financial support would enable Wright to escape the life of rural domesticity attendant on marriage to a son of the Australian squattocracy. In preparatory notes for her autobiography, Wright observes that, ‘Girl children soon learn their unimportance in the scheme of things, and there was much I wanted’.52 So naked a statement of desire and ambition is unusual in a woman of Wright’s generation, but like Woolf, Wright recognized early the poverty of being born a girl, even a girl born into a family with money and social status. This was a poverty of independent means, of access to education, and of a range of life choices that might prevent a girl from achieving her ambitions. When, in A Room of One’s Own, news of her ‘aunt’s’ legacy of ‘five hundred pounds a year for ever’ reaches the lecturer/protagonist at much the same time as the act was passed in Great Britain to grant women suffrage, Woolf provocatively claims that, of the two – the vote and the money – the money seemed ‘infinitely the more important’.53 The importance of an independent income is brought home in Wright’s own commentary on the powerless position of girls: ‘A girl,’ she reflects in an early draft of her autobiography, was ‘little more than an expense until she – unavoidably married and left home.’54 The fate of ‘a poor education’ is deemed by Wright to be a misguided measure of a girl’s ‘femininity’, as exemplified by the ‘various housekeeper-governesses that arrived to fulfil in some measure the duties of [her] absent mother’.55 Although Wright was bolstered by the support of her family’s financial and class capital, the ghosts of Woolf ’s impoverished women, doomed to the desultory employment of ‘addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten’, cringe at the edges of Wright’s pages.56 She would expel them if she could, but

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like Woolf ’s demonized ‘angel in the house’, they are not easily exorcized.57 Recalling the influence of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901), a novel she read many times over, Wright remarks on her mother’s shocked response to find her daughter reading a book deemed ‘unrespectable’ and her own realization that, ‘although it was not a happy book’ it offered a way out: ‘Sybylla [the protagonist] had refused to get married and she had left her home and decided to be a writer.’58 That decision not to marry would condemn Sybylla to a life of poverty, her dreams unfulfilled, but Franklin herself was a model of success. The discrepancy between author and protagonist, acknowledged by Wright as an irony, might also serve as a warning. From early childhood, Wright, like Carr, recognized that she neither had nor wanted the prescribed femininity that would smooth the way to fulfilled womanhood. She regularly makes her escape from the Inside world of subdued voices and suitably feminine pursuits to the Outside world of men where she finds a measure of freedom; but this choice is not a triumphant one. The fifth section of Wright’s autobiography, ‘School to University’, begins with reference to the death of her mother, and with that death comes not only grief, but guilt – a guilt specifically associated with a perceived failure to fulfil the duties of a woman. She writes: ‘I knew I had not been able to comfort her [my mother] or help her through those dreadful days at all, though I was the eldest and the girl, facts always emphasized when I failed in my duties.’59 But while this sense of failure and guilt encouraged the twelve-year-old Wright to make amends by taking on the domestic role of household duties and womanly support for her widowed father and motherless brothers, this does not bring about a transformation in the woman she is. The gap between the woman expected of her and the woman she wants to be widens. Wright’s autobiography presents her increasing awareness from childhood through adolescence of the choice that must be made between domestic femininity and the pursuit of her dreams of becoming a poet. This choice might be understood to some extent as a reaction to the lack of power she recognizes not only in her own life as a child and her future as a woman in a rural community, but also the example of her mother, confined to the Inside by gender and ill health. Wright recalls the excitement of reading The Arabian Nights, and in particular, the well-loved story of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, surmising: Perhaps I was really looking for power, as I read and internally chanted the words and rhythms of poetry. It was a power I felt I might be able to command, in a world in which males dominated and Outside was more important than

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr Inside. The Arabian Nights story . . . in which the words Open Sesame let one into a treasure-cave seemed to show that even nonsense words – perhaps especially nonsense words – could be potent spells . . . I began to practise a kind of primitive magic involving the use of chant and rhyme in the hope of finding some equivalent to ‘Open Sesame’ – which did not, I found, even work on the lock of the storeroom door.60

This recollection of childhood, told with the wry deprecating humour of a woman whose poetic skill and ambition had ultimately opened many doors, fails to mention Scheherazade – the woman so skilled in the literary arts that she changes not only her own future, but the future of the many women who might have been condemned to lives cut short through the exercise of male power. The story of the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ is a success story of feminine cunning and craft. But Scheherazade’s success is limited in the sense that although she secures her future and those of her sisters, that future is contained within the confines of the house: Scheherazade will not die at the hands of her tyrannical lord but lives on as his wife and the mother of his children. Skilful artistry saves her life, but does not change the course of her social destiny. Her story-telling remains confined to the bedroom and the Inside. Perhaps this is why the elderly Wright does not mention her, for this would be to close down the dreams and desires of the young woman she is calling to mind. The young Wright is determined to pursue her chosen career as an artist, even if, or perhaps, because, it confers the singularity of the ‘Cat that Walked by Himself ’.61 It is a nice irony that an author deemed ‘suitable reading for women’ and a favourite of the family,62 should be responsible for the story that would strengthen Wright’s resolve to pursue a most unsuitable profession. In Rudyard Kipling’s story, the wild dog, horse and cow accept domestication by man and woman for the comforts of the cave and the sustenance it provides, but the wild cat is a clever cat who negotiates a place by the fire and the freedom to walk by himself where he wills. In effect, the cat has it both ways – the comforts of domesticity and the freedom of singularity. This is not what Wright intends by her allusion to an adolescent alliance with ‘the cat that walked by itself ’, being ‘the wildest of all the wild animals’, and one who shuns the compromising roles of friend and servant. But this is the more complex reading of the story that corresponds with Wright’s adult negotiation of domesticity (the world of Inside) and artistic freedom (the world of Outside). The romantic allure of outsider status associated with the Cat by the young Judith is not, cannot, be tempered by awareness of the difficulties attendant on the choice to walk this path. Only the future will reveal to Wright how much more difficult it is for a woman than a

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man to acquire the freedom of exceptionality and the comfort of the family hearth. The right to and respect for the singularity of the female artist is difficult in itself to achieve. Woolf ’s essay novel, A Room of One’s Own, contemplates the artistic and social changes that have occurred from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries in Britain, in particular the change of relationship between men and women, and the possibilities that might now be available to women writers. In the first chapter, Woolf asks her audience to picture her dining at an Oxbridge men’s college. Having partaken of a sumptuous luncheon – the kind that male wealth and power assumes as an unquestioned right – she moves from the table to the window. As she flicks the ash from her cigarette out the window (being a very modern free-thinking woman of the 1920s) she notices a Manx cat. The cat provides her with an easy metaphor for the problem she is considering, that being, why women have not written as much or as well as men. ‘The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle,’ has the effect of a shade cast across the soft glow of the late afternoon. The cat, ‘who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn,’ becomes the target of her uneasy laughter. It is strange, Woolf observes, what a difference a tail makes. If the lack of a tail were equated to the lack of a penis, then what follows is a commentary on the problem of being a woman artist. The cat without a tail is ‘rarer than one thinks’. Here Woolf not only points to the rarity of women artists, but suggests that the difficulty of a woman achieving artistic greatness, or even professional status, is due in part to her lack of female role model, and that these few models (grandmothers, mothers, aunts or sisters) are generally perceived to be curiosities – ‘quaint rather than beautiful’.63 Thinking back, Wright too laments the lack of exemplary female models. She recalls how, even at an independent girl’s school, ‘Hymns, exhortations, sermons, all seemed to be recycled from male-directed models’ and ‘inculcated masculine values’. Female role models were rare, even in sewing and cooking lessons, of which Wright observes that ‘Mrs Beeton and Coco Chanel at least might have been held up as encouragement.’ Her English teacher was an exception, expounding the radical belief that George Eliot was the equal of Dickens and Thackeray64 as Woolf had earlier equated the poet Christina Rossetti with the great Lord Alfred Tennyson.65 The women of Wright’s extended family might have provided role models, particularly given the independence and strength of Wright’s grandmother May for whom Wright avers a deep love and respect. May Wright not only ably managed the family property after her husband’s death, but added to the family

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

capital, economically and socially. She was unconventional – according to Wright, ‘the word “unwomanly” was not exactly spoken, but there was a hint of it in the tone in which her cousins spoke of her bravery in taking on “a man’s work”.’66 But although May would leave her granddaughter Judith a bequest that allowed her to attend university in Sydney, she adhered to the patriarchal tradition of inheritance – ‘her will required money to pay for the legacies to her grand-daughters – the land and livestock naturally went to the males of the family’.67 May might have had ‘great respect for books’,68 giving her future daughter-in-law ‘a set of Jane Austen’,69 but Wright also portrays her (by implication) as something of a philistine with little appreciation of Art, and as a stern matriarch who policed the limits of respectable artistic expression in her talented daughter, Weeta. The poem, ‘Remembering an Aunt’, is a tribute (of a terrible kind) to Wright’s unmarried aunt, who, thwarted by life in a household which permitted her artistic talents only the most limited scope, deliberately renounces their full expression: Brushes, paints, Beethoven put aside (for ignorant flattery’s worse than ignorant blame), she took her stance and held it till she died.70

Although the Aunt would appear to have the pre-requisite of Woolf ’s room of her own – ‘large enough’ and ‘private from the rest of the house’ – a closer look reveals the surveillance that shuts down and locks in the promising female artist. Her room is ‘supervised by her mother’s window’, and her artistic life is curtailed to playing the kind of music and creating the kind of painting deemed suitable for a woman of her class and marital status – the romantic music of ‘Chopin and Chaminade’ and sketches that are ‘pretty’. The aunt’s response is a proud silence – a form of loyalty to Art and the aspiring self that will not accept less than Art, for which Wright praises her. It is however a desolate portrait of waste and loss. Pictures inspired by the galleries of Rome and Florence are kept face to the wall; and the music she wishes to play is closed, locked like her artistic potential, in a cupboard that she herself has carved. There is a sense here both of the damage done to women by other women, often those women closest to them, and the damage done to women by themselves – the carving of the cupboard suggesting self-harm. This is a very disturbing poem – one that bears relationship, in subject matter and tone, to ‘Smalltown Dance’. Although increasingly scholarly attention is given to the poetry and prose of Wright’s environmental and Aboriginal activism, it is the very personal poetry that carries most emotional intensity and often deploys the most successful imagery.

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‘Country Town’, published in Wright’s first volume of poetry, asks what is lost by the civilizing force of the town that nets the ‘hostile hills’ with fences and keeps the landscape ‘safe with bitumen and banks’. Stories of rebellion are printed and thereby also rendered safe – locked away for posterity – the story of rebellion is now history. But order and safety might act to imprison rather than free, might close down imagination: The church is built, the bishop is ordained, and this is where we live: where do we live? And how should we rebel? The chains are stronger.71

Although this poem questions the insular nature of country towns that work hard to create an Inside world of stability, security and comfort, relegating non-conformity and risk-taking to the Outside, it is a gentle poem that calls on the townspeople to remember the bid for freedom that brought them here – ‘where is here?’ and ‘who are we’? ‘Smalltown Dance’, a poem published in Wright’s last volume of poetry some forty years later,72 is poignantly, bitterly, feminist in its very personal portrayal of the country town that closes down opportunity for women in particular. An ‘ancient dance’ is performed by two women who fold a ‘white expanse’ of sheet in a well-worn ritual, ultimately reducing it to ‘a neat / compression fitting in the smallest space /. . . on a cupboard shelf.’ In the second stanza, the poet recalls her small self playing hide-and-seek between the hung washed sheets. For the child the highwalled clean corridor of flapping sheets offers a safe escape from Inside and a glimpse of a future full of potential – the infinite prospect of the blue sky above and ‘unobstructed green’ at either end. But although unroofed and open-ended, this is nevertheless a corridor, already suggestive of limited direction and constricted movement. And of course, although allowing for imaginative play Outside, the washed sheets are a potent symbol of womanhood – domestic, intimate, belonging Inside. The final line of the stanza plays out the childish game of hide-and-seek while also signalling awareness of a looming unnamed threat that will close down the free play of childhood – ‘Run, run before you’re seen.’ That threat is realized in the third and final stanzas in which woman and sheet become one, for: . . . women know the scale of possibility, the limit of opportunity, the fence, how little chance there is of getting out. The sheets that tug sometimes struggle from the peg, don’t travel far.

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

The ‘wallowing white dreamers’ are pulled down, and the ‘beckoning roads to some impossible world’ are folded into the cupboard and the door closed on them. Like the poem ‘Remembering an Aunt’, ‘Smalltown Dance’ takes the opportunity afforded a celebrated poet to not only consider what might have been her own fate, but to grieve and protest against the fate of other women not so fortunate. Wright’s struggles are successful, in part because she is so determined to reach that unobstructed green glimpsed in childhood, and she is supported by family – her mother’s pride in her early poetic forays, her grandmother’s bequest, and her father’s acceptance, if reluctant, of his daughter’s ambitions. What follows Wright’s discussion of the lesson to be learnt from My Brilliant Career, is the declaration that, ‘What I loved [that being primarily the natural world of the New England tableland] . . . I would have to leave if I wanted to be free.’73 So despite her father’s concerns about the potential corrupting influence of the big bad city, Wright cut the ties that bound her to ‘the life of a grazier’s wife’, making her maiden voyage to Sydney and the adventure of university life in 1934. In a sense, the unavoidable projection of an accomplished, successful woman back into the girl and youthful woman of her past self, results in something of a fait accompli. In Wright’s autobiographical reflections the voyage out is taken in imagination long before the ribbon is cut. Although many factors influence Wright’s realization of her dream ‘to be a Poet’, Half a Lifetime is, like much of Carr’s life-writing, a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman in which all roads lead to Rome: ‘to be a Poet’ is her destiny, and the story of the Artist’s Progress is one of challenges confronted and the barriers surmounted. The determination ‘to be’ never falters. Calling to mind those days of release into that ‘promised land’,74 she writes of ‘caring nothing for the suggestions of others’, of choosing ‘my own way’, and of being ‘Determined not to be side-tracked from my ambition to be a poet’.75 There was much that Wright no longer remembered of her student days at the University of Sydney when she came to compile notes for an autobiography and respond to a series of interviews with Heather Rusden in the late 1980s.76 Some of the gaps have been partially filled by Georgina Arnott’s research into ‘the unknown Judith Wright’.77 Wright recalls being ‘something of an oddity’, for while there were a ‘surprising number of women in Arts’, most were the daughters of professional men and university employees, and almost none had a pastoral background like herself. Like Carr, Wright portrays her difference proudly – it is the sign of her artistic destiny. She is, to her knowledge, the only student who had come to university with the idea of being a poet. It is to this end that she broods

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over the newly discovered modern poetry of T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and experiments with her own writing that had, to this point, been modelled predominantly on the Victorian verse of her mother’s preference.78 In addition to her formal studies, Wright contributed to the student paper Honi Soit as well as the university literary magazine Hermes. The Sydney years proved important for her later career by ‘introducing her to the intellectual paradigms that would shape her life’ and by affording some understanding of the mechanics of publishing and the workings of a literary community.79 During this period Wright published poems influenced by her new reading in a number of newspapers and literary journals, creating the foundation for her first volume of poetry that would be so important to the development and international reputation of modern Australian poetry. But Wright’s references to literary models in Half a Lifetime are unexpectedly sparse. Much more is made of a newly discovered sexual freedom and its enjoyment than literary stimulation and the life of the mind. This is not so surprising given the limited social circle of Wright’s adolescence and the heady excitement of new experiences available to women and men on the university campus and within the precincts of the modern city of Sydney. In an early draft of her autobiography, Wright recalls of her first year at university: ‘I was rapturous with freedom and independence. And for once, I had begun to make friends of my own and even to find lovers.’ She also acknowledges the importance of a bank account, described as: too small for my ambitions but available for buying the clothes I wanted. I intended to prove that . . . I could pass examinations well at least in the subjects that interested me, but I was not going to pass up the social life either; and with the daughters of judges and fashionable doctors to compete with, clothes seemed to me essential. Two long evening dresses made up for past humiliations . . . They were my statement of freedom and in the days of plunging backless dresses, I loved them.80

Wright has gained the symbolic and material benefits of a room of her own and the ‘five hundred pounds a year’ advocated by Woolf as fundamental to the success of a woman becoming a professional writer. Shakespeare gently mocks Polonius when he tells his son Laertes to don a habit, ‘costly . . . as thy purse can buy, / But express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy; / For the apparel oft proclaims the man’.81 As Wright discovered, such advice is not without truth or merit. The ‘right’ clothes not only endow the wearer with confidence, they proclaim the self s/he wishes to project. In 1938, two years after Wright left university, she is photographed on a Sydney city street stepping

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Figure 8 Street Photographer, Judith Wright in Sydney, c. 1938.

out with purpose – hat at a perky angle, low over the right side of her glasses; clutch purse under her arm, gloves loosely in hand, dark pumps setting off the light-coloured, ankle-length skirt suit. She is the epitome of the modern woman – self-confident, forward looking, stylish (Figure 8). Unlike Rachel, the protagonist of Woolf ’s novel, for both Wright and Carr this first voyage out offered not only challenges but the opportunities for artistic and personal growth that would enable them to realize their big ambitions.

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Many Roads Meet Here1

In moving away from home and homeland to San Francisco and to Sydney, Carr and Wright sought training and preparation for the vocation each was determined to pursue. Both were also seeking escape from constraints imposed by their families and local communities but neither Carr’s studies at art school in San Francisco nor Wright’s years at Sydney University provided the longed-for independence. Moving outside the sheltered enclave of home represented merely a first step, prompting further journeys as each sought to place herself within a wider world. Although Carr and Wright both had a profound sense of connection to the region and country of their birth, theirs was an uneasy sense of belonging since neither could fit comfortably within the social niche her local community considered appropriate, where marriage was a young woman’s ultimate destiny and any artistic aspirations were dismissed as outlandish or self-indulgent. One response was to engage in further travel; Wright to Britain and Europe and Carr to England, Alaska and various North West Coast Native communities. Although these were literal journeys undertaken for practical ends, they nevertheless assume qualities of a symbolic quest, with each traveller seeking to understand where she belongs, both as woman and artist, while focusing the subject and form of her art upon what is distinctive to the complexity of her social, cultural and natural inheritance. Much of that cultural inheritance was derived from Britain. Many of Carr’s fellow citizens in Victoria felt stronger emotional ties with England than with Canada. Carr herself was ambivalent, as expressed in a letter to Ira Dilworth later in life: ‘I would not for the world be any other nationality on earth than British & they’re marvelous but of course we must have faults & some of theirs I hate.’2 Even after several generations in Australia, Wright’s family was highly conscious and proud of their English roots. Although neither young woman herself felt any real allegiance to the mother country, Carr travelled to England in 1899 to further her art studies at the Westminster School of Art in London and Wright began her overseas journey in 1937, taking in part of Europe as well as Britain. But whereas Carr remained in 79

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Britain for five years, returning to Canada in 1904, Wright’s stay was necessarily much briefer given the increasing tension in Europe leading up to the Second World War. Offered the choice of spending income from her grandmother’s legacy on further study at Sydney University, or visiting England for George VI’s coronation, Wright chose the latter, not from royalist fervour, but to see what she could of the world. By chance, another significant royal event, the death of Queen Victoria, had occurred while Carr was in England, and she was persuaded to watch the funeral cortège. She recalls, the dismal hearing of those dead-march bands, which linked the interminable procession into one great sag of woe, dragging a little old woman, who had fulfilled her years, over miles of route-march that her people might glut themselves with woe and souse themselves in tears on seeing the flag that draped the box that held the bones of the lady who had ruled their land.3

Wright appears similarly unimpressed by the coronation. Having, on her father’s instructions, ‘viewed it from a seat near the royal route’, she recognized that in Australia the ceremony of royal occasion was ‘a soothing factor’, easier to talk about than the imminence of war, and wonders, ‘should we be breaking free from this adulation?’4 In noting how journeys often symbolize ‘the urgent desire for discovery and change that underlies the actual movement and experience of travelling’, J.E. Cirlot questions Jung’s view that the goal of the spiritual journey is in fact the lost Mother, claiming one might equally well say the journey ‘is a flight from the Mother’.5 For both Carr and Wright, discovering the mother country prompted a desire to escape nearly everything this particular mother figure represents, for she engendered no sense of belonging, leading them to re-evaluate what their own country meant to them. In London Carr felt stifled by crowds of people, a lack of open space and most of all by expectations she would conform to patterns of genteel, ladylike behaviour she so rebelled against in Victoria. She deeply resented being dismissed as a mere colonial: ‘So few over here accepted Canada. These people called us Colonials, forgot we were British’,6 and she determined, ‘I would go home to Canada as Canadian as I left her’.7 Although the British countryside proved more amenable than London, it appeared bland and subdued when contrasted with Canadian wilderness. Visiting Epping Forest with a fellow Canadian, Carr observes: Here were trees venerable, huge and grand but tamed. All England’s things were tame, self-satisfied smug and meek – even the deer that came right up to us in

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the forest, smelled our clothes. There was no turmoil of undergrowth swirling round the boles of the trees. The forest was almost like a garden – no brambles, no thorns, nothing to stumble over, no rotten stumps, no fallen branches, all mellow to look at, melodious to hear, every kind of bird, all singing, no awed hush, no vast echoes, just beautiful, smiling woods, not solemn, solemn, solemn like our forests.8

Nearly forty years later, when young women enjoyed somewhat greater freedom of movement, Wright seems amused more than angered by British attitudes as she hitch-hikes through Scotland and northern England – a rather daring mode of travel even for 1937. ‘Returning south,’ she writes of landing at last in Yorkshire ‘to call on a family of cousins, of parsonical nature, who bravely gave me shelter though clearly deeply shocked by my hitch-hiking and my rather eccentric costume of tam o’shanter and summer dress.’9 Wright’s time in Britain, however, and still more in Europe, was overshadowed by impending war and the insistent pressure of fascist politics which cause her to reflect: If Australia could do no better than the parent country and Europe, then what, I thought, would be the point of those thousands of years of religion and civilisation – and of wars supposedly intended to defend the right and colonise the world with the good.10

‘After a time in Europe’, she recalls, ‘my country looked to me like a far-off heaven of freedom.’11 Although for Carr and Wright, travelling overseas represented a voyage out, it also corresponds in some ways to what Edward Said calls the voyage in, ‘an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work’ where writers, artists and critics from the periphery challenge, and sometimes even influence, established views at the ‘centre’: No longer does the logos dwell exclusively, as it were, in London and Paris. No longer does history run unilaterally, as Hegel believed, from east to west, or from south to north, becoming more sophisticated and developed, less primitive and backward as it goes. Instead the weapons of criticism have become part of the historical legacy of empire, in which the separations and exclusions of ‘divide and rule’ are erased and surprising new configurations spring up.12

Said refers not to descendents of white settler families but to authors emerging from amongst colonized peoples and writing back to their imperial masters. However, for young women artists like Carr and Wright, in the early twentieth

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

century, England also embodied a set of repressive social and cultural attitudes they aimed to repudiate in their art. This involved adapting or overriding inherited cultural and artistic traditions in order to express their vision of countries which were in many ways quite alien to much of what those traditions represented. Wright combines imagery of trees and journeys to express this predicament in ‘For New England’,13 a poem where the winter season symbolizes white settlers’ refusal to accept their Australian environment, and where spring is merely a yearned-for possibility. Fierce winds buffet all trees equally, ‘the homesick and the swarthy native’ which, together,  signify division between the English past and an Australian present. Inspired by memories of her grandmother, May Wright, the poet recalls a woman firmly ensconced in her house ‘closed in with sycamore and chestnut / fighting a foreign wind’, having retreated there from ‘the black north’ and a ‘harsh horizon rimmed with drought’ – recalling the North Queensland property which May and Albert Wright abandoned to settle in New England.14 Wright comments several times in her autobiography on how her grandmother’s garden contained no native plants or trees.15 The house in the poem, with its immediate environs, resembles an island as the enclosing circle of English trees fights against the ‘foreign’ environment. Setting this long-standing cultural inheritance against her love for the land of her birth, the poet exclaims, ‘I find in me the double tree’. Australia too is an island where the speaker farewells ships setting off for England, remembering earlier British settlers who, desperate for news of home, ‘looked out towards the dubious rims of sea / to find a sail blown over like a message / you are not forgotten’. Thinking that perhaps she too should return to her overseas origins ‘through the taproot of the poplar’, she is suddenly confronted by an ecstatic vision where the wind is now a spiritual force generating energy and enlightenment: But look, oh look, the Gothic tree’s on fire with blown galahs, and fuming with wild wings.

In its winter bareness, this deciduous tree resembles the tracery of European Gothic architecture miraculously transformed, as native birds, in their pink and grey plumage, swirl through and around it like fire and smoke. There may be a distant echo here of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 describing trees in winter as ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’,16 but the dominant images are biblical – the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses and the Holy Spirit, descending both as dove and as tongues of fire.

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The poet acknowledges that, although a traveller, she is herself a set of intersecting pathways traversed by the experiences and knowledge of many others: Many roads meet here in me, the traveller and the ways I travel. All the hills’ gathered waters feed my seas and the long slopes’ concurrence is my flesh who am the gazer and the land I stare on . . .

Even at this moment of intense union with the land of her birth, however, the speaker still feels divided, standing back to observe the very thing she identifies with. Her cry ‘Where’s home, Ulysses?’ expresses a yearning to belong, not in that circumscribed island whose boundaries are determined solely by inherited culture and tradition, but in a location where this inheritance embraces the country which original European settlers found so alien, merging ‘the homesick and the swarthy native’ into a single fiery tree: Wind, blow through me till the nostalgic candles of laburnum fuse with the dogwood in a single flame to touch alight these sapless memories. Then will my land turn sweetly from the plough and all my pastures rise as green as spring.

Both trees, the local dogwood and the laburnum, with its ‘nostalgic candles’ indicating an English heritage, bear some resemblance to one another. Each is a small, lightweight tree with golden pea flowers hanging massed from its branches. The dogwood is almost certainly jacksonia scoparia, sometimes cultivated in gardens but more customarily growing wild in the bush.17 Fusing the two would generate a fertile region where new growth might flourish, as the poet invokes the winter wind for inspiration, realizing her vocation involves blending traditions inherited from the old world with the experience of living in quite different territory. Significantly she invokes, not that epitome of female virtue, Penelope, remaining faithfully at home before her loom, but the heroic traveller Ulysses, noted both for his adventurousness and keen intelligence. Overseas travel prompted Wright to recognize what Australia meant for her poetry – ‘I knew it would have to be my fate as a writer’ – though she acknowledges that, immediately after her return, it ‘was not yet my literary source’.18 The trip abroad also made her troublingly aware of the political turmoil in Europe leading

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

inexorably to the Second World War, which continued to fill her thoughts even after returning home: What I had seen of Europe – that place from which all wars seemed to begin – stayed heavily on my heart. The Spanish war dragged on to a lame and miserable conclusion; England was on the whole uninterested; Hitler, whose tracks were so visible in Germany and who had terrified the wits out of those I met in Germany and Austria, seemed unlikely to be appeased by small concessions. I remembered well the posters stuck around lampposts and on dirty walls in Munich and Berlin with their snarling caricatures of Jews and Englishmen. Whatever was going to happen, would happen soon. Yet in Australia, all was calm. Could anything really threaten us?19

Although Wright had entered into an informal engagement to a medical student before leaving Australia, she formed intimate friendships with various young men while she was away, some of whom later became war casualties. She was particularly haunted by memories of Andrei, a part-Jewish Hungarian she met in Budapest, who hoped she might be willing and able to help him emigrate to Australia although she felt there was no possibility of any lasting bond between them: ‘My conscience was sore, knowing that Andrei regarded me as his last hope of escape’.20 Back in Australia, she kept receiving his letters, one accompanied by a length of handmade lace intended for a wedding dress. The sum of fifty pounds required by the Australian Government to admit him as a migrant seemed impossibly large for her to raise and once Hungary fell to the Nazis, his letters ceased abruptly. Looking back some sixty years later, she writes: ‘The sins we commit in ignorance taste bitterer to the tongue than those we intend . . . I meant no harm to Andrei. That is why he haunts me’.21 Wright’s first collection of poems, The Moving Image (1946), reflects preoccupations prompted by her 1937 journey – an intensified awareness of Australia as key subject matter, together with what was to be a lifelong concern over the destructive impulses leading human societies towards war: ‘The horror of war has always been a big factor in my life.’22 While the book contains several poems regarded as iconically Australian – ‘Bullocky’, ‘South of My Days’, ‘For New England’ – echoes of war and its devastation pervade much of the writing. In ‘The Trains’, Wright’s beloved landscape is itself stained by war, when, ‘laying / a black trail over the still bloom of the orchards, / The trains go north with guns.’23 The turmoil of the period, just prior to and during the Second World War is conveyed in ‘Company of Lovers’24 where young couples cling to life and love in the face of death.

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We who sought many things, throw all away for this one thing, one only, remembering that in the narrow grave we shall be lonely.

As the poet herself comments on the work’s historical context many years later: a reader of a poem like ‘The Company of Lovers’ may know little of the great displacements of people during World War II, their snatching into armies and other defence forces, the desperation of lovers faced with the prospect of a separation which might last forever, and the urgency of need which drove the young into one another’s arms.25

The lovers, temporarily fending off the darkness through their embrace, become a ‘lost company’ meeting and parting all over the world, unable to settle anywhere or realize their hopes for the future. There is a play on the word ‘company’, meaning both a military formation and a group of people associating with one another from friendship or fellow-feeling. Lovers’ encounters, however, offer only a brief respite, for Death’s forces draw ever closer: Grope in the night to find me and embrace, for the dark preludes of the drums begin, and round us, round the company of lovers, Death draws his cordons in.

The tense war-laden atmosphere over-shadowing Wright on her trip abroad was not, of course, part of Carr’s English experience, but, as with Wright, the time spent in England confirmed her sense of vocation, reinforcing a recognition that Canada itself must become her principal source of inspiration – the only place where she really belonged, even if unable to fit the mould her society devised. Deciding it was impossible to reconcile marriage with an artist’s career, she had finally and decisively rejected her persistent Canadian suitor Mayo Paddon who followed her to London in hope of convincing her to be his wife. Just as Wright felt troubled over the years for failing to rescue Andrei from Nazi persecution, so Carr carried a long-standing burden of guilt over rejecting Mayo, as this 1935 journal entry indicates: I think it was a bad, dreadful thing to do. I did it in self-defence because it was killing me, sapping the life from me. But love is too beautiful, too lovely a thing to murder and it musses one up. The spatter of love’s blood is upon one’s hands, red blood that congeals and turns black and will not wash off the cruel hands. It does not hurt the killed; it hurts the killer.26

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

After travelling overseas, Carr and Wright each understood how central her own country was to her art, but homecoming presented practical, social and professional problems. Both had to support themselves financially while coping with a society that considered women artists an anomaly. Carr settled in Vancouver, conducting art classes as she had done previously in Victoria. Wright, deciding she ‘no longer wanted to be a suburban doctor’s wife’, still experienced family pressure ‘to get married into a suitably landed family’ and moved again to Sydney in search of a job.27 She attended a commercial college and tried various kinds of administrative office work while seeking what information she could about current literary trends in her spare time. Shortly after war broke out, and with both her brothers in uniform, she returned to help her father on his property in New England, deeply moved by the familiar landscape seen once more from the train windows: I found myself suddenly and sharply aware of it as ‘my country’. These hills and valleys were – not mine, but me; the threat of Japanese invasion hung over them as over me; I felt it under my own ribs. Whatever other blood I held, this was the country I loved and knew.28

Carr records comparable feelings on returning to Canada from England: Never had her forests looked so solemn, never her mountains so high, never her drift-laden beaches so vast. Oh, the gladness of my West again! Immense Canada! Oh her Pacific edge, her Western limit!29

To transmute this intense response into works of art was, for both women, a major undertaking, requiring several years for each to discover and develop appropriate modes of expression. When time allowed, Carr sketched and painted trees in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, then comprising ‘seven miles of virgin forest, three quarters surrounded by sea’.30 Meeting the artistic challenges Canadian treescapes presented, however, proved difficult. Maria Tippett writes of Carr’s fierce struggle with native trees and of how resentful she felt of their tightly sealed secrets, kept, it seemed almost deliberately, from her; resentful too at ‘my foolish art, humble & pleading before the great trees’.31 Her training at the Westminster School of Art helped very little, for the institution itself had proved ‘plodding and uninspired’.32 In later years Carr comments scornfully on conventional European attitudes to landscape painting: Artists from the Old World said our West was crude, unpaintable. Its bigness angered, its vastness and wild spaces terrified them. Browsing cows, hooves well sunk in the grass . . . placid streams . . . meandering through pastoral

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landscapes – that was the Old World idea of a picture . . . [the artists] would as soon have thought of making pictures of their own insides as of the depths of our forests.33

She believed that, to represent Canada faithfully, her artistic vision must encompass both the landscape’s rugged vastness and the indigenous presence there: ‘The wild places and primitive people claimed me’.34 Indigenous people were also important to Wright’s vision of Australia. Early poems like ‘Bora Ring’35 and ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’,36 lament white violence and Aboriginal dispossession, and Wright herself became a tireless activist for Aboriginal rights. But although Aboriginal themes are important in her poetry, it is in polemical prose works like The Cry for the Dead (1981)37 and We Call for a Treaty (1985)38 that her concerns were to find their fullest written expression. For Carr, however, indigenous culture, expressed through Native art work, was a key element of her subject matter. Pursuing her artistic vision involved further journeys, both within Canada and beyond, leading her to explore remote areas of the country’s north-west coast, and also to venture abroad yet again for further professional training. Carr’s early contact with Native people had been minimal, although their presence was a feature of her childhood and youth in Victoria: Indians went round the streets selling their beautiful cedar-bark baskets or trading them for old clothes, or peddling clams or pitch wood tied in bundles for the lighting of fires.39

She did not actually visit a traditional First Nations village until 1899 when a missionary friend of her sister’s invited her to Hiitats’uu/Ucluelet on Vancouver Island’s west coast. There she sketched houses, individuals and scenes of village life, while deploring the missionaries’ attempts to impose white, middle-class values on the people. In Vancouver, her friendship with the Native woman, Sophie Frank, led her to visit the Squamish reserve at Ustlawn/North Vancouver where she also sketched portraits of women and children living there. Carr’s introduction to First Nations’ art was probably through the baskets Native people peddled in the streets, for she recognized that: ‘The basketry of the Indians is a very fine art’, admiring its aesthetic complexity – ‘various materials are used, viz. cedar roots, cedar bark, rushes, grass, birchbark, also the quills of birds and the porcupine’.40 It was, however, while on holiday in Alaska with her sister Alice in 1907 that she confronted the scope and power of First Nations art through receiving her first sight of Native sculpture and carving, which was not practised in Hiitaats’uu/Ucluelet, nor on the Ustlawn/North Vancouver reserve. Carr made her earliest sketches of totem poles in a park on the outskirts of the

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Alaskan town, Sitka, for ‘a collection of magnificent poles, some Tlingit but most carved by the Kaigani Haida, had been erected there for tourists’.41 Although she later deplored their use as a tourist attraction – ‘translated from their rightful place in front of an Indian chief ’s house in his home village, poles now loaded with commercial paint to make curiosity for see-it-all tourists’42 – they provided significant inspiration for her youthful self. In Sitka she also encountered an American artist who spent summers there painting local scenes and Native villages, leading her to think she herself might do something similar: ‘By the time I reached home my mind was made up. I was going to picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection of them as I could.’43 Although white artists often liked to include First Nations subject matter in their work as a source of local colour, Gerta Moray notes how Carr’s ‘decision to specialize in painting Indian motifs, and to make these paintings into a serious record, led her to attempt to understand and educate herself about Native cultures’.44 Carr saw the Alaskan journey as pivotal in shaping her artistic career, recalling ‘The Indian people and their art touched me deeply’45 and later reflecting that, ‘Perhaps I shall never do anything beyond my Indian stuff because it struck into my vitals when I was freshly maturing into young womanhood and my senses were keenly alert.’46 Her published accounts of the Alaskan experience (in Growing Pains and Heart of a Peacock), were written several decades later, recalling earlier events through a lens of long-accumulated knowledge and observation. Jay Stewart and Peter Macnair suggest that differences of tone and detail in Carr’s much earlier Alaska Journal – a private, light-hearted memoir written at the time for Alice’s entertainment – bring into question the validity of her later accounts.47 But since the Journal is now lost, with only a few tantalizing fragments preserved, the evidence remains inconclusive, though if ‘the original work in its entirety were ever found, it would radically broaden the perspective on Carr’s inspiration’.48 From 1907 until 1913 Carr undertook several arduous journeys in the Canadian north-west coastal region to observe and sketch First Nations villages: she recalls how she ‘slept in tents, in roadmakers’ toolsheds, in missions, and in Indian houses [and] travelled in anything that floated in water or crawled over land’.49 Whereas male anthropologists and ethnographers working in the same area were usually well provided with funds to pay their informants, being ‘received and treated as men of influence’ by community members in the villages, which gave them ready access to chiefs and leading families, Carr had none of these advantages.50 ‘What I have done,’ she avers, ‘I have done alone and singlehanded. I have been backed by neither companies nor individuals. I have borne

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my own expenses and done my own work.’ 51 She experienced a further difficulty in that she had to make her journeys in the summer when her art classes were in recess, but during that period ‘many villages were more or less deserted . . . because the people were away working at seasonal jobs at the canneries’.52 In travelling to these remote communities to interact with their art and people, Carr defied social expectations which narrowly determined a woman’s role, deliberately disregarding much of her conventional artistic training as she moved beyond the limited range of subject matter deemed appropriate for a female artist. Ironically, a desire to embrace the country where she belonged reinforced her outsider status since attempts to gain even a limited understanding of First Nations culture often put her at odds with polite society. Most contemporaries would have found her regard for Native people bizarre, while portraying them and their culture sympathetically was politically suspect – likely to be perceived as a threat to white settler financial interests and land acquisition practices.53 Carr was even more an outsider in First Nations’ communities, recognizing and perhaps even yearning a little for the companionship they shared. ‘Kitwancool’, a story recounting her later 1928 journey to the Skeena river, describes the relaxed atmosphere in one chiefly household: There was no rush, no scolding, no roughness . . . When anyone was sleepy he slept; when they were hungry they ate; if they were sorry, they cried, and if they were glad they sang.54

A 1912 painting, Indian House Interior with Totems, also conveys something of this atmosphere, although attention is principally focused on two enormous carved figures dominating the living space (Figure 9). A group of Native people in coloured clothing sits by a fire, possibly eating or just concluding a meal, and surrounded by a collection of household goods, among them a canoe brought under cover indoors. In the centre of the wall behind is a door with steps leading up to it and on either side, appearing to hold up the rafters, are two enormous carvings of thunderbirds with outspread wings. In First Nations mythology, the thunderbird is a mighty spirit, characterized by a huge curving beak and prominent ears or horns. Lightening flashes from its eyes and it carries lightening snakes under its wings which produce thunder as they flap. Despite their ferocious aspect, with heavy beaks and fierce faces painted on their bellies, Carr represents the figures as protective, rather than menacing. The outspread pinions dominate the scene, stretched across the entire width of the painting and meeting wing tip to wing tip across the upper part of the

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

door, as if sheltering those below. Carr even gives the wings a soft feathery look, though the effect in the original carvings would probably have appeared more rigid.55 Rich colour helps convey a warm, companionable atmosphere. The back wall glows in shades of red ochre as do the thunderbirds’ bodies, complemented by the greenish blue of their wings, which is echoed by touches of this colour throughout the room. The strong horizontal of the outstretched wings, emphasized by a beam placed immediately above, is balanced by a central vertical axis, beginning with the standing figure of a young man in a white shirt and moving to a small figure on the stairs in front of the door. A central groove in the door’s planking leads upwards to the line separating the wings of the two totems, and to the inverted V where the left-hand rafter meets the right. In many of Carr’s later paintings a strong upward movement evokes aspiration or transcendence, although it is unclear whether that is intended here. While Carr set out to represent Native carvings as faithfully as possible, she inevitably imposed her own interpretations, infusing what she saw with her own emotion. She recognized, nevertheless, that First Nations art expressed a language she must struggle to learn, explaining that: The totem figures represented supernatural as well as natural beings, mythological monsters, the human and animal figures making ‘strong talk’, bragging of their real or imagined exploits. Totems were less valued for their workmanship than for their ‘talk’. The Indian’s language was unwritten: his family’s history was handed down by means of carvings and totemic emblems painted on his things. Some totems were personal, some belonged to the whole clan.56

In Vancouver, she studied the work of ethnographers and visited museum collections of Native artefacts as one way of learning the totem pole language, but at times she still misinterpreted what she saw, representing certain figures as female for example when they were actually male.57 In trying to include the ‘strong talk’ of the totems within her own art, Carr, found herself divided, as Wright later did, between new ways of seeing and those inherited traditions which had shaped her view of the world: Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England’s schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man’s understanding . . . The new West called me, but my Old World heredity, the flavour of my upbringing, pulled me back. I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce.58

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If she were to successfully accommodate both Canada’s ‘great woods and spaces’ within her painting, along with what she had learnt from Indian carving, Carr decided she must study the ‘New Art’ flourishing in Paris, so in 1910 she travelled to France with Alice, remaining there until 1911. Understanding the true nature of home meant taking another journey away from it. For both Carr and Wright, journeys, abroad or within their own countries, were also part of a metaphysical search as each sought to discover and understand the most recent developments in her chosen art while connecting with others who shared her professional interests. This involved an encounter with Modernism, the dominant art movement of their times, which profoundly influenced both literature and painting from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Glen McLeod contends that: The ancient parallel between literature and the visual arts . . . becomes newly relevant in the twentieth century. Painters were the first to explore the revolutionary possibilities of Modernism, so that painting became the leading art form. Modernist writers often patterned their literary experiments on parallels drawn from the visual arts.59

The techniques and style of painting that flourished in France during Carr’s visit afforded ways of moving beyond the conventions of nineteenth-century naturalism which had previously limited the full expression of her artistic vision. Inspired by her principal mentor there, English artist Harry Phelan Gibb, she explored the possibilities of the post-impressionist Fauvist style that so appealed to her in his work: ‘There was rich, delicious juiciness in his colour, interplay between warm and cool tones. He intensified vividness by the use of complementary colour.’60 She learned to see her subjects ‘in terms of abstract rhythms and bold colour masses, set down in relationships of mutual contrast’61 so that French landscape now assumed for her the vivid colour and contrasts of a Fauve palette: ‘The fields were lovely, lying like a spread of gay patchwork against red-gold wheat, cool, pale oats, red-purple of new-turned soil, green, green grass, and orderly, well-trimmed trees.’62 This new visual language was powerfully transformative in its effects both on Carr’s landscape painting and her portrayals of First Nations carving, assisting her to express more of the ‘totem-pole’ language. Her choice of Native subject matter corresponded well to early Modernist preoccupations with the ‘primitive’, for, just as emerging writers in colonized countries were starting to write back to the imperial centre, so metropolitan artists in avant-garde circles had begun incorporating in their work the myths and artefacts of colonized cultures:

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr In any number of different ways the West experienced this arrival of the Stranger in its midst: in the rise of cultural anthropology; in late nineteenth-century theosophist preoccupations with Eastern spirituality; in fauvist and primitivist styles of painting; in theories of the unconscious mind. What was once otherworldly was now encouraged to interact creatively with Western forms of understanding. Freud and Jung looked to myths and fetish objects from other cultures to illuminate the European psyche. For modernist artists – not only Picasso, but also Henri Matisse, André Derain, and others – the masks, carvings, and ceremonial artefacts which might be discovered in European collections held great potential for new aesthetic speculations.63

Harry Gibb greatly admired the Indian sketches Carr brought with her to France. He assured her that this ‘New Art’ would help her work ‘out west’ by showing her ‘a bigger way of approach’.64 With her newly acquired skills, Carr began reworking some of her earlier sketches,65 endowing her representations of First Nations carving with far greater presence and substantiality than previously. Nevertheless, some aspects of Modernist art proved alienating, especially the contorted figures many contemporary artists, including Gibb, created in overturning traditionally accepted ideals of beauty and nature: Against the distortion of his nudes I felt revolt. Indians distorted both human and animal forms – but they distorted with meaning, for emphasis, and with great sincerity. Here I felt distortion was often used for design or in an effort to shock rather than convince.66

Although Carr disapproved of deliberately setting out to shock, her paintings of Native sculptures convey the power First Nations cultures invested in them, and its disturbing effect on many observers, including Carr herself: she perceived, and probably envied, the strength of their monuments, and certainly attempted to imbue her art with it, not only to honour what she admired but also to claim it, to absorb some of the power she perceived there, a power of strangeness and the unknown, a power that harboured an ideal mirror and a matchless shield for dealing with her own sexual, social and professional marginalization.67

Back in Canada, Carr undertook an extensive journey in 1912 visiting as many North West Coast Native communities as she could, returning with an abundance of watercolour sketches she later worked up into large oil paintings in her studio as part of creating her pictorial record of First Nations poles and carvings. While several of the sketches are in the nature of jottings, a number are

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full scale watercolours which could be exhibited in their own right.68 In 1913, she hired a hall in Vancouver and, in what was a truly remarkable achievement, exhibited 200 works resulting from her expeditions of 1912 and earlier. The exhibition was accompanied by a lecture on totems, delivered on two separate occasions. Here Carr sought to explain the significance and meaning of the Native carvings she had recorded. The public response, however, was lukewarm. Viewers, and even her own family members, were uneasy with the bold, new style of painting she had developed in France and were indifferent or even hostile to her attempts to promote the artistic achievements of First Nations’ art. As a result ‘Carr, the impulsive enthusiast, felt alone and betrayed’.69 Like Carr, Wright struggled with the role of artist in an Australian cultural scene where ‘women were never expected to be major players’,70 and in 1943 she too embarked upon a further journey, from her father’s property in northern New South Wales to Brisbane, seeking a congenial artistic and literary milieu which might foster new approaches to art. To some extent, she found this through her association with the newly founded literary journal Meanjin to which she contributed volunteer secretarial work. In Brisbane, Wright also came in contact with the Barjai group of lively young writers who flourished there during the mid-1940s, addressing at least one of their regular Sunday afternoon meetings.71 Although Wright was not a group member herself, the association led to several long-lasting friendships, but, as recalled in her autobiography, the city did not provide the stimulating literary and intellectual community she needed: ‘As for the life of the mind, let alone the heart, which I had vaguely hoped to find through my connections with Brisbane’s literary life, nothing eventuated’.72 Through her work in Brisbane with Meanjin, however, Wright met the man who was to provide her with a deep sense of belonging, while nourishing her creative and imaginative life – her future husband, Jack McKinney. Australia in the 1940s was not particularly welcoming or sympathetic to artists and writers who wished to experiment or strike out in new directions. Modernism, especially in painting, aroused deep antipathy in members of the Australian cultural establishment who associated it with European decadence. As John Williams remarked: Modernism and madness went hand in glove to the small elite who held positions of power in national galleries, served as critics and influenced opinion on major newspapers, or edited influential cultural magazines.73

In Canada, the Group of Seven artists had provided modernism with a patriotic fillip:

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr Not that this group’s influence went beyond employing post-impressionism’s late-Edwardian techniques and colouring to ginger up a static landscape tradition but it was clear progress of a kind unknown in Australia, where landscape seemed to have become too sacred and untouchable for any kind of modernistic change.74

Australian painters were still expected to produce idealized pastoral landscapes, in a style formulated by the nineteenth-century Heidelberg School, to serve as metaphors ‘for health and sanity against the perceived disease and decadence of the city and the modernist art it produced’.75 Ironically, it was women artists, like Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston who became proponents of Australian modernism, because, ‘Modernism was designated as marginal, feminine, other, while academic painting, and pastoral academic painting in particular, maintained a masculine, mainstream presence.’76 The complexity of response to literary modernism in and of the antipodes can also be observed in Virginia Woolf ’s love/hate relationship with Katherine Mansfield, united as they were in aspects of this marginality being both female and avant garde yet divided by subject/object class relations of empire and colony. Woolf spoke of Mansfield as the only person with whom she could talk about writing ‘without altering my thought’;77 she published Mansfield’s story, Prelude, on her independent press;78 and on Mansfield’s death, Woolf bemoaned the loss of the only writer she deemed a worthy competitor.79 Yet, while admiring Mansfield’s ‘intelligence’ that ‘repays friendship’, Woolf could slander her in the same breath. In this diary entry from the early days of their relationship Woolf recoils from Mansfield’s ‘commonness’, infamously describing her as hard, cheap and ‘stink[ing] like a – well civet cat that had taken to street walking’.80 Woolf ’s relationship with her antipodean rival was almost necessarily a volatile mix of emotions because modernism meant so much to so few. Whether literary or visual, modernist works were met with antipathy and often outrage by critics and the general public in Britain,81 so although antagonism to modernism and its authors was quite pronounced in Australia, it was less institutionalized than such widespread aversion might suggest. As an undergraduate, Wright had been daunted to find that ‘the English department had no truck with Australian writing’,82 but university classes introduced her to some ‘daringly modern authors’ on whose work she initially attempted to model her own poetry: I brooded over Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins with real excitement . . . The few poems I did write then, with free verse and linguistic entanglements I fondly

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imagined were Hopkinsian, did not find publishers and this was fortunate in its way. Australia was no place for experiment I decided.83

The hazards of poetic experimentation were later highlighted by the Ern Malley hoax of 1944 when two young Sydney poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who were deeply opposed to ‘the most self-consciously “modernist” literary journal in Australia at the time’, Angry Penguins, with its flamboyant editor Max Harris, concocted sixteen poems by a fictional, recently deceased poet, Ern Malley. They sent the poems to the magazine with a covering letter from Ern’s equally fictitious sister, Ethel, requesting they be considered for publication. Harris, accepting the correspondence at face value, published the poems, and the hoax when revealed, ‘marshaled Australian popular sentiment against literary modernism as never before.’84 In Brisbane, Judith Wright became marginally involved in the whole affair when Harris sent Clem Christesen, editor of Meanjin Papers, some of the Ern Malley poems for his opinion. He in turn consulted Wright: Always interested in experiment, she liked them and insist[ed] . . . that there were some good poems in the collection. ‘You can’t sit two poets down over a quantity of beer with paper in front of them and not get some pretty remarkable phraseology out of it whatever the intention.’85

Experimental prose proved equally open to attack. When Patrick White published The Tree of Man in 1955, Wright read the novel with a sense of deep recognition, recalling, ‘Somehow it bolstered what I had been trying to do’;86 but poet and academic, A.D. Hope, savaged it in a notorious review: When so few Australian novelists can write prose at all, it is a great pity to see Mr. White, who shows on every page some touch of the born writer, deliberately choose as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge.87

Wright, however, escaped such censure. Although she had no desire to adopt the ‘Great Tradition’ of English literature advocated by poets like Hope and McAuley, considering it ‘the literary equivalent of the importation of foreign flora and fauna which had so damaged the physical environment’,88 her versification was relatively traditional, like that of the modernist writer who influenced her so significantly, W.B. Yeats. She did not, therefore, attract the wrath of critics who resented and condemned the linguistic experimentation of authors like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Wright’s affinity with modernism appears principally in her increasing concern with the destructiveness of modern society, apparent throughout all her work, and her poetic deployment of frameworks of myth and symbol in her poetry:

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr she was drawn again and again – like the European modernists – to the yearning hope that older religions and primitive mythologies might point the way toward congeries of truth which had been neglected by the technological civilisations of the West.89

Unlike Carr’s, Wright’s work met with early success and recognition. Even before moving to Brisbane, she had achieved some notice as a poet by publishing in a variety of journals, and her first book of poetry The Moving Image (1946) firmly established a literary reputation which was further reinforced by her next volume Woman to Man (1949). This early success, however, was something of a mixed blessing. Because a number of major poems in these first two books celebrate landscape, ‘the prominent subject of Australian art, including poetry’ both then and now,90 Wright’s work has often been perceived through the narrow prism of a patriotic nationalism to which it is largely antipathetic. The poems expressing awareness of Aboriginal dispossession were generally overlooked along with the many allusions to war, with its horrors and the threat it posed to her cherished landscape. ‘It is ironic’, observes Brigid Rooney, ‘that Wright’s philosophical and poetic engagement with modernity’s self-destructiveness in these two collections was at first so readily dismissed, for this was the intellectual scaffold for a maturing environmental poetics.’91 Carr was less fortunate than Wright in having to wait much longer for acceptance of her artistic achievement, for it was only after meeting artists from the Group of Seven in her late fifties that she felt truly acknowledged as a serious artist. Although her time in France had proved artistically stimulating, the nonFrench speaking Carr, unable to endure life in metropolitan Paris, had found little in the way of artistic companionship. Towards the end of her stay, however, she spent six weeks painting in the Breton village of Concarneau under the guidance of New Zealand artist, Frances Hodgkins, recording how ‘I put in six weeks’ good work under her’.92 Both women had left homes on the other side of the world, Hodgkins in Dunedin and Carr in Victoria, to further an artistic career and achieve a professional identity. Each carried the double burden of being a colonial and a woman. The relationship between them was so brief as to have left barely a trace in the written record of their lives, but is significant in that each made an opposing decision: Hodgkins to remain in Europe for the sake of what was to become a successful career and Carr to return to Canada, the only place which she believed could nourish her vocation. Both Carr and Wright recognized they could develop their creative vision only by living in their native land while struggling to belong in societies which relegated women artists to the margins.

6

Jack McKinney: The Equal Heart and Mind1

Travelling home to Wallamumbi, New England from Sydney in early 1942, after eight years of relative freedom from many of the expectations and restrictions placed on a young unmarried woman by family, Wright reflects on the possibility of marriage to her current boyfriend: My problem was, as usual, that I seemed never to strike the right note in any of my lovers. What I was interested in seemed to set them off immediately on a different line of thought from mine. If it had not been that the manifest destiny of women was to get married, I felt I could have chosen easily the fate of the spinster.2

But as explored in Wright’s poem ‘Remembering an Aunt’,3 the life of a spinster did not necessarily accord with freedom, especially when endured within the bosom of family, no matter how loving that family. In Half a Lifetime Wright speaks of again returning to the duality of Inside/Outside that shaped her childhood and adolescence, ultimately determining the woman she was expected to be and the woman she wanted to be. ‘At Wallamumbi,’ she writes, ‘I did what I could, both in the house and outside’: Mustering and drafting cattle had always been a joy; even the chill of winter winds as the autumn ended was no discouragement. Outside I could work myself back into the country I more and more recognized as my heartland . . . It was the indoor work, in that house which I always associated with my mother’s illness and death, that depressed me. I was never happy in the house. I hadn’t left Sydney with housework in mind.4

Wright also recalls the difficulty of writing poetry under the demanding conditions of the war-affected countryside. This difficulty was as much or more material as mental: As I attempted to get the garden into some order, did the dairy work, made the butter and cheese and fed the pigs, I tried to make poems. The physical task of 97

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr writing them down was difficult: we could use the generator for electricity for only a couple of hours a day, the house, so badly planned, was always dark and cold, paper and pens were hard to buy . . . In my father’s mostly fireless office my fingers stumbled on the old Remington and refused to hold a pen.5

These are the ‘grossly material things’ of life that impact on the capacity of a (woman) writer whose work is necessarily attached, like a spider’s web’, to ‘life at all four corners’.6 Wright describes the ‘cold, bitterly cold, to-the-bone cold’ of New England winters and the drought that seemed to make the winter of 1943 even worse. She begins to dream of warmer, coastal climes and city life – not Sydney, but Brisbane – Australia’s northern line of defence against Japanese invasion. Here it was that Wright obtained a clerical position with the Universities Commission and publication success with the little Brisbane magazine, Meanjin Papers. In the Spring of 1943 Brisbane was a city ‘crowded with servicemen [American and Australian] stationed there or passing through, women and girls in bright lipstick and bare or nylon-clad legs . . . and . . . entrepreneurs catering to the needs of the foreign peaceful invasion’.7 This was a city of gaudy flowers – bougainvillea, poinsettia, yellow cassia – that held out the promise of tropical vitality and a surprising fecundity, given the deprivation and misery of the war years. Perhaps Wright’s description of Brisbane, based on the impression of fifty years’ distance, is highly coloured by the very personal life-affirming, lifechanging impact of her move to this shabby but ‘rakish’ city.8 For it was here that she would truly come into her own as a poet, and here that she would meet and fall in love with Jack McKinney. In her autobiography Wright claims that: What was crucial in our relationship was the sense it gave me of faith in the human adventure . . . I needed nothing less than the hope Jack’s work gave me of the human capacity to create and affirm life before I could myself begin to have confidence in the creative side of my own life. The certainty with which he was pursuing his own work helped immensely to turn me back to mine.9

Wright makes clear how this founding of both a profession and a partnership is intimately entangled. She speaks of being ‘in love – in love with a man and a mind.’ ‘I had been brought up,’ she observes, ‘among men whose interests, as the saying went, could reach as far as the paddock gate, and women who often shared similar interests for lack of an education. Jack’s talk reminded me of a dragonfly in its speed and brilliance’.10 It is not insignificant that Wright should emphasize a love of ideas and linguistic proficiency in their expression in the list of attributes

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that attracted her to McKinney. Talk – reflective, intellectual, passionate and playful – was as important to Wright as it was to Woolf. Reflecting on the milieu in which her mother was educated, Woolf observes that her mother was taught to ‘take such a part as girls did then in the lives of distinguished men; to pour out tea; to hand them their strawberries and cream; to listen devoutly, reverently to their wisdom’.11 After the death of her father, Woolf moved from the family home in Hyde Park, Kensington to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury – a move accorded great symbolic value in Woolf ’s writing, for this was a shift from the Victorian era to the Modern. Here with her sister, the modernist artist Vanessa Bell, Woolf enjoyed the freedom to talk – to talk flippantly or seriously on equal ground with the women and men of her generation. She recalls the young men who had ‘no “manners” in the Hyde Park Gate sense’: They criticised our arguments as severely as their own. They never seemed to notice how we were dressed or if we were nice looking or not. All that tremendous encumbrance of appearance and behaviour which George [her elder halfbrother] had piled upon our first years vanished completely.12

Here at the heart of Bloomsbury modernism, ‘there was now nothing that one could not say, nothing that one could not do’. The young Virginia’s views could be considered with the merit they deserved – something unthinkable in the Victorian household in which her father and brothers reigned as superior beings. ‘It was, I think,’ writes Woolf, ‘a great advance in civilization.’13 Although Wright was born in the second decade of the twentieth century, her household, like Woolf ’s, largely retained Victorian attitudes towards a woman’s place in the home and society. Yet, despite being a (younger) man of Philip Wright’s generation, Jack McKinney had little truck with nineteenth-century manners or Victorian attitudes towards women: he appeared to be gender blind to the extent that, early in their relationship, Wright explains her possessiveness of McKinney and her perceived inability to live up to his high expectations by reminding him of their physiological difference. She writes: If I could always act consistently I would always be what you call the ‘real’ me (not any realer really than the unreal one, but better). I think it’s physiology darling. I’ll be quite frank because I want to get this clear. Women are built so that there are 2 things they want – under the circumstances you & I are under – children & security. That’s physiology for you, or nature if you prefer it. We can’t have either. You know that doesn’t matter to the ‘real me’ because I have what more than makes up for it, you & the job.14

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The achievement of what Wright desired, that is children and marriage, did not at first seem possible. McKinney, although long estranged from his wife, remained married. This was an era when divorce was rare, shameful and came with the very real possibility of social ostracism, something McKinney’s wife would not countenance. But although McKinney’s idealism sometimes prevented him from recognizing the realities with which idealism needed to contend, his passionate belief in ideas and the pursuit of their realization meant he saw something in Wright that other men either did not see or did not value. On being introduced to McKinney in the home of Clem Christesen Wright describes how ‘used to keeping away from the conversations of men’, she left Clem and Jack to talk while she ‘slipped into the kitchen to do some of the washing-up that awaited Nina [Clem’s wife] on her return from work’, only to be surprised by Jack’s appearance in the kitchen, tea-towel in hand to dry the dishes – an action remarked by Wright as ‘not a phenomenon to which I was accustomed.’ A partnership of ‘equal heart and mind’15 was begun with a man taking equal responsibility for an Inside task assigned women. It was an action that, in twentyfirst-century Australia or Canada, would not be seen to be so unusual but in the 1940s was extraordinary – its significance underscored by its inclusion in the autobiography of a poet of such eminence. Of course, this reminds us that it is not an autobiography of a poet, but that of a female poet – a woman who has successfully managed the difficult triumvirate of partner/wife, mother and ‘the job’ of professional artist. There is interesting accord, and marked difference, between Wright’s record of dishwashing and that of Katherine Mansfield, who falls out with her partner, John (Jack) Middleton Murray, over the dishes. On weekends when Middleton Murray comes with friends from London to visit Mansfield in Buckinghamshire, she finds herself excluded from literary discussions – ‘confined to the kitchen, scrubbing congealed mutton fat off a sinkful of plates and pans’.16 Mansfield’s resentment ends in a quarrel with Middleton Murray; he leaves in anger without speaking to her. Feeling an explanation is required, she immediately writes a letter: Am I such a tyrant – Jack dear – [. . .]? . . . when I have to clean up twice over or wash up extra unnecessary things I get frightfully impatient and want to be working. So often, this week, Ive heard you and Gordon talking while I washed dishes. Well, someone’s got to wash dishes & get food . . . Yes, I hate hate HATE doing these things that you accept just as all men accept of their women. I can only play the servant with very bad grace indeed.17

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But Jack McKinney is not ‘all men’. He is the man who wipes as Judith washes; not merely willingly, but unasked. The shared domestic chore is an opportunity to talk, as equals. Wright recalls how ‘before Jack’, her experiences of Australian men had been of patronage at best: ‘awkwardness and concealed dismissal were more likely than exchanges of views on an equal basis. This man was different.’ She speaks of McKinney sharing his enthusiasms and ideas ‘as though I was an authority’ and remarks: ‘It was a new experience to be asked my opinions on issues and writers.’18 As their daughter, Meredith, observes: The intellectual excitement and delight of their early encounters quickly spilled over into love, but it was the meeting of minds that first and to the end underpinned that love . . . Her own more intuitive vision of the world took fire and fresh form from his passionately reasoned one, and his understandings were increasingly infused with the clarities of her poetic intuition.19

In a sense, this first meeting of Wright and McKinney over the dishes was not the first, for they had already met between the sheets of Meanjin. Wright had been publishing poems regularly in Meanjin since the early summer of 1942 and McKinney’s work first appears in the last issue of that year. Wright recalls that, although Christesen had not told her at the time, McKinney had asked to be introduced to her ‘because he felt that my point of view, as expressed in my poems he had read, might approach his own.’20 Images of a sleeping world that needs to be woken from its lethargy are common to the work of McKinney and Wright during this period, both echoing the imagery of T.S. Eliot’s pre- and mid-Second World War poetry. In the opening lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ Eliot likens the evening to ‘a patient etherised upon a table’.21 In the poem ‘Waiting’, published in the Spring issue of 1943, Wright speaks of ‘minds anaesthetised’ and calls on time to be ‘the calm surgeon’ who will decide ‘our cancer is not mortal, can be exercised’.22 But this stanza continues with the recognition that at the back of our prayers is the truth we know, although we turn our faces away: ‘only ourselves / have choice or power to make us whole again’. Time is in our hands – we can wait or we can act. Prayer to ‘God’ is the Shadow, to quote Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’, that falls between ‘the idea / And the reality’, between ‘the motion / And the act’23 – it is the darkness in which we attempt to hide from ourselves and the truth of what we have done and not done. Neither God nor Time lifts knives ‘to heal or to destroy’. For Wright, that anesthetized state is a nightmare from which we can and must escape by our own hand – an illness that need not be terminal if we recognize our complicity and our responsibility. It is a nice fillip that the poem ‘Waiting’ appeared in the

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

issue of Meanjin where Wright and McKinney would finally ‘meet’ – as though ‘Waiting’ signalled its own end, propelling the writers towards a beginning together. They would become, to quote from ‘Little Gidding’, the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘the complete consort dancing together’.24 It is no wonder that McKinney saw much in Wright’s poetry that spoke to his own concerns, beliefs and values, for in this same issue his essay on ‘The Poet and the Intellectual Environment’ begins: We are living through a troubled moment in the life of the spirit. Thought has been emptied out of meaning, truth has slipped out through the meshes of our web of reason. We had claimed to disclose the secret of Eternal Truth [. . .] we find ourselves with a formula barely covering the knowledge of temporal fact . . . This is the mood of our generation . . .25

This mood is captured by McKinney in quotation of Eliot’s poetry – from ‘Burnt Norton’ (Four Quartets)26 and ‘The Hollow Men’ – and the modernist American poet, Archibald MacLeish (‘The End of the World’).27 But although dark, the essay is not pessimistic, gesturing in its conclusion to the potential of this troubled age: And yet hope, too, stirs around us and within us. We cannot grasp it nor define it, it is so vague and elusive that we can scarcely know it from our fear . . . this is a mood of tension before the new springtime of the spirit. The word of Truth lies coiled upon itself awaiting the moment of release . . .28

This aligns with Wright’s notion of ‘Waiting’, and more significantly in terms of their coming together and their life project, McKinney delivers the promise of that moment into the hands of the poet. Following a quotation from Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’29 he concludes: In such a moment of the spirit’s growth Art and Religion, reduced to their elements as the sense of beauty and truth, of awe and reverence, join hands once more across the ages. The poetic gift becomes, not a mere personal possession, but a profound moral responsibility: on him who possesses it falls the ancient mantle of poet and prophet.30

For McKinney, that mantle would fall onto the shoulders not of a man, but of a woman he had yet to meet in person – Judith Wright – and together, Jack and Judith would take on that profound moral responsibility. It was no small task, but one that Christesen – the man responsible for their meeting on page and in person – endorsed: ‘In an age governed by the stomach-and-pocket view of life, and at a time of war and transition’, Meanjin was founded on the belief that

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‘talking poetry’ was not only essential to the intellectual and aesthetic life of a nation, it was ‘a duty’. If the Arts were to be neglected during the war years, the damage to their production and efficacy might be irreversible.31 Christesen would assuredly have concurred with nineteenth-century social and literary commentator, Matthew Arnold, that a nation’s greatness was not founded on its material assets like coal or iron but on its spiritual assets – its culture. Culture, according to Arnold, encourages all ‘men’ to use ideas freely – ‘nourished, and not bound by them’ – and to regard a nation’s wealth as nothing more than useful machinery.32 Much of what constituted ‘talking poetry’ in the Meanjin Papers that followed was directed towards reflection (in prose as well as poetry) on the all too apparent failings and the possible prospects of human society, with particular emphasis on Australia as a young nation and a world player. ‘J.P. McKinney’ was introduced to Meanjin readers in the Christmas issue of 1942. Here he is described as the ‘author of “Crucible”, a prize-winning novel of the last war; short story and radio feature writer, of Southport, Queensland.’33 McKinney’s contribution is a short rebuttal of an article published in January of that year by J. Hanson-Lowe. McKinney argues that: This is a troubled age because we are living in the final phase of a cultural cycle, in which the view we have held as to the Universe at large, and man’s place in it, has been worked out to its logical limits.

He urges his readers to embrace the ‘intellectual irritant’ of contradictory viewpoints, for this is the necessary tension that urges mankind on to ‘new intellectual achievements’. The road forward is unclear for ‘we have lost the courage of our convictions’ but we are challenged to ‘at least have the courage of our doubts’. This conclusion does not point a way forward but rather exhorts us not to lapse into ‘mental inertia’.34 The essay is an echo of the sentiments expressed in McKinney’s 1934 novel, Crucible. In the final pages of the novel, John, the protagonist, reflects on the past and the possible future from his position as a survivor of the First World War and ultimately a ‘returned soldier’ who will count the gains and losses: ‘Over! [. . .] The thing they had fought for – victory, peace, civilization, decency, a safer world, a world purged of Prussianism, and so on and so on – well, they had it, whichever and whatever it was. And what did it amount to? All phrases . . . And each side had lied loudly and accused hotly, to save its face and to keep its stupid millions from waking out of their sleep . . . The world had suffered all this misery “for civilization!” [. . .] Actually it had suffered it from civilization – a wrong civilization, or a wrong application of civilization.’35

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Both novel and essay are indicative of a widely shared sense, at the very least among the intellectual circle of Meanjin contributors and readers, of the need to question the state of ‘Western Civilization’ that had led to two horrendous world wars and looked likely to lead us into further calamity if we did not change our thinking, our values and our way of life. A veteran of the First World War himself, McKinney was almost twenty-five years Wright’s senior. When Judith was born a few weeks after the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli in 1915,36 Jack was a young man – a soldier who would return from the war with post-traumatic stress disorder, his health severely compromised but determined to figure out what went wrong and how that wrong turning might be righted. Personal philosophical introspection was given political public voice in a variety of literary, scholarly and journalistic forms (his philosophical treatise being published, in large part through Wright’s indefatigable determination, as The Challenge of Reason in 195037 and The Structure of Modern Thought in 197138). McKinney found his equivalence in Wright’s poetry – they shared a philosophical, literary language and a passionate desire for world change. Referred to as ‘the Job’ in letters to each other, together they worked towards a rethinking of what a better human civilization might look like, might be. Writing to Jack in December 1945 Judith asks, ‘You know don’t you that you & the job are the only things that really matter to me?’ and Jack responds, ‘We’re so necessary to one another, both on our own & for the Job’s sake . . . And the world is going to obstruct us as much as it can.’ They were both acutely aware that they had chosen to pursue a life together of which ‘the world’ would not approve.39 ‘By early 1945,’ writes Meredith McKinney, ‘what had begun as an intense intellectual relationship was secretly sealed with love’: Secrecy only served to intensify what was already an intense relationship between them. It is difficult now to grasp the degree of social disapproval of broken marriages, sex outside wedlock, and indeed any relationship not sanctioned by law and normalcy, that prevailed at the time, and the possible repercussions if such a relationship were discovered.40

On a visit to family in New England in April 1945, Wright keeps up a regular correspondence with McKinney, a correspondence in which the gap between her world-view and her family’s is increasingly apparent to us as readers, but also to herself. Judith writes to Jack: You know after a little of this practical nineteenth-century atmosphere I begin to wonder if you really exist. This family is a survival all right – necessarily so I suppose, I never met a country family yet that wasn’t. I can’t think why I didn’t

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marry a grazier long ago. (But I certainly am glad I didn’t.) There’s no doubt about it, looked at from this angle you and I are queer and sinful fish!41

Judith doesn’t seem overly perturbed by either queerness or sinfulness, perhaps because she and Jack are thereby more securely positioned apart together, bound by a secret intimacy and the higher authority of Love. Judith comments on the ‘nineteenth-century atmosphere’ of home and Jack replies: ‘I can feel that 19th cent. atmosphere & how strange our life would seem by contrast.’ He reassures her that ‘We of course are right, but it’s difficult being the only people who are right. This “living between two worlds” is awkward all round.’42 Here then is an interesting reminder of the impact of the shift that Wright underwent on her voyage out – a shift from grudging adherence to Victorian values of the nineteenth century to an embrace of twentieth-century modernity. Woolf ’s discussion of the divide between the centuries and the generations is pertinent: ‘Two different ages confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate: the Victorian age; and the Edwardian age . . . The cruel thing was that while we could see the future, we were completely in the power of the past. That bred a violent struggle.’43 Wright emerged from the power of that past with apparently more ease than Woolf, perhaps because the colonies were more future oriented than the ‘mother country’. Wright’s struggle appeared to be more a debate about the nature of that future than a struggle to extricate herself from the past, although she remarks in her autobiography that partnership with McKinney provided her with the means of ‘stepping out of the old rigidities and prejudices’ that were part of her background and from which she had been unable to effectively break away.44 Jack is certainly assured, writing to Judith, ‘I wonder can that article [the philosophical article he is writing] make your folk realise that that good old world of theirs is now a fiction in a world of alien fact – realise that this is necessarily so and has a meaning.’45 McKinney believed passionately in the potential of this new world and new world thinking to create a better world. Although in that essay published in the spring 1943 issue of Meanjin Papers McKinney quotes from Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’46 and MacLeish’s ‘The End of the World’, his ideas and the words with which he expresses them are surely influenced by W.B. Yeats’ gyre theory,47 particularly when McKinney observes that ‘As a generation we lie becalmed for a moment at the still point of the turning tide of the spirit’s evolution’ and further, that: Thought and reason have completed their task of the definition and analysis of experience; they are groping for the elements of a new synthesis, a new idea

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which shall be the basis of a new way of looking at things. To art, and to the poet as artist, whose raw material is the pulse and feel of living experience, falls the task of guidance and inspiration; the gift of the poet is to feel the truth that cannot yet be thought.48

The strength of McKinney’s belief in the regenerative value of art, and in particular, the poet’s capacity to discover the truth through a process of intuition rather than logic, feeling rather than reason, would not only bolster Wright’s confidence in her own ideas and the importance she placed on the creative word; it gave her ‘a step-ladder’ out of her ‘solipsistic despairs about the nature of life and its meaning’.49 McKinney affirmed her role, indeed, calling, as poet prophet. Living separately but meeting and corresponding regularly throughout the last years of the war, Judith and Jack critiqued one another’s work with honesty and love, acting as a mutual support group of two that culminated in early 1946 in the purchase of a home. ‘Quantum’50 was a two-room timber-getter’s cottage in the sub-tropical hinterland of Tamborine Mountain in south-east Queensland, of which Wright remarks: ‘We were entirely contented’. She writes with a happy nostalgia of its ‘honest construction’, its ‘walls of reject weatherboards that never quite met’, its ‘one deal table and two wooden benches’, as though she were writing of marriage itself.51 ‘In Praise of Marriages’, a poem published almost a decade later, speaks of both the precariousness and the power of a marriage that although unconventional, although unrecognized by church or state and thus viewed by some as ‘sinful’, was right and true and good: So, perilously joined, lighted in one small room, we have made all things true. Out of the I and the you spreads this field of power, that all that waits may come52

Wright recalls her decision to live in common-law marriage with McKinney as one of defiance – a decision that not only flouted the social mores of the period, but one made counter to an earlier renunciation of ‘the idea of ever marrying with my deafness and the warnings my surgeon had given me about the doubtful chances of bearing a child . . .’53 The first years of this marriage were enormously productive years for Wright: many of the poems published in Meanjin Papers were collected in her first volume of poetry, The Moving Image, in 1946, to be followed by Woman to Man in 1950; and, against the odds, a daughter was born in April of that year. But

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these years were also difficult. Unable to marry, it is hard these days to grasp how profoundly transgressive this was at the time, particularly when Wright became pregnant. As she comments much later: ‘it was social death to give birth outside matrimony, and especially so if one did so willingly’.54 A change in the divorce laws eventually enabled the couple to marry in 1962, but Wright was keenly aware of the stigma attaching to their early years together. Philip Wright was so distressed by his daughter’s pregnancy that she changed her name by deed-poll to Judith Wright McKinney so her child would at least bear the father’s name.55 ‘Quantum’ was small, and although a literal and symbolic shelter from the world, with the birth of Meredith it quickly proved too small. As Wright would observe some years later: Houses and bodies: both limiting factors, shelters, educators subject to alteration56

It was at this point, with wonderful serendipity, that Wright received a legacy from her great aunt Rose. Like Woolf ’s narrator protagonist of a Room of One’s Own, Mary Beton, who also received a legacy from an aunt,57 Wright now had the economic means that would enable the purchase of a more comfortable room of her own and the dedicated pursuit of a writing profession. Although Mary Beton’s legacy was far more substantial than Wright’s, amounting to five hundred pounds a year for life, it nevertheless had something of the same effect: ‘my aunt’s legacy’, writes Woolf, ‘unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.’58 That open sky might be understood not only as a woman’s unimpeded access to the world of ideas, unrestricted by gender or tradition, but access to productive conversation. With the purchase of ‘Calanthe’, the Wright–McKinney partnership could expand with generosity to encompass a coterie of writers, artists and intellectuals. In a letter that looks forward to a visit from fellow poet A.D. Hope, Wright’s careful instructions indicate how far she had removed herself from the more usual city haunt of modernist writers: We are about forty-eight miles from Brisbane by bus – the Tamborine Bus Service, in Roma Street near the City Hall end, runs a daily service up and down, leaving in the mornings (except for Friday, when the bus comes up in the evening, leaving Brisbane at 5.30 pm) and going back in the afternoons. If you care to catch the Saturday morning bus, we would meet you at Curtis Falls at the

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top of the mountain road (dark blue panel van, man with small white beard, matron with horn-rims and attached small child); and drive you back to the bus stop on Sunday or whenever you liked. Or if you can only manage one day, the bus is here for some hours.59

Perhaps surprisingly, this rainforest home situated ‘far from the madding crowd’, provided a solitary retreat and a convivial hub – both necessary to the growth of a poet’s mind and art. It is clear from Wright’s poems and letters that the years lived with McKinney at ‘Calanthe’ gave her a place in the world removed from the world – or a remove from the world that placed her in the world. Letters written throughout the 1950s and 1960s to her close friend, Kathleen McArthur, give a good sense of this. In June 1962 she writes of an ‘Influx of southern visitors – so far Geoff and Nina Dutton, Alf Wesson and various relations, and today Judah Waten (whom I have never met or even corresponded with) rang up to invite himself on Saturday . . .’ In the same letter, she mourns the delay of the return of Charles and Barbara Blackman from London.60 Like 46 Gordon Square, ‘Calanthe’ was a meeting place of the new moderns. Writing from London in 1965, Wright’s good friend Barbara Blackman consoles her own homesickness with memories of the Wright–McKinney household which she regarded as a place of warmth and cultural energy: We WANT to come and spend a week with you at Tamborine. It always seems like the final real centre about which our other ideas of home and what Australia was like all centre, the walk up the red road and you round your kitchen fireside.61

Thirty-five years later, the occasion of Barbara Blackman’s donation of a family portrait of Judith, Jack and Meredith, painted by her husband, Charles, to the National Portrait Gallery of Australia (Figure 10) was an opportunity to celebrate Wright’s eighty-fifth birthday and for Barbara Blackman to offer a tribute to a cherished friend of fifty years.62 She recalls the meetings of the Barjai group whose Sunday afternoon gathering at the Lyceum Club in Brisbane created a space for young writers like herself to read and discuss each other’s work and to hear from invited ‘significant’ speakers. Blackman speaks of how Wright’s reading of poems from her unpublished manuscript of The Moving Image, ‘went to the heart, the Australian heart’ and of Jack, ‘the published writer J.P. McKinney’, who spoke about ‘emotional honesty’.63 She recalls his ‘keen blue eyes’, his ‘direct, disarming manner’ and of how she wanted ‘to listen to everything this man had to say.’ Blackman was still in high school,

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awed by two published writers, far older and wiser than herself. But although she speaks of them as her ‘Sky Heroes’,64 a tag that suggests a distanced, worshipful relationship, this was far from the case as the voluminous correspondence between Barbara, Judith and Jack makes clear. Theirs was a warm, supportive friendship that, although punctuated by sometimes great distances, was maintained through frequent letter writing. Barbara recalls of Judith and Jack: ‘I loved their wordiness and their quirky humour.’65 When in calling distance, Barbara and Charles would visit their friends at ‘Quantum’ and then ‘Calanthe’. Blackman writes of weekends spent in ‘their little wooden house made of books’ where they would be ‘gentled by Judith’s readings and comments and bluff country meals, pricked by Jack’s exposure of the Modern World Crisis and warmed by his worldly humour and the legendary anecdotes of his roving days in the bush.’66 The seed of Charles Blackman’s painting of ‘The Family’ was sown in the winter of 1955 when the Blackmans and McKinneys picnicked at Cedar Creek in Tamborine. Charles took a photograph of the happy picnickers (later published in Barbara’s ‘autobiographical reflections’)67 from which the portrait would be recreated. In Sarah Engledow’s words, ‘The Family is not a comfortable portrait; its subjects appear anguished and alienated, and its flowers add no cheer to a landscape as bleak as the slopes of Stromboli.’68 If there is reference to Cedar Creek it lies in the stretch of grey-brown background against which the bold colours and shapes of hats, eyes and flowers are unsettling. Judith’s face blends in part with the background and the flowers obscure all but the blue blaze of her eyes. Stretching to the very edges of her face they seem to be reaching out to Jack and Meredith on either side with as much strength as she can muster; and yet the eyes also hold the viewer with hypnotic power – they look to the sides and yet straight ahead. There is something almost hysterical in this portrait of Judith that is calmed by the darker, softer blue green of Jack’s face, despite the mismatched eyes and features askew. Jack’s face is squashed into Judith’s hair, her arm around his shoulders, holding him close. Meredith holds herself a little apart – yet she is linked to Judith by a flower chain that touches her shoulder and is mirrored in her hat that sits low, obscuring her vision. Perhaps Meredith does not yet see what her parents see; and perhaps it is just as well as there is indeed something disquieting about this family portrait. Flowers and schoolgirls would become the trade signature of Blackman’s work in the 1950s and 1960s. He said of the flowers: ‘they were very very floral and “flowery” in a kind of way, but still a bit angst-y, a bit Funeral funeral’.69 The ‘bleak landscape’ of which the family is part and yet not part might be a projection into the future, given the funereal

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aspect of the flowers and the fears of nuclear holocaust that haunted writer intellectuals like Wright and McKinney. Some twenty years later, and ten years after McKinney’s death, Cedar Creek is recalled by Wright in a poem included in Fourth Quarter (1976) in which she struggles to hear the lyrical voice of the muse amidst the cacophony of competing voices that demand her attention.70 This struggle is represented by the abandoned garden, ‘Too overgrown to recall the shapes we planned’ that ‘flourishes with weeds not native to this country’. Thoughts of ‘calm wisdom’, of ‘an old age with something to say / that any future will listen to’ cannot be reconciled with the demands made by a world that has seemingly lost the vital connection between Culture and Nature. Wright sees the poet’s job as that which maintains this connection but it would seem that Yeats’ sense of impending disaster is played out.71 Changes in the Garden from Ancient to Modern, or even over the brief space of the poet’s lifetime, have so altered the relationship that darkness threatens to overwhelm light: By the waterfalls of Cedar Creek where there aren’t any cedars I try to remember the formula for poetry. Plastic bags, broken beer bottles effluent from the pig-farm blur the old radiance.

This is a world without Jack – the man who believed so vehemently in the power of creative thinking to change the world. But in the 1950s and early 1960s Judith was supported by what she describes as Jack’s ‘sheer tranquil existence’ as much as his work.72 Published twenty years after their first meeting, Wright dedicated her sixth volume of poetry, Five Senses, to McKinney (although she does not name him): Lost in a desolate country, I travelled far to find what only you could give me – the equal heart and mind that answer love in kind.73

In the Collected Poems, the poem is titled, ‘A Dedication’, but prefaced by the additional title, ‘The Forest’, which suggests a relationship between the dedicatory poem and the second poem of the volume entitled ‘The Forest’.74 This begins: ‘When first I knew this forest / its flowers were strange’,75 an allusion surely not

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only to the forest of Tamborine, but to Judith’s relationship with Jack, and a love that once new and strange has become known and comfortable: Now that its vines and flowers are named and known, like long-fulfilled desires those first strange joys are gone.76

The sentiment is similar to that found in the poem ‘A Decade’ written by American modernist poet, Amy Lowell: When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant. I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, But I am completely nourished.77

But unlike Lowell, Wright concludes her love poem with reference to a higher Love, and although not a denial of ‘complete nourishment’, there is recognition that a sexual love (albeit one between partners of equal heart and mind) is not sufficient in itself: ‘my search,’ she writes, ‘is further’: There’s still to name and know beyond the flowers I gather that one that does not wither – the truth from which they grow.78

This search for Truth was one supported in the first ‘half a life time’ by McKinney. The volume that begins with a dedication of and to love – love of Jack and a more abstract, philosophical understanding of Love as Truth – includes the poem ‘Reading Thomas Traherne’. Here Wright describes Traherne as ‘the man who knew / how simply truth may come’.79 Paul Kane sees Traherne as ‘someone Wright turns to in doubt or in despair, for he possesses a strength and serenity she covets’.80 But we might better understand the metaphysical poet’s place in Wright’s work and her life as symbolic of the ontological quest she shared with McKinney. Traherne acts as a touchstone of their particular personal truth – a truth they discover together through their love for each other – and a larger Truth that they work towards understanding and sharing with others through their joint philosophical and poetic endeavour. For Wright and McKinney, reading Thomas Traherne was a joint felicity (to use a significant recurring word in Traherne’s work). In her memoir of her

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parents, Meredith McKinney recalls her mother’s ‘occasional “little talks” to me as a growing girl’. In these talks a mother passed on her experience of love ‘between the sexes’, a love as impressed on her daughter as, at best, capable of encompassing ‘the purest, deepest and most joyous experiences.’ Meredith remembers being unsure if her mother was talking about herself and her father, ‘but could only conclude that she was, although she never spoke in such personal terms, preferring (as always) to express herself on the level of truths rather than mere facts.’ In addition, she wonders what experiences, other than the sexual, her mother might be including in that most joyous of experiences, concluding: ‘probably a version of the mystical experience, which is another form of Love, at least in the Christian tradition she inherited.’ Later in her memoir, Meredith asserts her belief that what lay at the core of her parents’ shared ‘vision’ was Love: ‘that transcendent experience that reaches beyond the isolated “I” to embrace the other and ultimately the world itself.’81 This sense of a greater Love allied with Truth is again called upon in the poem ‘The Slope’, included in Wright’s 1973 volume Alive,82 and again, is associated with Jack. The poem begins with despair over the blindness, greed and corruption of Men and a vision of ‘suicidal Earth’, but regains spiritual and poetic strength in the recollection of ‘poets and fighters with their eyes on truth’ like Traherne who would ‘rather suffer the flames of hell / than be like these’. As a result of that remembering, the poem and poet cannot deny ‘the burst of glory in the world and man’ that might still be Earth’s saving grace. The poet calls up ‘true men . . . my dead beloved, my guides, my living friends’ to her side – her support through this dark night of the soul: Even on the last black slope among mad images that rave or weep, let all your voices call me back to air: show me my true beginnings and their ends.83

In the collection Shadow (1970), Judith writes a ‘Love Song in Absence’. Here she returns to that country of desolation in which she wandered lost, before Jack’s love: I sighed for a world left desolate without you, all certainty, passion and peace withdrawn; ... You are gone, I said, and since through you I lived I begin to die.84

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But this time, desolation is tempered by the memory of their love, of the qualities of the man himself, and of her own sense of being loved: What I remember of you makes reply. Your eyes, your look, remain, all said and done, the guarantee of blessing, now you’re gone.85

The second ‘sigh’ of ‘Love Song in Absence’ is one not so much of deep sadness as of philosophical inevitability – heart supplanted by mind, emotion by intellect (if only temporarily): ‘But as I sighed, I knew: incomprehensible energy / creates us and destroys, all words are made / in the long shadow of eternity.’86 Here we see Meredith’s response to their letters – that Judith’s ‘more intuitive vision of the world took fire and fresh form from his [Jack’s] passionately reasoned one’87 – given poetic veracity. Here we also see Wright accept the truth she cannot deny: that all words and all worlds are made and unmade in that long shadow.

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7

Darkness

Wright and Carr each endured a dark period in middle life, though for different reasons. Carr’s crisis, prompted by her local community’s inability to understand or accept her art, and compounded by severe financial difficulties, began as she reached her forties, while Wright experienced deep suffering when entering her fifties with the final illness and death of her beloved husband Jack in 1966. The darkness manifested itself in varying ways through both women’s art, though Wright’s autobiographical account in Half a Lifetime is quite reticent compared to Carr’s detailed record of her troubled time in Growing Pains and The House of All Sorts. For each, the dark time marked the end of one particular phase in life, with significant consequences for her future artistic development. Wright’s career followed a different trajectory from Carr’s with the darkness shadowing a later stage of it. Unlike Carr she enjoyed a number of advantages which contributed towards her relatively early literary acceptance and success. The class confidence of her wealthy New England pastoral family endowed her with immense social assurance and a powerful sense of self that persisted throughout her life. Even though, like Carr, Wright often experienced serious financial difficulties (since the family wealth was largely tied up in land which only the male members could inherit) her family’s prosperity nevertheless must have been a bulwark of sorts. A further advantage was the three years’ study at the University of Sydney, funded by her grandmother’s legacy, even though, having failed to matriculate, she could not take out a degree. But she chose subjects she hoped would foster her literary aspirations, no matter how slim the chances of making her living as a writer appeared at the time. As Georgina Arnott comments, ‘To embark on university with no realistic vocational plan was, of course, a privilege made possible by her family’s wealth’.1 As a student, and in the years immediately after, Wright published a number of poems in magazines and literary journals, often under a pseudonym which, she half humorously declares to an interviewer, ‘I shall never reveal . . . whether wild horses are harnessed to me or not’. Other times she gave her name merely as 115

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J. Wright, considering this gave her a better chance of publication2 so, on moving to Brisbane in 1944, she already had the beginnings of a body of work. Most importantly, Wright, unlike Carr, experienced early artistic acclaim. Her first collection of verse, The Moving Image (1946), was reviewed enthusiastically by leading Australian writers, even receiving overseas commendation in the British journal Poetry Review.3 In Shirley Walker’s view, ‘It is difficult to overstate the impact of this collection. It was obvious that an exciting major talent had emerged; one which was to dominate Australian poetry for many years.’4 Wright’s literary reputation was further confirmed three years later with her second book, Woman to Man, and by 1955, with publication of her next two books of poetry, she was established as one of Australia’s pre-eminent poets. Wright’s idyll was eventually disrupted, however, by Jack’s death. Born in 1891, he was not only her senior by more than twenty years, but his soldiering in the First World War had left him suffering lifelong poor health, largely from the effects of ‘shell shock’5 though he refused to consider himself an invalid. Wright’s constant anxiety over him comes through in letters to her very close friends: Jack is not as well as I’d like, though really he’s been very lucky. He is sensible and doesn’t do too much, and he doesn’t now get any pain to speak of and can work for hours at a time at his writing, but he tires very easily . . .6

Occasionally the news is good – ‘Jack is very extremely well in fact quite superman at present. It’s wonderful indeed’7 – but more often she records his health setbacks: ‘Jack seems to get most things nowadays and it takes him a good time to shake them off now he’s entered the 70’s’.8 Even when, in a 1963 letter to Nettie Palmer, Wright records he ‘is mostly very well and lively’ she explains she is unlikely to visit Melbourne because ‘I don’t like leaving Jack to cope alone, for he isn’t always well’.9 His death, long dreaded by Wright, finally occurred on 6 December 1966, though a little unexpectedly. He had been sent to Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane for diagnosis of severe stomach pains but died there shortly after admission, as Wright records in writing to fellow poet John Blight: He wasn’t ill for long, thank goodness, and though the last weeks were not good, still, even when he had to go into Greenslopes for X-rays at the beginning of December he was lively and interested in the world. It was only five days after he went in that the old heart took him, really very easily, and we were much afraid of those X-rays, so it was well he went as he did.10

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In writing to Barbara and Charles Blackman about Jack’s last days, Wright concludes, ‘he was a sweetie and my dear companion and I am sure what I had of him will never leave me’.11 Her letters around the time of Jack’s death, even to close friends, reveal both deep feeling and remarkable composure, with the intensity of her loss and grief quite closely guarded. It is in poems, many included in Shadow (1970), her first verse collection to appear after Jack died, that she expresses the anguish of bereavement whilst also celebrating their relationship. ‘The Vision’, dedicated to J.P. McKinney,12 praises Jack for ultimately succeeding in his philosophical quest. Here she compares him to a migratory bird flying by instinct halfway round the globe from north to south: as though a godwit, rising from its shore, followed alone and on its first migration its road of air across the tumbled sea . . .

The journey maps out an intricate design, enabling him to penetrate the centre of ‘the maze we travel’: . . . tracing out a pattern to its core through lovely logics of the octagon and radials’ perfect plunging.

Traditionally, the octagon (once linked to ideas of squaring the circle) offered an image of spiritual renewal, an intermediary between the square associated with earth, and the circle representing heaven. In Christianity the baptismal font ‘symbolizing regeneration and rebirth is frequently octagonal in shape’.13 The perfect plunging radials project beams of light from the centre whilst simultaneously leading back into it and Jack, by finding his way to the heart of the maze and describing that experience, creates a pathway others can choose to follow. Years later, in her autobiography, Wright records his death and the continuing existence of his life’s philosophy in a passage which, though very different in style and tone, corresponds to the much earlier poem: After years of increasing illness Jack died in 1966 in Greenslopes Military Hospital in a heatwave in circumstances I hate to remember – we did not treat our returned soldiers with much ceremony once they were old and ill. I took his book, so long laboured over, to London . . . It was published in London by Chatto & Windus in 1971 as The Structure of Modern Thought and can be found in many libraries in Australia and elsewhere. Through the years before its publication it had accompanied me as a sort of guarantee that life did indeed have meaning and that meaning was a human creation guaranteeing the significance of human

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life. It was as much his sheer tranquil existence as his work that supported me through what I thought of as ‘the rest of my life’ – a postscript perhaps but also a guarantee of the continuance of meaning.14

In ‘The Vision’ the poet expresses a yearning to enter wholly into Jack’s perception of the world, while lamenting she herself was, not strong enough to bear such invocation nor pure enough to enter such a fire I winced and envied. How to move entire into the very core of concentration?

‘Eurydice in Hades’15 represents the experience of bereavement still more intensely, reworking the classical myth of Orpheus, the great singer and musician, and his wife Eurydice who died of snakebite. Grief-stricken, he journeyed to the underworld singing of his loss so movingly the deities there agreed Eurydice could accompany him back to life provided he didn’t turn to look at her walking behind him. He disobeyed the prohibition, looking back just as she was about to emerge above ground, and so lost her. The story emphasizes both the power of art and the inexorability of death. In Wright’s poem, Eurydice laments how her lover’s absence has condemned her to darkness in a ‘region of clay corridors / below the reach of song’ as she tries to invoke his return: Singer, creator, come and pierce this clay with one keen grief, with one redeeming call. Earth would relent to hear it if you sang.

Orpheus’ descent into Hell and his redeeming song are now just a brief dreamlike vision: ‘one summoning glance of incandescent light / blue as the days I knew’, but his song itself ‘fades as the daylight fades’ leaving Eurydice in the silent dark. Most versions of the Orpheus story emphasize the surviving husband’s grief, but here it is the bereaved woman who, though still alive, feels dead, imprisoned in cold clay. Jennifer Strauss points out that Wright also reverses the traditional narrative by representing the male lover as the poet’s departed Muse: ‘I am convinced that “Eurydice in Hades” is a poem of mourning for the lost Muse, for fading of faith in the efficacy of poetry’s “all–creating, all-redeeming song”’.16 Five Senses, the volume of poetry that began with a dedication to Love – a matching of heart and mind, the lost wanderer found, light out of darkness – invokes Thomas Traherne, who saw the depth of darkness shake, part and move,

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and from death’s centre the light’s ladder go up from love to Love.17

Now, faced with a return to desolation with the loss of the beloved, in Shadow Wright considers again the complex relationship between death and life, darkness and light. ‘This Time Alone’18 portrays lovers climbing a mountain, their sexual joy enhanced by the beauty of the natural world as dawn casts ‘its holy ordinary light’ over them: Wild fuchsia flowered white and red, the mintbush opened to the bee. Stars circled round us where we lay and dawn came naked from the sea.

Now climbing the mountain on her own, the poet finds the same setting harsh and resistant: I face the steep unyielding rock, I bleed against the cockspur’s thorn struggling the upward path again, this time alone.

Drawing on her own life energy she must now recreate through memory and imagination the world she previously knew, feeding it with her own breath and blood – ‘I turn and set that world alight’ – as the sun now rises within her. The interaction of light and darkness is explored further and with greater complexity in ‘Shadow’19 where the poet gazes at the setting sun, ‘its white hot temples burning’. As the sun, associated with the divine in so many religions, disappears she acknowledges how, The shadow at my feet rose upward silently; announced that it was I; entered to master me.

With the sun a primary source of life and energy, and its rays regarded in most cultures as representing celestial or spiritual influences, the absence of light is readily perceived in terms of loss, with darkness usually symbolizing negation and the principle of evil. The poem, however, questions this dichotomy. Daytime life is not necessarily ideal: Possessed by day, intent with haste and hammering time,

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earth and her creatures went imprisoned, separate in isolating light.

But, even so, ‘negating night’ brings fears of the end of time and the death of each individual self overwhelmed by ‘invading darkness / that brims from earth to mind’. Nevertheless, the darkness proves inevitable. The shadow, which gives the poem its name, relates to C.G. Jung’s theory of the self, signifying negative and alienating aspects of the unconscious which may suddenly intrude, apparently threatening the ego. While the shadow often represents much that the ego deplores or aims to reject, it can also contain valuable, vital forces that ‘ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed.’20 In Jungian theory, therefore, resolving tensions between ego and shadow can be essential to achieving psychic integration. In Wright’s poem, that invading darkness which overwhelms the day is balanced against the after-image left by the setting sun ‘burning behind the eye’. Focusing on this, the observer perceives how ‘world’s image grows and flares’ mastering the chaos associated with darkness and leading to the conclusion: Now I accept you, shadow, I change you; we are one. I must enclose a darkness since I contain the Sun.

Like life and death, light and darkness define each other. As in the conclusion to ‘This Time Alone’, the speaker must accept into herself the power of the sun and all it represents, but this involves accepting darkness as well. Unable to ignore it or its power, she acknowledges its presence is essential if she is to contain the sun’s creative energy within herself. Wright survived Jack for thirty-four years. Entering into what Philip Mead describes as the third stage of her life,21 she became busier than ever, concerning herself increasingly with political activism in the cause of conservation and environmental protection along with a fierce commitment to the rights of indigenous people. She continued to write and publish poetry, though less prolifically than in the years when she lived with Jack. Various commentators and scholars have criticized her for pursuing politics at the expense of poetry, but her friend and fellow poet A.D. Hope comments: those of her friends and her critics who deplore the loss to poetry involved, as they think, by her plunge into what E.M. Forster once called ‘The world of anger

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and telegrams’ possibly do not realize how deeply the active and contemplative life may combine in a poet . . . she grew up with a passionate love of and involvement in the life of the country and all its creatures, which is at the root both of her poetry and her political involvements.22

It is also possible that Jack’s absence from her life may have contributed to the diminution in her poetic output. They had seen themselves as working jointly to express the ideas and attitudes both considered essential to society’s well-being, Wright through poetry and Jack through his philosophical writing. Each read and discussed the other’s work when it was in the process of composition. Shortly after Jack’s death, she writes to John Blight: ‘I don’t know when I’ll start writing poetry again. Mostly, I showed them to Jack and will have to get used to the loss of an immediate audience.’23 In 1968 she thanks Blight for a poem he had written for her saying, ‘I haven’t been able to write poems at all since Jack died’, and also telling him that he was the only Australian poet Jack had ever read for long, ‘except (since I shoved them at him with demands for opinions) me.’24 Despite her difficulty in writing so soon after Jack’s death, Wright did, of course go on to produce important poetry in her latter years. Phantom Dwelling, the last volume of new poetry published in her lifetime, contains late-style poems of very great beauty in response to the experience of ageing while drawing on long-standing poetic traditions from Japan and the Middle East. For Emily Carr, the dark times, spanning a period from 1914 to 1927, preceded the final stage of her life when she went on to produce her greatest art. Her studies in France had inspired a striking transformation in her painting style, characterized particularly by a vibrant and intense use of colour which drew perplexed and condemnatory newspaper comments as she exhibited her work in Vancouver and Victoria in 1912 and 1913. A reporter from the Vancouver Province was startled to see blues which ‘were so very blue, the yellows so unmitigated, the reds so aggressive, and the greens so verdant’.25 In 1913 a reviewer in Victoria’s Daily Colonist, who expressed a preference for Carr’s earlier work, ‘when it was signalized by quiet, sombre tints and beautiful nuances of colour’, was highly dismissive of her new modernist style: Even the most patriotic Irishman never saw grass as green as Miss Carr had pictured it in Brittany and Alert Bay. And the blues, yellows and reds were just as blinding as the greens.26

For all the disapproval, however, eight art exhibitions in Victoria and Vancouver between 1911 and 1913 included paintings by Carr.27 Many of these were of images inspired by her journeys among First Nations peoples along the North West Coast

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and early in 1913 she held a week-long exhibition in Vancouver of paintings, drawings and sketches of First Nations villages, people and carvings, accompanied by an explanatory lecture on Indian art. Although ‘this was the largest and most ambitious show ever staged’ in the city, its subject matter also proved unpopular with viewers and potential purchasers because its social and political implications were so challenging for the local settler population.28 Carr had hoped the Province of British Columbia might be interested in buying her First Nations material as an historic record for the Provincial museum and that the Province might even help her fund future painting trips up the North West Coast. Dr Charles Newcombe, sent as an expert to evaluate the suitability of the images for museum purchase, admired their artistic quality but considered them ‘too brilliant and vivid to be true to the actual conditions of the coast villages’, so, to her great disappointment, none of Carr’s work was acquired by the province at that time.29 In 1912 Carr decided to move from Vancouver, where she found it increasingly difficult to earn an income through teaching art, and settle back in Victoria, drawing on her share of the family estate in hopes of joining that significant group of local citizens who made a comfortable living by letting rooms or taking in boarders. She arranged for a house to be built at 646 Simcoe Street, just round the corner from the old family home where her unmarried sisters still lived. Although originally named Hill House, because of its proximity to Beacon Hill Park, Carr later wrote about it as the House of All Sorts. The building originally comprised separate self-contained apartments in the expectation that one, containing Carr’s studio and living quarters, would be financed by rents from the others which would also cover her living expenses. Unfortunately, just as the house was ready for occupation, the economy took a significant downturn creating, in Carr’s words, ‘an anxious shuddery time for every land-owner’.30 Real estate values began to collapse, British investors withdrew their funds from the Province and, on the outbreak of war in 1914, young men who once sought prosperous employment in local industries went to the front instead, leaving their families to subsist on a soldier’s wages.31 Difficulty in finding tenants forced owners to lower rents and Carr had to reconfigure her house to take boarders as well, greatly reducing her own living space and adding to her workload. Unable to afford domestic staff, she found herself doing minor building repairs, tending the furnace and cooking meals for boarders. She also coped with difficult residents who tried to cheat her over rent or made demands she considered onerous and unreasonable. One or two were drunks, while a few couples flouted all social proprieties of the period by only pretending to be husband and wife. Writing as a landlady, she points out, ‘You can’t ask to see people’s marriage

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certificates’.32 Boarders would deride her paintings (hung on the walls for want of storage space), loudly dismissing her images of native totems as ‘grotesque monsters’.33 As ‘the embittered landlady of a boarding house . . . an impoverished single woman on the fringes of a provincial society that had little respect for the artistic or social ideals she espoused’,34 Carr considered her tenants largely responsible for her misfortunes since their very existence represented ‘the circumstances and obstacles that stood in the way of her painting’.35 She also resented how the house defined her ‘as a failed artist’.36 This resentment persisted throughout the rest of her life. In a 1934 journal entry she writes: Heaven forgive me. How I hate tenants. Always trying to squeeze something out of you, always trying to make out they’re being done in or not getting their pound of flesh, always finding shortcomings in you and your house. Snivelling, whining, squeezing, hypocritical vermin.37

The House of All Sorts, written largely in 1938 though not published till 1944, was inspired partly by a desire to avenge herself. In a 1937 letter to Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher she writes of ‘trying to work with those filthy tenants all round me, sapping the joy out of everything’, promising ‘I’ll be even with them yet – using them for stories’.38 In the book, Carr presents herself in the character of landlady, beginning gently enough with a nostalgic account of the Carr family estate, on part of which the House of All Sorts was built. She recalls beloved childhood places now vanished, like the cow yard and the lily field, acknowledging that the new house’s foundations ‘were not entirely of brick and cement’ but were laid in her memory: ‘No house could . . . blind what my memory saw – a cow, an old white horse, three little girls in pinafores, their arms full of dolls . . .’39 The mood soon changes, however, as she records problems arising from her conflicts with the architect, difficulties with tenants and her feeling that, as landlady, she was gulped into the stomach of the house, ‘digesting badly in combination with the others the House of All Sorts had swallowed’.40 She details with gusto her tenants’ rudeness, peculiarities of dress and sloppy housekeeping, relishing those occasions when she got the better of them whilst seeking readers’ sympathy for their bad treatment of her. Paula Blanchard observes that, ‘Nowhere are her verbs more violent than in this book, and the vigorous metaphors . . . often approach the grotesque.’41 The tenants of course had to put up with their landlady’s black moods when she would pull out the fuses, turn off the water and retreat to her attic bedroom, leaving them in the dark.42 Carr did, however,

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cultivate favourites, writing approvingly for example, if somewhat sentimentally, about a young couple who conformed to her ideal of married life: ‘She tidied the flat all day and he untidied it all night. He was such a big “baby man,” she a mother-girl, who had to take care of him.’43 Shortly after Carr’s death, one of her favoured tenants, Philip Amsden, published an account of his time renting an apartment in the ‘House of All Sorts’, leading to a six-year friendship between them.44 His admiration of her paintings may have led her to see him as a kindred spirit for he writes of how ‘They gave [him] a sense of awe, of spaciousness, bigness – of nature felt, seen and understood, and depicted with reverence’.45 Whatever the reason, Carr mothered him, Amsden recalling, ‘How often there would be a tap at the door and she would be outside with a dessert for my supper or an invitation to spend the evening with her in her studio!’46 Landlady and tenants, however, were rarely on such good terms. The House of All Sorts concludes on a bitter note when, during a particularly severe winter, a brutal tenant – ‘crude, enormous, coarse’ – follows Carr into the basement, and assaults her for being insufficiently prompt about repairs to a frozen bathroom tap: ‘As I stooped to shovel coal his heavy fist struck across my cheek. I fell among the coal’. Stumbling out into the garden, she looks up at the house, now identified with her bullying tenant, and longs for freedom: ‘House! House! How long? From the frozen garden I looked at it hulking against the heavy sky.’47 The burden was lifted in 1935 when Carr put the ‘House of All Sorts’ on the market, acknowledging her deficiencies as a landlady in her journal: Temperamentals should not ‘run’ places to house other people. I was not cut out for a landlady: I’m not a nice one. But I guess I had to learn things through that particular way and the tenants had to learn painfully through me.48

Since her rents proved insufficient to live on, Carr was forced to scrape together extra income by selling produce from her garden and breeding Bobtail English sheepdogs, as well as making hooked rugs and hand-built pottery for the tourist trade. Animal breeding involved substantial work but she took great pleasure in her Bobtails, writing a short book about them which was eventually published in the same volume as The House of All Sorts. Her craft work was related to her continuing interest in First Nations art and culture as she observed and sketched native artefacts held in the Provincial Museum and studied ethnographic works in the Museum library: She transcribed pages from the latest writings on West Coast Indians into her notebook; she took a great deal of interest in the meaning and precise forms of the crest symbols, copying these too.49

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Her hooked rugs, made from strips of old clothes and discarded army blankets, incorporated some of these symbols. Native women had adopted rug making from the settler community, embellishing the work with their own traditional designs, so Carr was attuned to native tradition in this activity.50 Her pots, however, were a different matter: I ornamented my pottery with Indian designs – that was why the tourists bought it. I hated myself for prostituting Indian Art; our Indians did not ‘pot’, their designs were not intended to ornament clay – but I did keep the Indian design pure.51

Nevertheless her study of Native symbolism was later to prove a valuable resource for numbers of important paintings. Managing the house and tenants, together with other money-making activities, left Carr little time for painting. In her autobiography she claims that this, together with her isolation from like-minded artists, suppressed the desire to practise her own art: ‘for about fifteen years I did not paint’.52 This, however, is an exaggeration. She produced a number of works during this period, though they were smaller in size than her pre-1914 canvasses. All were landscapes, of which Doris Shadbolt writes: ‘We know twenty or so of them and there may not have been many more – a likely average of less than two paintings a year. They show no lapse of painterly authority though their consistent small scale reflects a diminished ambition’53 – or more likely the material and psychological impact of straitened circumstances. Carr did however develop friendships with several other artists at this time. A young couple, Viola and her Australian husband, Ambrose Patterson, discovered the ‘House of All Sorts’ when on holiday from their work as art teachers at the University of Washington in Seattle where a modern art community had developed. The Pattersons became regular weekend boarders with Carr, encouraging her modernist art practice as well as introducing her to several current books on painting which she studied intensively. At their urging she exhibited four canvasses in the Ninth Annual Pacific Exhibition of the Pacific Northwest organized by the Seattle Fine Arts Society in 1924 and received Second Honourable Mention in oils for one of them. Mark Tobey, a young American artist also based in Seattle, who became an important influence on Carr’s work, also exhibited four paintings and it is possible the two may have met at this particular exhibition, though the first definite evidence of their association seems to be in 1928.54 In 1925 Carr exhibited again in Seattle, sent a painting to the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honour and displayed several more works at the Victoria Island Arts and Crafts Society.55

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When writing of Carr’s dark period, Maria Tippett names her chapter ‘Chrysalis’ to indicate the development of energies that would suddenly emerge in a mature painting style transcending everything the artist had achieved so far. This dramatic transformation was triggered by the 1927 trip to eastern Canada which revolutionized her approach to painting. Eric Brown, director of the Canadian National Gallery, had visited her in Victoria the previous year, inviting her to contribute paintings on Indian themes – together with examples of her pottery and hooked rugs – to the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern which he and ethnologist Marius Barbeau were staging at the Gallery in 1927. Native artefacts presented ‘as artistic treasures from a vanished past’56 would be exhibited along with work by contemporary artists. Brown also organized a rail pass, enabling her to attend the exhibition in Ottawa. In addition he told her about those artists, known as the Group of Seven, who were painting in the east, and, on his recommendation, she bought and read ‘from cover to cover’ F.B.Housser’s A Canadian Art Movement.57 Breaking her train journey at Toronto enabled Carr to meet members of the Group in person and see their work before proceeding to Ottawa. While inclusion in the 1927 exhibition involved national recognition of Carr’s art, discovering the Group proved still more crucial and both experiences combined to relieve her long period of darkness and professional isolation. Although by 1926, the Group of Seven, ‘well known as representatives of the most advanced art in English Canada’,58 were close to becoming establishment figures, Carr must surely have identified with this ‘rebellious crew’, even before meeting them, as Housser describes their struggles for acceptance in the teeth of dismissal by the Canadian art establishment. His accounts of them venturing into the North Ontario wilderness to paint their vision of Canada must also have resonated with Carr’s memory of her own painting trips to remote Native villages in coastal British Columbia: Here were a group of men answering to the conditions which we have insisted upon as being necessary in order to have a Canadian statement in painting; a group of men in love with the Canadian backwoods, donning the outfit of the bushwhacker and prospector in order to satisfy a need they felt to express themselves, and using their environment as a medium for this expression.59

Although Carr had doubts as to how readily this male group of artists would accept her, she felt warmly encouraged when Lawren Harris, the Group’s ‘acknowledged leader’ and its most distinguished painter, proclaimed ‘You are one of us’.60 Such acceptance by Harris and his fellow artists boosted Carr’s self-

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confidence, recharged her creative energy and reinforced the belief that in painting her beloved West Coast landscape and the Native presence there she was producing a truly Canadian art. On returning home she set to work, painting with renewed enthusiasm. Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher notes how the tempo of her life sped up after 1927: ‘She wrote and painted like a woman possessed: the urge to create while there was still time drove her ruthlessly on.’61 In 1928 Carr undertook a major expedition into Native communities up the coast, sketching as she went, and later that same year she studied briefly with Mark Tobey whose mentorship she particularly valued at this time: ‘I think he is one of the best teachers I know of. He gave a short course of classes here in my studio, and I feel I got a tremendous lot of help from his criticisms.’62 Inspired as she had been by the Group of Seven and their nationalist vision, Carr also needed the Seattle Group’s artistic stimulus, especially that of Tobey, without which Gerta Moray believes that neither her ‘large-scale field sketches done in Native villages in 1928 nor her cubist experiments in the “Indian” paintings of 1929–31 would have been possible’.63 With his interest in cubism, Tobey urged Carr to use greater abstraction in her work and modify her palette: He told me to pep my work up and get off the monotone, even exaggerate light and shade, to watch rhythmic relations and reversals of detail, to make my canvas two thirds half-tone, one third black and white. Well it sounds good but it’s rather painting to recipe, isn’t it? I know I am in a monotone. My forests are too monotonous. I must pep them up with higher contrasts.64

Lawren Harris, who corresponded with Emily over many years, also encouraged a more abstract approach, both with direct advice and through the example of his own paintings. More tactful than Tobey, with whom she eventually had a falling out, Harris sent regular letters which Carr describes as ‘a constant source of inspiration . . . He scolded, praised, expounded, clarified . . . He understood many of my despairs and perplexities’.65 Despite the great boost in morale from her journey east, and with her work now being included in important national and international exhibitions,‘despairs and perplexities’ continued to trouble Carr as she wrestled with her subject matter and explored new techniques. Money difficulties persisted and, while her artistic output grew, in the 1930s Depression ‘she was making so few sales that she was still unable to cover the cost of making her art’,66 so the burdensome ‘House of All Sorts’, where she presided until 1935, continued to provide a necessary if somewhat uncertain source of income. For all the exaltation and joy

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shining out from so much of her work, many of Carr’s paintings strike a sombre note, expressing the complexity of her subject-matter as well as her own fluctuations of mood. In the first few years after visiting the East, many of her paintings explore the relationship between Native carvings and the surrounding trees. Shadbolt describes how, ‘she took on the Indian’s darkness in her canvasses, closing them in with weighty and darkened skies or with claustrophobic forests even when fidelity to her subject did not require her to do so.’67 The forest offered inspiration and illumination but also induced fear. Carr describes fighting her way through it on one of her northern journeys to sketch some totem poles: I did beat my way to the base of another pole only to find myself drowned under an avalanche of growth sweeping down the valley. The dog and I were alone in it – just nothings in the overwhelming immensity.68

Just as Wright explores the relationship between light and darkness in poems written soon after Jack’s death, Carr does something rather similar in works painted shortly after her return from eastern Canada. Images of moving through darkness towards sources of light correspond to the transformation taking place in her art, although self-doubt continued to trouble her. An untitled painting of 1931–32, possibly influenced by Mark Tobey’s interest in cubism and his advice to Carr about using half-tone and a black and white palette, represents the forest as a largely monochromatic pattern of zig-zag shapes where inner turbulence appears to push against a constraining environment (Figure 11).69 Mature trees, with dark, heavily sculpted foliage and pillar-like trunks create an almost architectural enclosure, which a jagged stream of little pines in the foreground, thrusting diagonally from right to left, seems to be trying to evade. Light falling on their triangular shapes makes them appear almost white, like ice pinnacles in a glacier. A heavy lid of near-black foliage closes off the painting’s top left-hand corner, counterbalancing, with its sweep from left to right, the young trees’ thrusting movement in the opposite direction. But slivers of blue-grey light glimpsed between solid tree trunks in the background seem to offer some hopes of reaching beyond the darkness. In this painting the forest is both powerful and oppressive whilst simultaneously suggesting a possible path to illumination. Old and New Forest,70 painted around the same time, seems to explore similar ideas, though without such harsh angularity as the untitled picture. The movement towards the light appears stronger and the presence of colour creates a greater sense of warmth as little pines in varying shades of pale green cluster in the foreground with mature trees in darker green ranked behind them. A heavy

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band of very dark foliage draped across the top of the painting balances the bright cluster of small trees lined up below whilst also revealing a narrow arc of pale blue sky towards which the trees, both young and older, appear to advance. Slender, pale brown tree trunks feature prominently, their verticals binding the different levels of the composition together, and here their strong upward thrust suggests aspiration rather than constraint or impediment. Grey,71another forest painting from this period, is also characterized by strong upward movement whilst representing the forest as offering illumination at its heart. Dominant in the centre is a young tree, pale grey and cone-shaped, surrounded by mature trees ranging in colour from darkening grey to near black, which seem to enfold it protectively within their embrace. The mood is gentle and tender, if somewhat melancholy. Curved rather than jagged shapes predominate and light seems to radiate from the central tree. The eye is led to further sources of light as it shines on a path curving into the forest from the lower right-hand corner of the painting and is balanced by another band of light in the top left-hand corner. Carr also directs our vision further into the painting through an eye-shaped opening in the central tree, inviting us to penetrate its very heart. In many of her paintings forest foliage seems to echo details of the Native carvings she spent so much time observing and eyes in particular keep reappearing. A public lecture she delivered in 1935 notes how the Native carver would emphasize important details: ‘The eyes he always exaggerated because the supernatural beings could see everywhere and see more than we could’.72 Shadbolt writes how in so many of Carr’s paintings, ‘The supernatural Indian eye has become the mythic eye of the forest’ and that in Grey she achieves a remarkable evocation of Native presence within the forest: In GREY there is no Indian form, though much of the Indian spirit is there: a dim and enfolded world, an iconic confronting silence, a symbolic eye, a glimpse into the secret heart of the timeless placeless forest. In no work do we find a stronger or more poetic statement of Carr’s mystical participation in the dark and haunted spirit of the forest to which the Indian had awakened her.73

Susan Crean considers this painting ‘represents both the nadir of Carr’s descent into despair and the light she found flickering at the end of the tunnel’, claiming that the experience of depression, by opening her to the dark side of herself, gave her ‘the courage to confront the dark side of nature’.74 Moray believes the bleak period in Carr’s life, from 1914 into the 1920s, with all its disappointments, ‘must be taken into account as it influenced the outlook she expressed in her later work’.75 In a journal entry recording one of her painting

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expeditions, Carr describes periods ‘when one is just vacant and nothing works’, commenting: ‘I believe these times are good too, not to be worried over as savouring of laziness but regarded as times of preparation for development, like a field lying open and fallow and bare.’76 Similarly, the darkness she experienced prior to her 1927 journey to Toronto and Ottawa was also a fallow time preparing the ground for further and important artistic development. Many of Carr’s forest paintings show constant awareness of the interplay between dark and light just as Wright explores the interaction between light and darkness in her poems about bereavement. Journal entries suggest Carr considers darkness and light as complementary with one defining the other. Looking at the woods just after sunset, she writes: I love the woods at that hour – no blaring lights and darks to perplex and make you restless with their shifting and sparkle, but that lovely mellow peace so much deeper and richer than sun glare.77

In her autobiography she also praises two of her painting masters during her time in England, John Whitely and Algernon Talmadge, ‘who first pointed out to me (raw young pupil that I was) that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in the shadows’.78 For both Carr and Wright, the periods of darkness and loss they endured proved an important factor in their subsequent work. As Wright became increasingly involved in political activism after Jack’s death, her celebration of the natural world and its beauty is often countered by outrage at her fellow Australians’ despoliation of the natural environment. In ‘Australia’,79 one of the angry poems appearing in her collection Shadow, she addresses a ravaged land: For we are conquerors and self-poisoners more than scorpion or snake and dying of the venoms that we make even while you die of us.

Although the polemic is a response to her ever-increasing awareness of human responsibility for environmental degradation, it is also prompted by anger at the way Jack’s healing vision of what society could become had been so totally ignored. The darkness in Carr’s work has its roots partly in an awed and sometimes fearful response to the power and majesty of the great forests she painted, and partly in the constant self-doubt arising from her early difficulty in finding acceptance of her painting. But, in poetry and painting, Wright and Carr show themselves continually aware of the sunlight in the shadows.

8

Lawren Harris: Where the Soul Penetrates1

Although Carr’s 1927 visit to eastern Canada had a dramatic effect on her life and her artistic career, it also prompted some doubt and anxiety. Expressions of Canadian nationalism and identity in works by the Group of Seven artists excited and uplifted her: ‘I feel as if I have met the “worthwhiles” on this trip, people who really count and are shaping a nation . . . so proud of the bigness of their country, so anxious to probe its soul and understand it’.2 Despite this, however, Carr was uncomfortably conscious of her own outsider status as a Westerner and a woman: ‘I want to have my share, to put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding up my end’. Although she prays, ‘God Bless the Group of Seven’, she suspects her gender precludes full acceptance: ‘I wonder if these men feel as I do, that there is a common chord struck between us. No, I don’t believe they feel so toward a woman’.3 Many years later, she would write of Group members Lismer and Jackson, ‘They resent me a little – I’m a woman’,4 and in a letter to her friend and fellow artist, Nan Cheney, she observes, ‘I have never hit it off with A.Y.J. [Jackson] always feels he desp[i]ses me for a woman artist.’5 But, for Carr one member stood apart from the others: Lawren Harris, made a powerful and lasting impression on her and his warm encouragement was a source of immense reassurance. Their meeting and ensuing friendship were high points of her first trip to Eastern Canada. For Carr, the Group’s landscape paintings were not only an expression of national identity, they revealed a spiritual quality which prompted her to believe she might, through her art, discover a pathway to God, though it is perhaps important to recognize that for Carr ‘God’ was, in fact, whatever she needed Him to be at the moment.6 In the early pages of Hundreds and Thousands, the journal that begins with that life-changing journey to the east, Carr considers the relationship between the languages of forest, God and visual artist: What language do they speak, those silent, awe-filled spaces? I do not know. Wait and listen; you shall hear by and by. I long to hear and yet I’m half afraid. I think 131

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perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed and hunted for and failed to find. Always he’s seemed nearer out in the big spaces, sometimes almost within reach but never quite. Perhaps in this newer, wider, space-filled vision I shall find him.7

Harris was the artist whose spiritual vision she found particularly inspiring. Carr would already have seen the black and white reproductions of his work in Fred Housser’s book and read Housser’s description of his canvas ‘Above Lake Superior’: Five . . . trees . . . stripped by fire and ice, their white trunks glorified in the flow of northern light, form the forepart of the canvas. Another tree lies on the ground as it were with its face downwards in the spot where it fell, while a forked stick raises a crooked body to receive the descending rays. The pyramidal crown of a purple hill swells up behind the trees beneath ribs of cold gray clouds. Back of this peak, unseen, lies the wilderness. The mood is static, lonely, eternal and austere. People either love it or hate it.8

Carr was so deeply moved on seeing the actual painting she asked Harris for a second viewing, exclaiming, ‘I believe I love the mountains better than the tree forms. Bleached, wonderful, in purified abandon, they are marvelous’.9 Together with Housser, whom she also met in Toronto, Harris introduced Carr to the poetry of Walt Whitman, which was to remain a continual source of inspiration to her, as well as to Theosophy – a belief system that they assured her would help achieve the exalted and spiritual artistic vision she yearned for. Biographers and commentators all emphasize how important Harris was in Carr’s artistic development, something she herself acknowledges in Growing Pains, the autobiography he had originally urged her to write: My first impression of Lawren Harris, his work, his studio has never changed, never faltered. His work and example did more to influence my outlook upon Art than any school or any master. They had given me mechanical foundation. Lawren Harris looked higher, dug deeper.10

The way his art dealt with moral and spiritual ideals appealed to her own religious sensibility: Carr writes in her journal, ‘his religion, whatever it is, and his painting are one and the same’.11 But more, in Harris Carr found a soulmate with whom she could talk straight ‘from the heart’. Similarly to the young Woolf ’s delight in a new-found freedom to talk at Thursday evening gatherings in Bloomsbury,12 Carr records the pleasure of long talks with Harris in his studio:

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unashamed talks from the naked soul, a searching for realities and meanings, the beautiful pictures gleaming all round, calm, inscrutable notes and glimpses of the between places where the soul penetrates . . . I am glad, glad, glad that I have these rare privileges and that I am able to talk straight and unafraid. One can’t do that with many . . . throw away the shell, escape for a brief spell to a higher place of thoughts and ideals.13

Harris and Carr corresponded until her death and she includes extracts from his letters in Growing Pains to show how he encouraged and supported her: For goodness sake, don’t let temporary depression, isolation, or any other feeling interfere with your work . . . Keep on . . . do what you feel like doing most. Remember, when discouraged, that there is a rhythm of elation and dejection; and that we stimulate it by creative endeavour.14

She indicates her dependence on the correspondence, acknowledging that, even when her own responses were sometimes aggressive or bad-tempered, he continued to write helpful, encouraging letters: ‘A lesser man might have huffed at my petulance, even stopped writing. If he had I would have broken’.15 After her eastern journey, Carr painted with renewed enthusiasm continuing to pursue Indian themes, undertaking further journeys to remote Native villages. In many of these works, however, the forest setting assumes near equal importance with the carvings and totems, while in some cases forest and totem appear fused. The artist’s attention, however, was increasingly drawn to the forests of British Columbia and she credits Harris with suggesting she make them her principal subject matter. She records his advice in Growing Pains: ‘For a while at least, give up Indian motifs. Perhaps you have become too dependent on them; create forms for yourself, direct from nature.’16 Carr herself goes on to acknowledge that: I had now become more deeply interested in woods than in villages. In them I was finding something that was peculiarly my own. While working on the Indian stuff I felt a little that I was but copying the Indian idiom instead of expressing my own findings.17

For Carr, focusing on the west coast forests meant ‘learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect’,18 but as subject matter, this allowed continued exploration of the relationship between darkness and light while expressing the essence of the region where she lived. In her painting A Young Tree (1931) the forest setting, simultaneously sombre and illumined, emphasizes nature’s cycle of decay and regrowth which became such an

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important motif in her art.19 The central image of a young pine, painted in rich greens, its upper foliage partially bathed in golden light, almost fills the canvas. It is flanked by dark, conical tree-shapes in the background, while a fallen tree trunk crosses the foreground diagonally, its curving roots extended towards the young tree. The pine’s near symmetrical cone-shape creates a strong upward thrust and though the painting’s upper edge cuts off its apex, this merely intensifies the upward movement as the tree emerges from dark shadows at its base into light which falls on it from above, reaching beyond the picture plane to something viewers can only imagine. By backlighting several of the background trees and those of the pine’s outer edges still in shadow, Carr also directs shafts of light upwards, heightening the overall dramatic effect. The work seems to embody the spiritual yearning described so often in her journal. She exhorts herself to: Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest. Feel their protecting spread, their uplifting rise, their solid immovable strength. Regard the warm red earth beneath them nurtured by their myriads of fallen needles, softly fallen, slowly disintegrating through long processes, always living, changing, expanding round and round. It is a continuous process of life, eternally changing yet eternally the same. See God in it all, enter into the life of the trees.20

The fallen tree in the foreground is an ambiguous symbol. On one hand, it is an image of dissolution, the eventual fate of all living things, while its prone position emphasizes the sturdy young pine’s upright stance. Some of its roots writhe darkly in the painting’s bottom left-hand corner, while others curve up like fingers clutching at the pine’s foliage. Yet the radiance which strikes the living tree also illumines the fallen trunk, bringing out red highlights in the wood, and roots which appear to claw at the young pine may themselves be reaching upwards to the light. In portraying cycles of decay and growth in her paintings, Carr alludes not only to her spiritual quest, but also, perhaps, to memories of the long fallow period in her life, when she painted little, followed by such amazing artistic regeneration after her 1927 journey to eastern Canada. Carr identified strongly with the landscapes she painted, condemning another artist’s poor watercolour because, ‘The painter just had not experienced the thing he represented. The objects, water, sky, rocks, were there but he hadn’t felt that they were big or strong or high or wet’.21 She yearned to enter into and experience her subjects so her pictures would ‘rock and sway with the breath and fluids of

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life’,22 and often seems to imbue trees she paints with her own deep, personal feelings. In her writing, Carr often personifies trees, usually gendering them female. In A Young Tree the pine’s foliage resembles an elaborate gown, its material draped, folded, frilled and fluted, with a suggestion of skirts rippling behind as the tree moves towards the light. Paradoxically, however, the foliage also appears carved, even chiselled, giving it a solid, monumental quality. Is Carr perhaps creating yet another self-portrait, representing herself as a substantial figure, feet firmly rooted in her native soil, whilst aspiring to transcend the material world and enter a spiritual realm? She writes: ‘I grasp for a thing and a place one cannot see with these eyes, only very, very faintly with one’s higher eyes’.23 As she explored the west coast forests for subject matter and self-expression, Carr drew great strength from her association and correspondence with friends in the east, particularly with Fred Housser, his wife Bess and, of course, Lawren Harris, whose significance in her life she continually asserts in her journal and letters: In painting you don’t see the woods or whatever you are looking at but something else bigger and more vital. In people, you do not see nor can you afterwards recall their features; their faces do not exist. What you know and love is way in back in their souls. I know that Bess is beautiful and serene. I know Fred’s smile. I know nothing about Lawren’s face, can’t remember one feature – yet I know him best and love him best.24

After a few years, however, disillusionment set in. Early in 1934 Carr confessed with some trepidation in letters to Harris and the Houssers that she could no longer persist with Theosophy and what she saw as its denigration of Christianity. She records in a journal entry: I have written to Lawren and told him about things. I think he will be very disappointed in me and feel I have retrograded way back, fallen to earth level, dormant and stodgy as a sitting hen. I think he will hardly understand my attitude for I have been trying these three years to see a way through theosophy. He Fred and Bess all tried to help me and wanted me to get it and become one of them. Now I turn my back on it all and go back sixty years to where I started, but it is good to feel a real God, not the distant, mechanical, theosophical one.25

Her friends seem to have been quite accepting, and she describes the replies from Lawren and Bess as ‘exceedingly nice’,26 feeling particularly relieved by Harris’s response: ‘How could I ever have doubted his friendship?’27 That friendship, however, was soon seriously disrupted. In the summer of 1934, Fred

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Housser separated from Bess, later marrying another artist, Yvonne McKague, while Harris divorced his wife to marry Bess. After incurring great social disapprobation in Ontario, Harris and Bess left Canada for the US, settling in New Hampshire. Carr, deeply distressed and shocked by these events, felt personally betrayed, laying most of the blame on Bess. In a journal entry for 13 July 1934 she describes meeting her in Vancouver: [S]he told me the whole story. It’s rather horrid seeing life messed up that way. I’m glad they are out in the open now. They ought to have done it sooner. They’ve been living falsely. I don’t feel that about Lawren. He was as frank with me as he could be, but I feel it about Fred and Bess. I feel as if I could never trust them again. I felt that the real friendship Bess and I had enjoyed was gone.28

Subsequent letters to friends contain many sharp comments about Bess, whom Carr dismisses as a poseur, regularly accusing her of ‘weakening’ Harris. Some of Carr’s resentment, however, was prompted by jealousy of Bess which she could not admit to herself, and according to Paula Blanchard, ‘much less begin to understand it’.29 Tippett claims the first Mrs Harris had always been safely in the background, whereas ‘Bess – stronger, opinionated, and herself a painter – would be competition [for Carr] as Harris’s wife’.30 That Bess was attractive and stylish added to Carr’s resentment, as this letter to Nan Cheney, indicates: I don’t trust her any more I think she is a poser & I think she has weakened Lawren, he relys on her opinions too much but I’d like to see his new work hope she has not influenced him there because Besses [Bess’] own work is not (or was not when I saw it) much. too ‘slush’ & too ‘theosophy’. She will have a circle round her soon you’ll see, rather a mushy circle & she will pose to the eyebrows in black & soft greys & graceful poses well I’m a cat, & I used to be intimate & fond of Bess once but after I felt she was a hypocrite it put me off.31

It is interesting to note, however, that while denouncing Bess to her correspondents, Carr is always eager for news of her. Susan Crean claims her harsh references to Bess ‘indicate an emotional tie of significant proportions’ between the two, pointing to a strong bond of love previously existing between them.32 Carr’s journal entries also indicate she frequently dreamt about what she referred to as ‘the bust up’ and its consequences. In one dream Bess seemed to take possession of Carr’s little dog, Tantrum, just as she had appropriated Lawren. Carr reflects:

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Dreams can hurt hard. I went, in the dream, to the station to meet Bess. She had returned my greeting in a cold abstract way, seeming in a violent hurry as if she had a train to connect with or someone to meet. She flashed up a stair and was gone. It was my place, my own town – sore, I wandered round the hotel a primitive affair with doors opening onto balconies. Looking up, I saw Bess dressing in a room. She came out onto the balcony with Tantrum and began pouring coal oil on him, rubbing it in. Oh, I thought, she did not even tell me she had Tantrum and she knew I loved him and would want to see him. It seemed she had got him from me in the East and I longed to see the little dog and touch him. And there through the open door I saw a wicker chair and over the back was Lawren’s suit and hat. So he was there too and had not even come to speak to me. They were done with me and excluding me. I turned away sore. Dreams are foolish. It does not do to set store by them. Friendship? What is that but misunderstanding and disappointment.33

One reason for Carr’s distress and anger over her friends’ new sexual arrangements was the considerable anxiety associated in her own mind with sexuality. She had been profoundly distressed in girlhood by what she later refers to as ‘the brutal telling’ when her father apparently explained the facts of life to her in a harsh, uncouth manner and, in her words, ‘broke the fond[,] devoted relationship’ between them, leaving her ‘bitterly unforgiving’.34 As a young woman, she met and fell in love with a man who seems not to have returned her affection, although her papers contain only a few fragmentary hints about this experience. In ‘Stone and Heart’ one of the small autobiographical pieces she wrote shortly before her death, Carr alludes fleetingly to a brief youthful encounter with a young man at a tennis party to whom she lost her heart: ‘It took fifteen years to pull myself out’.35 She devotes considerable space in her autobiography, however, to William ‘Mayo’ Paddon, who was attracted to her around the same time and pursued her for several years with offers of marriage, even following her to England while she was studying there. Carr, however, was not attracted to him, and having come to believe that marriage would undermine or even extinguish her artistic vocation she writes: ‘I gave my love where it was not wanted; almost simultaneously an immense love was offered to me which I could neither accept nor return.’36 Acceptance of her own single status, however, did not lead to acceptance of a more relaxed approach to sexual matters. Although she had rebelled against the many demands of conventional ladylike behaviour her family tried so hard to impose, Carr nevertheless internalized the fear and disapproval of sexual irregularity current in nineteenth-century society. She writes in a journal entry of 26 November 1930:

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This would-be smart psychology makes me sick; it’s so impertinent, digging round inside people and saying why they did things, by what law of mind they came to such and such, and making hideous false statements, and yanking up all the sex problems, the dirty side of everything. They claim they are being real and natural, going back to the primitive. Animals are simple and decent with their sex. Things happen naturally and just are. It’s all simple and straight, but we – ugh! – we’ve fouled it all . . . dirty books, filthy cinemas, muck everywhere.37

That Carr had a deeply sensuous side to her nature is abundantly plain both in her painting and her writing. One childhood story, ‘The Orange Lily’, describes how the flower entranced her as she tried to reach the heart of its mystery: Lily rolled her petals grandly wide as sentinelled doors roll back for royalty. The entrance to her trumpet was guarded by a group of rust-powdered stamens – her powerful perfume pushed past these. What was in the bottom of Lily’s trumpet? What was it that the stamens were so carefully guarding? Small pushed the stamens aside and looked. The trumpet was empty – the emptiness of a church after parson and people have gone, when the music is asleep in the organ and the markers dangle from the Bible on the lectern.38

In another autobiographical sketch Carr describes how white currents growing in the garden fascinated her as a child: ‘You could see the tiny veins in their skins and the seeds and the juice. Each current hung there like an almost-told secret’.39 Her increasing awareness of the mystery is intensified by the perfume of flowers and the white butterflies hovering over them: Everything trembled. When you went in among the mauvy-pink flowers and the butterflies you began to tremble too: you seemed to become a part of it – and then what do you think happened? Somebody else was there too. He was on a white horse and he had brought another white horse for me. We flew round and round in and out among the mauvy-pink blossoms, on the white horses. I never saw the boy; he was there and I knew his name, but who gave it to him or where he came from I did not know. He was different from other boys, you did not have to see him, that was why I liked him so . . . Everything was going so fast – the butterflies’ wings, the pink flowers, the hum and the smell, that they stopped being four things and became one most lovely thing, and the little boy and the white horses and I were in the middle of it, like the seeds that you saw dimly inside the white currants.40

Just as she is about to penetrate the mystery an adult voice shatters the vision, demanding she hurry and pick some currants. Carr would no doubt have been horrified to hear such passages labelled erotic. She objected strongly to any such

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comment being made about her paintings. A young Dutch artist, Lodewyck Bosch, temporarily living in Victoria, sought to promote Carr’s work by helping organize a local exhibition of it and by writing an article for the Colonist asserting how in Europe she would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest artists of her day. But, according to Hembroff-Schleicher, ‘When Bosch visited her studio and announced that he discerned erotic symbolism in her work Emily gave him a look of withering scorn and curtly showed him the door.’41 Many of her paintings, however, reveal a powerfully sensuous, if not sensual quality. Like beautiful women, cedar trees stand in clearings, their luxuriant foliage resembling great sweeps of hair.42 Among Carr’s charcoal drawings of cedars, there is one whose trunk leans obliquely to the right while swathes of foliage sweep across it diagonally like wind-blown tresses.43 Her oil painting, Abstract Tree Forms intensifies this effect into a rhythmic pattern of curving tree trunks surmounted by waves of green and gold foliage which Sharyn Udall compares to ‘great ribbons of colour’ flowing across the canvas (Figure 12).44 The work demonstrates that sense of movement Carr considered so important in painting. She writes in a journal entry of 9 October 1933: Direction, that’s what I’m after, everything moving together, relative movement, sympathetic movement, connected movement, flowing, liquid, universal movement, all directions summing up in one grand direction, leading the eye forward, and satisfying. So to control direction of movement that the whole structure sways, vibrates and rocks together, not wobbling like a bowl of jelly.45

Everything in Abstract Tree Forms bends and sways. The forest becomes a great loom where colours and shapes continually intersect to create simultaneous impressions of brightness and depth. Great swoops of gold and green undulate to reveal blue-grey depths and streaks of purple, suggesting reflections in water or fragments of sky glimpsed through foliage. To the right of the painting, sections of dark tree trunk seem to emerge through mist or are possibly reflected back in a forest pool. Curved dark green shapes in the top left-hand corner may represent tree trunks or those small conical pines which appear in the background of so many Carr paintings. In the foreground, just left of centre, a cedar trunk, richly red where the light strikes it, loops upwards, while, to the right, a broad band of mingled ochres and purple, suggests another tree trunk rising on the slant to meet it. Together they enclose a mysterious space containing both a glimpse of sky and a swirling movement which surmounts a dark shape at the painting’s lower edge, possibly representing the darkness at the forest’s heart, although Udall suggests it could be ‘a tree

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stump, a fragment of a downed totem Pole, or even the form of the artist herself ’.46 Carr would almost certainly have insisted that the joyful, ecstatic mood of Abstract Tree Forms expresses a yearning for the divine and the desire to incorporate her experience of God in her painting. To a modern viewer, however, it can also exemplify the ‘sublimated eros’ certain critics have discerned in Carr’s work: some imagery of strong sexual connotation was frequent in the formal painting period: the contained hollows and openings in the woods; the phallic poles, stumps and tree trunks. Such content does not disappear in her later work but is translated into a powerful and more generalized sexual energy, as openings and enclosures vibrate with light and movement, trunks thrust upward into sky, earth fecundates, and death and decay are absorbed into the irresistible regenerative cycle.47

For someone of Carr’s generation and background, the idea that religious devotion could be closely identified with sexual longing might well appear shockingly irreverent, if not blasphemous, although much great art and literature of previous centuries has combined both impulses, often with overwhelming effect. One striking example is the Ecstasy of St Theresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, created by the seventeenth-century Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. Bernini has sought to capture the moment St Theresa of Avila describes in her autobiography of how an angel appeared to her in a vision: In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it – even a considerable share.48

The saint reclines on a cloud above the altar with lips parted and eyes closed, swooning in ecstasy while the smiling angel stands before her, drawing aside a fold of her habit and aiming an arrow, rather than a spear, ready to plunge it into her body. Simon Schama describes Bernini’s carving of St Theresa ‘as if at the height of her sexual pleasure, utterly abandoned to a flood of sensation, straining towards her spiritual consummation, body and soul indivisible’.49 When he created this remarkable work, Bernini was practising strict Christian discipline

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and, for all its intense sensuality, his altarpiece is also an expression of deep devotion. As Schama points out: the modern anachronism is not the union of body and soul that so many 17thcentury poets and writers obsessed about, but its demure separation into sensual and spiritual experience. Ecstasy in Bernini’s time was understood, and experienced, as sensuously indivisible. You only have to read the poetry of Richard Crashaw or John Donne . . . to grasp that in the early 17th century the yearning of the soul for possession by the divine was always understood as working through the extreme sensations of the body.50

Carr’s Abstract Tree Forms certainly expresses rapture, if not quite so orgasmically as Bernini’s sculpture of St Theresa, but the folds and openings of the forest foliage have a not dissimilar effect to the way Bernini has sculpted the saint’s habit so ‘the protecting garment of her chastity’ seems to drape itself into highly suggestive folds and hollows,51 much as Carr’s 1931 painting Tree Trunk evokes an intimate, erotic portrayal of femininity. Eros may be sublimated in her work, but it is certainly present in many of her paintings. Similarly, there was sublimated eros in her relationship with Lawren Harris, and later, with her other significant mentor, Ira Dilworth, though it is impossible to know to what extent, if at all, Carr recognized its presence. Whereas, a significant amount of the Carr/Dilworth correspondence has been preserved, Harris destroyed Carr’s correspondence with him in order to preserve her privacy, while she destroyed some of his letters to her: Any that have anything personal any hints which are now clear to me though they were not at the time (as to his personal unhappiness) things I see now but could not then these I am burning. Nothing really in them but it seems fairer to him. The work letters I shall keep. They would be of no interest to anyone but a worker or a seeker like yourself. They throw light on Lawren’s work & on my own too.52

We are left wondering what it would be like to read the entire correspondence between Carr and Harris while understanding and indeed sympathizing with their desire to preserve it from prying eyes.

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When Carr recalls writing to Lawren Harris about her friendship with First Nations woman, Sophie Frank, she records his response with a sense of pride: ‘ “It goes to prove,” he replied, “that race, colour, class and caste mean nothing in reality; quality of soul alone counts. Deep love transcends even quality of soul . . . It is unusual, so deep a relationship between folks of different races.” ’1 Both Carr and Wright bore witness through their art to the devastating impact of colonization on the lives and cultures of indigenous people. Both art and artist have, in each case, accrued iconic status within their respective nations, but not without criticism directed towards the very notion of bearing witness and the form that witnessing took. Our interest lies in the degree to which their attitude towards, and sympathy for, indigenous peoples shaped their sense of themselves, both in terms of the construction of autobiography and the acknowledgement of the importance and influence of an indigenous female friendship on their lives. In the poem ‘Two Dreamtimes’, dedicated to her Aboriginal friend, Kath Walker (later known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Judith writes: Kathy my sister with the torn heart, I don’t know how to thank you for your dreamtime stories of joy and grief written on paperbark. You were one of the dark children I wasn’t allowed to play with – riverbank campers, the wrong colour, (I couldn’t turn you white). So it was late I met you late I began to know they hadn’t told me the land I loved was taken out of your hands.2 143

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The phrase ‘they hadn’t told me’ seems a little disingenuous, given Wright herself relates the stories heard from her father about Aboriginal dispossession of the land ‘settled’ (stolen) by her forefathers that gave rise to the poems ‘Nigger’s Leap: New England’ and ‘Bora Ring’, both published in her first volume of poetry, The Moving Image of 1946. But the stories are given their full significance at a much later date,3 so perhaps what Wright is suggesting here is the difference between knowing and acknowledging – the difference between passive and active knowing. In ‘Bora Ring’, Aboriginal song, story and dance are ‘gone’ and ‘the nomad feet are still’; Only the rider’s heart halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word that fastens in the blood the ancient curse, the fear as old as Cain.4

The poem is an image of stasis, suggesting that the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and White invaders has nowhere to go, being irretrievably broken. Only the trees are left to posture, mime and murmur forgotten ritual and forgotten Aboriginal lives. Aboriginal people have been consigned to the stasis of the past tense, and the White man is stilled by fear. The alliance of fear with judgement and retribution, however, would suggest some kind of future action that might arise out of this fixed tableau. Similarly, ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ offers a warning of a night that ‘floods us suddenly as history / that has sunk many islands in its good time’ but even so the earth will not give back ‘the thin black children’ – neither children nor dance can be recovered.5 Yet while the poet asks that night cover ‘the bone and skull’ of that which ‘screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff ’ in an act of tenderness and respect for the dead, the quilt of night is cold comfort, and suggests a grotesque cover-up (the bodies ‘waiting for flies’) that the poet brings to the light of day. These two early poems then are forms of witness, but the action seems bogged down by the weight of its burden. Some years later however, in the poem ‘Old House’, although the ‘original’ river of life is slowed and silted with the bodies of black and white (including Wright’s great-great-grandfather), the poet bears witness not only to ‘those days’ but to a faith in the song that survives to ‘tell the story’: And in those days there was one of him and a thousand of them, and in these days none are left –

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neither a pale man with kangaroo-grass hair nor a camp of dark singers mocking by the river. And the trees and the creatures, all of them are gone. But the sad river, the silted river, under its dark banks the river flows on, the wind still blows and the river still flows. And the great broken tree, the dying pepperina, clutches in its hands the fragments of a song.6

It is significant that ‘Old House’ is chosen to begin Wright’s autobiography, not only because Wright herself is an ‘old house’, turning eighty-four in the year Half a Lifetime was published, but more because it is a poem that bears witness to her own life as a committed writer for whom testimony is central, and to the lives of those others (black and white) for whom, through whom and with whom she spoke. Nine years prior to the publication of Half a Lifetime, in the preface to essays collected under the title Born of the Conquerors (a phrase drawn from the poem ‘Two Dreamtimes’) Wright acknowledged the debt she felt she owed to Kath Walker, the woman to whom she was mentor and who acted as mentor for Wright herself: It was not until I was in my forties that I was able to meet Kath Walker, as she then was, and to get educated in the realities of Aboriginal life. I had written some stories (including, I am glad to remember, perhaps the first short story on the land rights question, Eighty Acres7 . . .). I had spent a couple of years in the late 1940s writing a book based on my grandfather’s diaries (The Generations of Men),8 and had come to understand something of the suppression of the real story of the great pastoral invasions of inland Australia . . .9

Wright here explains how meeting Kath Walker in 1963 gave her the impetus to dig deeper into the story of the invasion and colonization of Australia – an exploration that resulted in the publication of The Cry for the Dead in 1981.10 This book that might best be understood as a re-assessment and a re-writing of the earlier family biography, places the beginnings of her Australian inheritance not in the house and garden of her grandparents, but in the geography of the Wadja Plain and the history of its original inhabitants. An Edenic description of Dalwood, her Grandmother May’s ‘great house of cool stone corridors and highceilinged rooms’ whose passages were filled with the scents ‘from Grandmama’s garden – summer roses, lemonhedge, lavender and sage’ and the ‘continual soft murmur of voices as the women of the household sat stitching’,11 is replaced with a description of ‘the great blunt triang[ular plain] rimmed by low sandstone

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ranges’ ‘upon which the people known today as the Wadja once lived’.12 In ‘Two Dreamtimes’ Wright had expressed desire for a return to ‘that far time’, ‘that easy Eden-dreamtime’ of childhood: I riding the cleared hills, plucking blue leaves for their eucalypt scent, hearing the call of the plover, in a land I thought was mine for life

But it is in this ‘country of birds and trees’ – the country of childhood innocence – that Walker/Oodgeroo (or at least her racial kin) is rendered ‘a shadow-sister’, the ‘dark girl I couldn’t play with’. Eden is here already lost and its inhabitants cast out.13 The poetic image is reminiscent of The Expulsion – Margaret Preston’s 1952 visual image of an Aboriginal Adam and Eve cast out of the Australian Garden.14 But Wright suggests the expulsion is not God’s doing but the result of racial discrimination and settler violence. The ghosts who haunt the houses of Dalwood and Wallamumbi in The Generations of Men – the phantom people upon whose blood and bone those houses were built – are remembered, resurrected and recognized as the rightful owners of the land in The Cry for the Dead. With the acknowledgement that ‘the land I loved was taken out of your hands’ (as expressed in ‘Two Dreamtimes’), Wright moves into the arena of political activism, forming, ‘with a few other people’, the Aboriginal Treaty Committee – an act which she describes as ‘attempting at last to do something to redress the old wrongs.’15 Wright would here suggest that the act of bearing witness through art is not sufficient unto itself; that some further action must be taken if justice is to be done and the vision of a better future is to be realized. To speak the truth is not enough. She even goes so far in ‘Two Dreamtimes’ to claim that Art is ultimately a lie and therefore even the poet of conscience, no matter how well intentioned, cannot be trusted: My shadow-sister, I sing to you from my place with my righteous kin, to where you stand with the Koori dead, ‘Trust none – not even poets.’

Art is a lie because bearing witness through the act of writing a poem cannot remove the poet from her history and her kinship: A knife’s between us. My righteous kin still have cruel faces.

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Neither you nor I can win them, though we meet in secret kindness. I am born of the conquerors, you of the persecuted.

‘Two Dreamtimes’ is a desolate poem that speaks of a personal loss of faith in all that the poet has done to right the wrongs and heal the wounds of the past – her kin are still righteous and still have cruel faces. In this poem Wright also acknowledges the hope she once held that the example of friendship between a black and a white woman, the love and support given each to each, might in itself bear witness to the larger value of their shared ‘secret kindness’; but she demonstrates a loss of faith even in love: The knife’s between us. I turn it round, the handle to your side, the weapon made from your country’s bones. I have no right to take it.

Yet with back to the wall, and even whilst offering her friend the right of enmity and reprisal, the poet knows that ‘both of us die as our dreamtime dies’ and that, frail as it might seem, all that she can offer (along with the knife) is a poem. Here there is a glimmer of hope that the pen is mightier than the sword, that love is stronger than hate, that the river of life though silted still flows deep underground. The gift of a poem is also significant for it was poetry that brought the women together, and poetry that gave Wright the opportunity to mentor and champion Walker when she was unknown and her work untested. Brigid Rooney’s book on Australian writer-intellectuals devotes a chapter each to Wright and Oodgeroo where she comments of their relationship: Wright’s advocacy of Oodgeroo’s poetry, in particular, derived its passionate, emotional tone from their friendship. They learned and drew support from each other, working towards shared goals.16

Wright was given a copy of the manuscript of Walker’s first collection of poetry to read for potential publication with Jacaranda Press. ‘I told Brian Clouston,’ she recalls, ‘that the book should be published, not as a curiosity, but as a contribution to Australian poetry in its own right.’ But of course, she observes, ‘it didn’t work out quite like that. The boom in sales which took We Are Going,17 through edition after edition did happen partly because of its “curiosity value”, the first-footing for Aboriginal published work.’18 Although popular with the general public, the

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collection went unappreciated by most academic critics for whom it had neither ‘the polish of English poetry’ nor ‘the authentic voice of the song-man’.19 For Wright, not only race, but politics and gender were at issue here. Oodgeroo herself observed that ‘The chief criticism seemed to be that some of the poems were somewhat angry and bitter; as though even atrocities were never to be mentioned by nice people.’20 Wright remained a staunch advocate of Oodgeroo’s poetry and her activist stance, commenting in the essay of appreciation written in the year before her friend’s death: Even though so little may seem to have been achieved for Aborigines in the years since 1964, the grudging new respect for Aboriginal life, Aboriginal capacities, and Aboriginal art, owes far more to Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s work whether as Kath Walker or as the descendant of her island people than has been acknowledged . . . Her work has vital things to say, as well as angry and funny and insulting and biting things.21

Oodgeroo felt similar respect for Wright – a sister poet, activist and friend. Although it was three years before Oodgeroo responded in kind with a poem titled, ‘Sister Poet’, Kathy Cochrane notes in her biography of Oodgeroo that ‘Kath often said that she was so moved by the poem that she was unable to read it aloud for many months; and it was three years before she felt able to reply in kind’.22 The poem opens with these words of conciliation and comfort: Sister poet, I answer you, Where you sit with your ‘civilised’ kin Shadow sister, your high ideals Compensate me for their sin.

Much of the poem is an appreciation of Wright’s long-term involvement in environmental activism (a concern linked in ‘Two Dreamtimes’ with Aboriginal dispossession), but the poem is most significant for its refusal of the proffered knife and its affirmation of the sisterhood it espouses, across racial lines: But, my shadow sister, this I know, Your dreams are my dreams Your thoughts are my thoughts And our shadow that made us sisters That binds us close together, Together with us CRIES . . .

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The poem is generous in its recognition of shared dreams and aspirations, but the spirit shared by the sister poets mourns for losses suffered on both sides. Loss is a significant factor in Wright’s autobiography, alleviated to some extent by the record of a life that untiringly worked for the gains of positive social change. The autobiography is another form of testament. Published in 1999, Half a Lifetime is framed and deeply informed by Wright’s relationship with indigenous peoples – one in which an acknowledged but nevertheless passive guilt by (colonial) association is transformed into a political advocacy that is integral to her art, her life and her personhood. Surprisingly, there is no direct reference to Walker/Oodgeroo in the autobiography, given its half lifetime ‘ends’ in 1966 with the death of Wright’s beloved partner, Jack McKinney. Perhaps Kath is absent because the autobiography is focused on childhood, early womanhood and the enormously creative and fulfilling period of Judith’s life spent with Jack. But it is also important to keep in mind the very piecemeal nature of the autobiographical process, one in which Wright was quite reluctant. There would appear to have been no ‘bits’ written to cover the large period, during which Kath made her appearance in Judith’s life, from 1955 to 1966.23 The final form of the autobiography was only achieved with the guidance offered by Patricia Clarke, at which point, after many years of working at the ‘life’, perhaps Wright felt unable and unwilling to do more. The last ‘chapter’ of the autobiography is a personal apology to the Koori and Murri people that begins with an early and very beautiful poem, ‘At Cooloolah’, in which Wright acknowledges both her sense of alienation from and her love of the land to which she knows she has no rightful claim, being ‘a stranger, come of a conquering people’.24 ‘To all the people of the old and true Australia on whose land I have trespassed and home, by being part of my own people, I have wronged,’ she writes in conclusion, I plead for forgiveness . . . To all of them I now bend my head and say Sorry. Sorry, above all, that I can make nothing right.’25 And yet, her life is testament to how much she made right: the past cannot be changed, but the future is not so intransigent. Rooney suggests that the long-term friendship between Wright and Walker/Oodgeroo created ‘a space of risk and revelation’ – ‘a space within which they contended with and perhaps began to unfix the immobile, binary identities of colonizer and colonized.’26 An official national apology to the indigenous peoples of Australia would have to wait for the election of a Labor government in 2007, some eight years after the biography’s publication and seven years after Wright’s death in 2000;27 but come it did as a result in no small part of Wright’s untiring determination to

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bear witness in the face of many and powerful forces ranged against her.28 In our estimation, it is her art that most effectively bore witness and continues to bear witness to wrongs suffered and the need to right them. The same might be said of Emily Carr’s art; but to suggest such at this moment in Canadian history is contentious. One of the essays in the catalogue produced for a twenty-first-century Canadian exhibition of Carr’s work, New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon,29 includes discussion of a performance piece acted by Shirley Bear and Susan Crean in the exhibition spaces of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Royal British Columbia Museum. ‘The opening dialogue in Dear Sophie/Dear Emily always ended with a blunt question,’ write Bear and Crean: ‘Susan, would you say that Emily Carr was a racist?’ And that is the question that lies at the heart of the discussion of Carr’s legacy. ‘It goes without saying,’ Susan would respond. ‘Only we do need to say it.’ Carr’s career as an artist and writer is inescapably connected to the history of White Canada and the First Nations, the ‘visitors who never left’ and the communities that accommodated them.30

While it is clear that Carr’s career cannot be removed from the history of White Canada (those ‘born of the conquerors’) and First Nations (‘you of the persecuted’) – and that Carr of all people would not wish it so; it is also clear that her art and its relationship to that history has suffered from the ‘celebrity effect’, and more importantly, from the race politics of the twenty-first century that has resulted in the blindness to, or even the refusal of, the particular circumstances of her place, time and person. The problems associated with the celebrity effect are taken up by Crean herself in the conclusion to her semi-fictional work on Carr, The Laughing One, published five years before the New Perspectives essay. Here she observes with some acumen that contemporary artists and writers, both Native and non-Native, ‘have gone back to the woman in the icon and demanded not only a reckoning but a prophecy’ and that ‘Like all icons, Emily is amenable. She allows us to use her, blame and excuse her, to see through her foibles to ourselves . . . Her life story unfolds as a palimpsest of our fables.’31 The issue of race politics is taken up with some asperity by Maria Tippett in her review of the New Perspectives catalogue.32 Here she complains of the catalogue essayists in general that ‘they allowed understanding, empathy and historical wisdom to be sacrificed for their own present-day political agenda’. Of the racist slur cast by Bear and Crean she asks, ‘So what is going on here? Do these sorts of claims enhance our understanding of an artist who died more than 60 years ago?’ and remarks that if the authors had ‘made an effort to situate Carr’s work and life

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within the historical context in which it was produced they might have been less critical.’ Tippett acknowledges Carr’s tendency to idealize or romanticize the people she met in the West Coast villages but condemns the writers’ failure to acknowledge ‘that she was genuinely sympathetic toward the aboriginal people.’ This sympathy was not merely a matter of passive feeling but was translated into political work that took the form of painting, writing and public speaking. Although those to whom she spoke through these various forms of address were largely unsympathetic to her views, Carr was indefatigable in her persistence. Much of Carr’s career was dedicated to convincing others of the value of First Nations art and the importance of First Nations art and culture to the construction of the modern Canadian nation. This did not imply, nor did Carr advocate or have any interest in, recognizing the legal and governmental rights of First Nations People. But her art and her life were testament to her respect for Native ways of understanding and being in the world that she too (by way of invasion and colonization) had come to inhabit. In 1913, Carr organized and mounted a solo exhibition of paintings based on her sketching trips into First Nations villages and reserves up the West coast of Canada, from Vancouver to Alaska, undertaken intermittently from 1898. In the lecture she wrote to accompany the exhibition, Carr offered the public an explanation of her work and what she understood to be the artistic and cultural significance of First Nations carved house and grave posts. ‘My object in making this collection of totem pole pictures,’ Carr explains, ‘has been to depict these wonderful relics of a passing people in their own original setting: the identical spots where they were carved and placed by the Indians in honour of their chiefs’: These poles are fast becoming extinct. Each year sees some of their number fall, rotted with age, others bought and carried off to museums in various parts of the world, others, alas, burned down for firewood. In some instances the Indians are becoming ashamed of them, fearing that the white people whom they are anxious to resemble will regard them as paganish and will laugh at them, and they are threatening to burn them down.33

The ‘Lecture on Totems’ is underscored by the contemporary discourse of ‘the dying races’ in which the indigenous peoples of North America have the recognizable qualities of ‘the noble savage’ and are positioned on an evolutionary ladder that aligns them with the ancient Britons – they are ‘our’ primitive forefathers.34 They are ‘simple, gentle folk’, ‘full of poetry’ who, ‘in their own primitive state’, undefiled by the contamination of white vices, ‘were a moral people with a high ideal of right’.35

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

The language of the lecture makes clear the degree to which Carr was a woman of her time. The lecture participates in a familiar racist discourse, in part drawn from ethnographic commentators of the time36 and designed to speak in a language her audience would have understood. This is not to suggest that Carr did not believe in the language she spoke, but that it is important to recognize the politics of a public speech designed to elicit appreciation of her work and financial support for her project. Carr was not a radical, but she did believe that there was much to be learnt from First Nations’ understanding and living in the world, declaring, ‘I think they could teach us many many things’.37 This belief played no small part in the development of her personal and artistic philosophy. Although influenced by the vibrant colour palette of Fauvism, Carr’s representation of Indian totem poles and house posts during this period had political and artistic intent. These paintings aimed to be a kind of ‘true to life’ artistic documentation that would act as an archive when the Indian art, and perhaps the Indians themselves, returned to the natural world from which they had grown. This naturalistic representation, of native art and native people, is evident in a painting like Indian House Interior with Totems of 1912 (discussed in Chapter 5; see Figure 9). Cumshewa, thought to have been completed in the same year, is similarly documentary but here speaks of something quite personal to the artist who is bent on recording absence as much as presence (Figure 13). In the story of the same name, published in Klee Wyck, Carr recalls her visit to the village of Cumshewa, a Haida village in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Here she describes the very paper upon which she sketches and the paints with which she recreates the wooden raven as literally soaked in the spirit of the village: ‘Cumshewa seems always to drip, always to be blurred with mist, its foliage always to hang wet-heavy. Cumshewa rain soaked my paper, Cumshewa rain trickled among my paints.’38 The village is deserted of people, culture is returned to nature: the Raven grave-post is Cumshewa – guardian spirit of a disappeared people whose cultural material remains are also vanishing. Carr describes how the raven sits within a few feet of an empty pole, a pole that apparently held his mate who ‘rotted away long ago, leaving him moss-grown, dilapidated and alone to watch dead Indian bones’. These two great wooden birds are spirit guardians – set on either side of the doorway of ‘a big house that had been full of dead Indians who had died during a small-pox epidemic.’39 Carr’s commentary on Cumshewa is fascinating both for what it says and for what it does not say. The raven is deserted even of his life companion – for she has rotted away – and he himself, the sole and last vestige of a life and culture, is rapidly deteriorating. The carved wooden pole is in a process of return to natural

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origins – moss-grown and rotting, as the bodies of the Indians over which he watches are also returned to bone and then to dust. It would seem that the disappearance of Indian culture is represented as part of a natural cycle – dust to dust, ashes to ashes. A culture born out of the natural world returns to the natural world: the reference to the death of an Indian community ravaged by smallpox is not linked to European invasion or associated with any judgement or guilt that might be associated with Carr herself, a daughter of the colonizer. Carr’s 1912 watercolour rendition of the wooden raven tends towards the naturalistic: the raven itself is static – a carved wooden post – greyed by weather. The vegetation at the base is picturesque in its flourish of detailed colour and movement. Doris Shadbolt describes it in terms of its compositional facility – a picture carefully composed of ‘elegant foreground arabesques and touches of intense colour’.40 It is a skilful replication whose picturesque quality aligns it with the Romantic movement, but in 1931 Carr returned to the subject matter of Cumshewa and again painted the raven post – this time in very different style (see Big Raven, Figure 14). The years between 1912 and 1931 had wrought a change in her artistic and personal vision, largely precipitated by contact with the painting and philosophy of the Canadian Group of Seven and the Modernist movement. Carr records in her journal the moment of revelation that changes her own artistic response to Indian art: this is a shift from the anthropological or archaeological to the visionary or symbolic. On seeing some ‘Indian pictures’ by A.Y. Jackson she writes: I felt a little as if beaten at my own game. His Indian pictures have something mine lack – rhythm, poetry. Mine are so downright. But perhaps his haven’t quite the love in them of the people and the country that mine have. How could they? He is not a Westerner and I took no liberties. I worked for history and cold fact. Next time I paint Indians I’m going off on a tangent tear. There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.41

Big Raven is the representation of a powerful spirit – a presence to be reckoned with: the boldness of colour and line, the swirling undergrowth, the contrast of horizontal lowering cloud and slanting vertical sheets of brilliant light and rain, heighten the drama and power of the carved pole. This is no longer the record of a vanishing, but the reincarnation of a vibrant energy. The Raven lives through Emily Carr’s visionary art: Indian spirit is envisaged as a living, growing, vibrant force that unites earth and sky.

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

In her journal entry of 5 February 1931, Carr remarks upon the achievement and her aims, at first prosaically, but increasingly poetically: Got the Cumshewa big bird well disposed on canvas. The great bird is on a post in tangled growth, a distant mountain below and a lowering, heavy sky and one pine tree. I want to bring great loneliness to this canvas and a haunting broodiness, quiet and powerful.42

The words are an uncanny pre-echo of Wright’s poem, ‘At Cooloolah’ (published in the Australian Bulletin in 1954): The blue crane fishing in Cooloolah’s twilight has fished there longer than our centuries. He is the certain heir of lake and evening, and he will wear their colour till he dies, but I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people. I cannot share his calm . . .43

Here too is an image of bird and aboriginal presence – an image of quiet, solitude, power and haunting broodiness. Like Carr’s image of the raven, the blue crane is ‘the certain heir’ of the world into which he is born, but unlike the raven, the crane is given no aboriginal association – if he is totemic of ‘those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah’, there is no indication of this in the poem. The first peoples are represented only by the ghost of ‘a black accoutred warrior’ who rises to confront the white settler (Wright’s grandfather) with the guilt of violent invasion and dispossession, only to sink again ‘into bare plain, as now into time past’. Aboriginal presence dissolves into land and into ‘time past’ – subsumed by the natural world, and the poetic scene is restored to the tranquil peace of ‘White shores of sand, plumed reed and paperbark, / clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan’. Wright suggests that this Edenic world is defiled by human presence. It is unclear whether ‘our centuries’ is a reference to the centuries of White presence in Australia or indicative of human presence on the earth, inclusive of aboriginal peoples; but the pristine beauty of the landscape is defiled once more by violence, guilt and fear as Wright’s own prints join those of ‘bird and animal’ on ‘the clean sand’ in the fourth and last stanza. Here again the ghost of aboriginality rises to challenge this new intruder with a ‘driftwood spear / thrust from the water’. Thus aboriginality is signified as guardian and protector of the natural world – unquiet spirit of the land, but not of the land in the same way the crane is ‘certain heir’. It is an unsettling representation that simultaneously accords and refuses aboriginal peoples humanity, grants and

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denies them presence in this world – the world of ‘culture’ in the twentieth century. The totemic raven that guards the house of the dead Indians is the signifier of spectral aboriginal presence, but Carr’s painting of Big Raven celebrates aboriginal spirit through dynamic representation – totem is rendered living spirit. The trees that ‘grew up round the dilapidated old raven, sheltering him from the tearing winds’ and ‘the moss that grew upon his back and in the hollows of his eye-sockets’44 give the totem what Carr calls a ‘hugging’ place,45 sheltering the spirit of aboriginality. The harsh reality of dilapidation is gentled in the soft colour and line of Cumshewa. But in Big Raven, the comforting moss that paradoxically threatens the bird’s sight and strength of wing as rendered in Cumshewa, is transformed to a faint sheen of dark green on a gleaming black body that bears relationship but is not engulfed by the vital force of green origins. Carr’s totemic Raven defies disintegration and decay. In this 1931 painting time and art have worked together to create ‘living spirit’ where time has rendered the ghost of aboriginal presence in the last stanza of Wright’s poem even less than it was in the fourth. Only the signification of the black warrior – his spear – remains, and it has become driftwood, weathered by the waters of time like the carved post of the raven Carr paints in her first rendition of 1912. Although Wright’s aboriginal spear that thrusts from out of the peaceful waters of Cooloolah is aggressive and accusatory where Carr’s grave post in either painting is not, Big Raven renders aboriginal spirit as enormously powerful – a vital force that defies death. The swirling undergrowth out of which the totemic bird rises is a green whirlpool whose centrifugal energy is drawn up into a dominating figure of black power. Soft, comforting cloud of Cumshewa is replaced by great slanting sheets of light or lightning that dramatize the scene and align the Raven with heavenly power. This is a credo – a powerful statement of belief, an assertion of value – and, although Carr herself might reject the claim, it is political. This visual rendition of credo is complex; complicated by what Carr says and what others say about her. Unlike Wright, Carr did not see herself as ‘one of the conquerors’; her views and actions are always distinguished from those of other white Canadians. Discussing the difficulty of obtaining the stories behind the totems, Carr notes that ‘It is indeed an honour and a privilege to be taken in an Indian’s confidence, for they are and have good reason for being suspicious of the whites’.46 In her own eyes Carr is not a white like the other whites who came before her – she is different; she does not recognize either racial or historical connection to the ‘bad’ behaviour of her forefathers and mothers or her contemporaries. This

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

sophistication of guilt by association would take most of the twentieth century for whites of settler cultures to reach, and in this, Wright was well ahead of her time. Carr also distances herself from the ‘good’ of the missionaries, recognizing the ill effect of conflicting belief systems and the damage done to self-respect such ‘good will’ has on the Indian and his/her community. Some of Carr’s stories were so critical of missionary attitudes and practices that words, phrases, passages, even whole stories, likely to offend Christian believers or imprint a negative image of Christianity on young minds, were removed from the ‘Educational edition’ of 1951 by the publisher.47 How then did Carr see herself, and how might we best understand her ‘Indian project’? She might be understood as a white apologist for indigenous cultures, but this label too is inappropriate. Carr’s stories, journals, letters and life-writing reveal the degree to which she came to the First Nations peoples primarily with respect for their culture and a desire to learn and thence to apply that acquired knowledge to her own life and art. This might be labelled unethical appropriation, but this does not make a lot of sense when Carr so often acknowledged her debt to First Nations art and culture in an historical environment where this was rare, even peculiar. Granted there are instances of neglect and of contradiction, but historical perspective and recognition of the integrity of Carr’s personal investment is important here. In a brief autobiographical statement, Carr relates how, whenever she could afford it, she went up North, ‘among the Indians and the woods,’ and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not I did not care a bean. I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also struck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history.48

In an environment in which the cultural production of the First Nations was consigned to categories of the ethnographic, the archaeological or the anthropological, Carr was unusual in her insistence that these ‘objects’ and the process of their making be understood and valued as Art. The debt her own work owed to this art should not be confined to the opportunity it afforded her to create her own place in history through the salvage of this disappearing world, for Carr was unequivocal in her acknowledgement of its enormous impact on her art and her self. ‘Indian Art,’ she wrote, ‘broadened my seeing, loosened the

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formal tightness I had learned in England’s schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man’s understanding . . . I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce.’49 This ‘struggle for bigness, simplicity [and] spirit’50 is the defining force and the hallmark of Carr’s work and life, in relation to which she represents herself as small. In ‘Ucluelet’, the first story in Klee Wyck, Carr represents herself as eleven years younger than she actually was, a shift which allows her to enhance the sense of smallness51 and awe she felt when confronted by the ‘two grave Missionaries’ but more importantly, by ‘the house full’ of Indians who have come to look at her, and the Chief, old Hipi, who reads her face and pronounces judgement on her character. ‘What did he say?’ the young Carr enquires of the Missionary when she cannot understand Hipi’s terse speech. ‘Not much,’ replies the Missionary, ‘Only that you had no fear, that you were not stuck up, and that you knew how to laugh.’ It is for the latter quality that she becomes known, and is given the name ‘Klee Wyck’ or ‘the laughing one’.52 ‘Ladies approaching seventy must not expect to work like girls of seventeen – it is unreasonable,’ admonishes her doctor forty years after the trip to Ucluelet, when Carr suffered what she described as ‘an enraged heart’.53 Confined to bed, she decides to write about her sketching trips up the West coast of Canada. ‘I don’t know how to write,’ she told Eric Brown (then Director of the National Gallery): ‘My Indian stories . . . are just fun and they’re medicine. I go back so vividly on those sketching trips, that I forget being sick.’54 Her formal autobiography, Growing Pains, records how ‘reliving those beautiful, calm places among the dear Indians . . . healed my heart.’55 The stories collected under the name given her by the Indians of Ucluelet constitute another kind of autobiography. Klee Wyck is a word picture of the many people, places and incidents that gave rise to the ‘Indian paintings’ upon which Carr’s career as an artist was founded. The book is a testament to the beauty and strength of spirit she discovered among the villages and forests, a form of witness to the destructive impact of colonization on First Nations cultures, and a memorial to Sophie Frank, her beloved Indian friend. When Sophie Frank came to her studio door in Vancouver in 1906 to sell baskets, Carr recorded this moment as ‘The start of a deep friendship. Something that touched the very core of life.’56 The friendship would last until Sophie’s death in 1939, the immediate impact of which is recalled by Carr in Growing Pains. She writes: ‘I had only a few chapters [of my autobiography] written, and was still in hospital, when I got word that Eric Brown was dead. Following close on the news of his death came the death of my Indian friend Sophie around whom many of my

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Indian stories were written. Writing as well as painting paused a little inside of me . . .’57 Klee Wyck was dedicated to Sophie Frank, and the first edition included a colour reproduction of Carr’s portrait of Sophie as its frontispiece (dated 1914) Sophie is painted in three-quarter profile – looking both towards and away from the viewer (Figure 16). Her eyes do not seem to focus on us, but rather, look inwards. Adjectives like sad and stoic come to mind, but the portrait might better be described in Gerta Moray’s words as reflective of a ‘gentle melancholy’.58 There is a downward pull to the portrait and an inner stillness. The fluid brush of pale earthy watercolour tones, the loose braid of hair that falls down her back and the dark sweep of hair that lies softly on her forehead suggest an artist’s loving hand – one that also pays careful attention to the soft sculpting of nose, curve of cheek bone mirrored in the deep curve of eyelid, gentle arch of eyebrow and the distinct shape of lip. The colour of Sophie’s lips is mirrored in the jacket toggle that resembles a rose – allusion to the beloved (the rose beyond compare) is surely made here. The fact that the portrait hung on the wall of Carr’s studio, and is one of a relatively small number of portraits in Carr’s oeuvre, is indicative of the important place Sophie held in Carr’s life. In an early version of the story ‘Sophie’,59 later revised for inclusion in Klee Wyck, Carr writes of the hardship of Sophie’s life that results in alcoholism and finally, prostitution: After Sophie had buried twenty children, she broke and took to drink. Frank, her husband, had the habit for years. Coming from Victoria to see her, I found her drunk. The shock of having me see her sobered her. Her shame and crying were bitter. Even the disgust of the vile-smelling liquor and Sophie dishevelled and wrecked couldn’t shake my love for Sophie, and I love her still. Although she has passed on now, it was just all comprehensive love. Perhaps to me it needs neither defence or explanation. The people in the village called me ‘Sophie’s Emily.’ She herself called me ‘My Emily,’ and so I was. She is dead now, and the memory of her folded together with the little handful of things particularly mine.60

The shock Carr feels over her friend’s decline is not so much the shock suffered by a middle-class, small-town morality, sensitive to the likely judgement that will be pronounced by others on her friend and herself, although there is an element of this; rather or more, Carr expresses a deeply personal shock at Sophie’s ‘dishevelled and wrecked’ state that induces feelings of repulsion, and then the urge to offer explanation in her friend’s defence.

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It is not that Carr was unequal to the defence of her friendship or her friend. Her writings, whether in journal, speech or story form, more often than not take the form of a defence of difference. As Susan Crean remarks in the introduction to Opposite Contraries, ‘She [Carr] started early down the path of difference, becoming a contrary within her family, and then remaining a contrary within Canadian society all her life. Emily Carr was a woman who consciously did things differently, and even though this difference bedevilled her, she embraced it.’61 A white woman of Emily Carr’s genteel background did not travel alone into the wilds of forest and Native village at the end of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century in search of artistic subject matter. She did not befriend ‘the Natives’. A woman of Carr’s religious and class background did not pursue an artist’s vocation, choosing so dubious a ‘profession’ over marriage; nor waste her time on Indians, totem poles and trees when watercolour miniatures and painting on porcelain were considered appropriate to her sex. ‘One sister painted on china’, writes Carr: ‘Beyond mention of that, Art was taboo in the family. My kind was considered a family disgrace.’62 In a journal entry dated 12 August 1934, Carr despairs (not without a sense of humour): I haven’t one friend of my own age and generation. I wish I had. I don’t know if it’s my own fault. I haven’t a single thing in common with them. They’re all snarled up in grandchildren or W.A. or church teas or bridge or society. None of them like painting and they particularly dislike my kind of painting . . . A lunatic, a prostitute and a Chinese artist – these are among my friends.63

Sophie Frank is ‘the prostitute’: the stark nature of Carr’s pejorative label is shocking given Sophie is the friend for whom she declares such abiding love. This might be understood as a representation of how others see Carr and her friends and as such is a contrary embrace of what others condemn. In addition, the statement should not be read out of the context of a diary entry that veers between self-pity and self-reflexivity. The defence that Carr feels she should not be impelled to mount in response to Sophie’s ‘immoral’ state and her friendship with a woman of such ill-repute, is nevertheless offered to the reader in the opening lines of the passage quoted earlier. These lines bear witness to the terrible suffering of a woman who loses all of her children and suffers the additional burden of an alcoholic husband, under whose gaze Sophie is rendered mute.64 Sophie is destitute, but nowhere does Carr overtly associate that state with colonization and an impoverished life on the Reserve. Rather, Carr is more concerned to examine herself than to cast blame. The idea that she herself, as a

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

child of the conqueror/colonizer, may in some way be to blame for Sophie’s ‘fall’ is not within her ken. Rather, Carr takes this shock as a moment to reflect upon the extent and strength of her love for Sophie. She is afraid she will be found wanting, for Love should not require defence. Love according to Christ’s example is all-forgiving and all-embracing. Carr’s perspective is always personal; it might be understood as selfish but it might equally be seen as honest. To bear witness does not only require the bearer to speak the truth as her conscience dictates, it requires the bearer to seek the truth. Carr’s statement that ‘I felt it a tremendous thing to be accepted by an Indian like this’65 might be (mis)understood as a form of racism similar to that attached to policies of affirmative action. More negatively, Bear and Crean claim that, We know from [Carr’s] writings that Sophie Frank meant a great deal to her; not just Sophie Frank the woman of warmth and companionship, but the very idea of Sophie Frank. To Carr, the story of their unlikely friendship was something to cherish. But she also understood the significance of being able to claim firsthand experience of First Nations culture. This was ultimately invaluable to her work as an artist and writer.66

The barely veiled allegation that Carr cultivated a friendship with Sophie because it gave her ‘Indian paintings’ credibility is not only unkind and presumptuous but everywhere refuted in the sentiment of Carr’s correspondence with Sophie and her reflections on their love. Carr’s relationship with Sophie Frank would appear to be very different from Wright’s relationship with Kath Walker. Although Carr appreciated Frank’s beautiful basket work, and recognized it as ‘art’67 in a period when work of this nature was consigned to the lesser category of ‘craft’, they were not ‘sister artists’: Carr was not a mentor to Frank, nor was Frank a muse to Carr. Like Wright however, Carr bore witness through her art, her autobiographical writing, and her friendship to discriminatory attitudes and practices that worked against the Christian ethos of Love.68

10

Late Love, Late Style

Emily Carr’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ takes the form of a personal letter to Ira Dilworth. She writes: My dear Eye What a blessing you have been in my old age with all my decrepitude. I have loved and trusted you well . . . The little Indian basket Sophie gave me and you know so well I’d like you to have that & use for your pencils & I’d like you to have Sophie’s portrait the original little watercolour used for Klee Wyck. Forgive me dear for all the times I have been unreasonable or petulant or weepy. I have loved you truly & shall as long as I can.1

The most significant gift Emily can give her beloved Ira (‘Eye’)2 is her painting of Sophie that featured as the frontispiece to her first collection of stories (stories that Dilworth carefully shepherded to publication) and the work of Sophie’s own hands, gifted to Emily. Here Carr wills what she hopes will be a lasting connection, through art, between herself and two people she loved. In what might be understood as the other or second ‘half a lifetime’, both Carr and Wright entered into a significant personal relationship – Carr with Ira Dilworth and Wright with H.C. (‘Nugget’) Coombs.3 In the introduction to Corresponding Influence, a collection of letters between Dilworth and Carr, Linda Morra speaks of a ‘complex mentoring process’ and of ‘a relationship that was both professional and personal’.4 Such also was the relationship between Carr and Harris, and indeed, between Wright and Coombs as earlier between Wright and McKinney. For both women, intellectual and emotional intimacy, although not expressed through a sexual relationship in Carr’s case, was generative of enormous creative energy. The kind of love about which they write is very different, but for both women the relationship in their later years is an important influence on what might be termed their ‘late style’.5 In addition, both women created a new habitus: Wright through the purchase (in 1976) of a property in 161

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

Figure 16 S.F. Morley, Emily Carr and her caravan ‘The Elephant’, 1934.

the dry eucalypt bush outside the small town of Braidwood, New South Wales, that she called ‘Edge’; and Carr through the purchase (in 1933) of an old grey caravan she named ‘the Elephant’ (Figure 16). On 23 July 1933 Carr records her delight at realizing a childhood dream: Caravans ran round inside of my head from the time I was no-high and read children’s stories in which gypsies figured. Periodically I had caravan fever, drew plans like covered express carts drawn by a fat white horse. After horses went out and motors came in I quit caravan dreaming . . . Then one day, plop! Into my very mouth, like a great sugar-plum for sweetness, dropped the caravan. There it sat, grey and lumbering like an elephant, by the roadside – ‘For sale.’ I looked her over, made an offer, and she is mine . . . We towed her home in the dark and I sneaked out of bed at 5 o’clock the next morning to make sure she was really true and not just a grey dream. Sure enough, there she sat, her square ugliness bathed in the summer sunshine, and I sang in my heart.6

The Elephant is a lovely projection of Carr’s small self, so often confined by female domesticity, into a vehicle of mobility and bigness. The Elephant was towed into the forest so Carr, along with her beloved animals, could live in intimate connection with the Green that energized her body, mind, spirit and brush. In September 1935, Carr expresses the joy of this life in the woods: Blessed camp life again! Sunshine pouring joyously through the fringe of trees between the van and the sea . . . Sketching in the big woods is wonderful. You go,

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find a space wide enough to sit in and clear enough so that the undergrowth is not drowning you. Then, being elderly, you spread your camp stool and sit and look around . . . Everything is green. Everything is waiting and still. Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their places . . . Air moves between each leaf. Sunlight plays and dances. Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. Everything is alive . . . Here is a picture, a complete thought, and there another and there . . .7

On return to domestic normality after one such month-long trip, Carr records her feeling of despondency and sense of oppression: The Elephant is bedded down opposite the Four Mile House in a quiet pasture. It is hard to settle down. The house feels stuffy and oppressive but the garden is joyful . . . I have uncovered ‘The Mountain’. It makes me sick. I am heavy in spirit over my painting. It is so lacking. What’s the use? Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.8

But although in moments of despondency, depression, even despair, Carr threatened to ‘quit painting’, to quit was to accept death – not only the death of the artist, but the death of the spirit and the death of the woman she believed herself to be. Carr’s ‘struggle for bigness’ was a life struggle.9 Defeat was not to be countenanced. But the physical challenges of age proved difficult to surmount. A heart-attack suffered at the beginning of 1937 put the indefatigable Carr in hospital, and even after her release home she found, to her disgust, her aging body did not recover with the elasticity of youth. Painting was difficult, particularly as so much energy was required for the basics of everyday living in a semi-invalid state – mornings and often days were spent in bed. The Elephant was sold. Nevertheless, Carr continued to manage sketching trips between 1938 and 1940 but her painting suffered in relation to frequent periods of depression. Her journal records the darkness of this period. The entry for 5 March 1940 begins: ‘The world is horrid right straight through and so am I . . . every bit of me is tired. I’m old and ugly, stupid and ungracious . . . I am a pail of milk that has gone sour.’10 The wind that tears and roars is an echo of ‘The ghastly breath of war’. Carr includes a description of the ‘heavy, drooping’ cedars on the boulevard that ‘writhe’ and ‘toss in agonized swirls’ but significantly, do not break.11 The old cedars serve as a symbol of her physical and psychological state – down but not out. The following day, Carr reflects on the last few years: At sixty-four my heart gave out but I was able to paint still and I learned to write. At sixty-eight I had a stroke. Three months later I am thinking that I may

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Judith Wright and Emily Carr

work on perhaps to seventy after all. I do not feel dead, and I am writing again a little . . . I am nearer sixty-nine than sixty-eight now, and a long way recovered from my stroke. There is a lot of life in me yet.12

Although Carr continued to paint, writing was a significant, even life-saving, creative outlet in her later years. This was restorative work for which Ira Dilworth was largely responsible. Despite Carr’s twenty years’ seniority, Dilworth took on the elder role of a ‘beloved guardian’. He offered the aging woman and artist a special kind of sanctuary and support, acting as the protector of ‘Small’ – her vulnerable personhood – and the Big truth of her art (stories and painting). Linda Morra writes of how ‘extraordinarily important’ Dilworth would become to Carr over the latter period of her life, noting in particular his ‘substantial, virtually immeasurable, influence upon her writing career’: Ira Dilworth, the British Columbia regional director for CBC Radio . . . edited her manuscripts, set up introductions with persons from whom he believed Carr’s literary career would benefit, discussed the merits of poetry and of writing in general with her, was an arbiter on her behalf in negotiating publishing contracts, and acted as a support and adviser when she found herself at a loss in a world that frequently challenged her.13

Dilworth had faith in Carr’s writerly self and she had faith in him – as an editor and as a human being. In his Foreword to the 1951 ‘Educational Edition’ of Klee Wyck, the book he had nurtured through to publication in 1941 and the Canadian Governor General’s Award, Dilworth declares that Emily Carr was ‘a great painter, certainly one of the greatest women painters of any time’ and reminds readers of those qualities that set her above most of her peers: originality, versatility, and driving creative power.14 These are the qualities that also make her a ‘remarkable writer’: Words are used by her with great courage, sometimes taking on new and vivid meanings. They are in her writing the equivalent of the quick, sure brush strokes and dramatic, strong colours which are so characteristic of her canvases.15

Dilworth spends some time outlining the idiosyncratic process by which Carr achieved the qualities of immediacy and sincerity that ‘carry the reader into the very heart of the experience she is describing’.16 An example of her writing is claimed to transcend the usual limits of prose to become lyrical. That Dilworth should place emphasis on heart and lyricism in the value he ascribes to Carr’s writing is surely related to his love of Romantic poetry. This was a love he shared with Carr in the poems he read on the CBC radio program, Sanctuary, to which

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she listened devotedly, and those included in his letters over the course of their correspondence. Aired during the years of the Second World War, these poems were selected to provide listeners with a temporary dwelling place of beauty and peace. Carr transcribed the poems from Dilworth’s letters into a cloth-bound notebook she referred to in her ‘Last Will and Testament’ as ‘the sanctuaries’. Here she asks her beloved Eye to ‘Keep the sanctuaries They have been joy and comfort’.17 In the early stages of their correspondence, Ira explains to Emily that ‘The artist sees things imaginatively and so penetrates beyond the surface . . . [he] gets into the centre of things and speaks from there – if he speaks clearly enough he brings a revelation of the meaning of life to those who hear or see his work’, and refers her to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘To a Skylark’ from which he quotes, concluding, ‘How much the work of Wordsworth and Shelley have had to do with the molding of our minds and spirits no one can say’.18 To some extent, Dilworth takes on the literary education of Carr, but, like the best teachers, he educates to support and encourage his pupil’s personal growth and in this case, her literary skill. Carr writes of her first experience of Dilworth’s editorial manner in Growing Pains: ‘he corrected as we read . . . but he made me feel such things [punctuation and paragraphing] were subservient and of secondary importance to the spirit of the text’; and of the long-term relationship she declares: ‘My Editor never altered my wording arbitrarily . . . Sometimes he made suggestions, but he made me re-word the thought myself. He was a million times younger, a million times cleverer than I but he never made me feel an old fool, or finished, or stupid, or ignorant.’19 As a professor of English Literature, a musician, and a man described as ‘at once gay and serious, warm and sensitive’, Dilworth possessed the personal and professional qualities that enabled him to navigate the highs and lows of Carr’s creative temperament.20 He worked skilfully to improve the quality of her writing whilst preserving its idiosyncrasy of vision and style, for here lay the pungency of its truth and its reader appeal. Returning a revised manuscript of The Book of Small to Dilworth, Carr writes: I don’t know enough to know often good from bad parts The ones you praise I always find are ones where I have let myself go ‘til the thing has become a greater reality than myself After that one tries to tidy the phrases & words Why did I hurry to be born so soon? Why didn’t I manage it so that I happened along at a time when Professor Dilworth was teaching high s. in Victoria & had some literature cracked through my skull by a ruler of the back of a book or whatever his method was. Well I didn’t It’s no good weeping over spilled literature, so I’ll

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be thankful very thankful that I found him in time to guide the tail of my literary struggle.21

The extant body of correspondence between author and editor about writing is very personal and often erotic. For both Carr and Dilworth, writing was an expression and a gift of self. Early formality takes little time to slip into comfortable familiarity, and later, not so comfortable intimacy for the reader cum voyeur. With the publication of Klee Wyck just before the Christmas of 1941, sales are very healthy, and Ira writes to Emily with delight: ‘Klee Wyck’ – what a run of prosperity she had! . . . Did you get a copy of her from the Oxford Press – very magnificent, all done up in a grand leather cover. I know this dress is a costly one – but I much prefer her in her ordinary richcoloured house dress, don’t you? This new gown is the sort of starchy outfit people force themselves into for church, weddings, funerals and other often uncomfortable experiences. However you and I have seen her in a great variety of dresses – in fact no dress atall and then we saw a beauty in her heart that no dress will ever be able to destroy.22

The play of metaphor reveals how well Dilworth understood Carr’s dislike of social strictures, behaviour and dress codes; but a reference to ‘no dress atall’, although ostensibly a reference to the long labour and birth of the autobiography in manuscript (pre-binding) form, nevertheless conjures a somewhat uncomfortable image of a naked Emily, or more radically, a ménage à trois – Emily, ‘Small’ and Ira. In later letters to her beloved Eye, Emily is the ‘mouse’ that slips in and out of his waistcoat pocket – intimately close to his heart and person. Ira writes to ‘Dear Small’ in November 1942: Remember . . . other people may buy your books and think they have you but I know better – I know you won’t desert my waistcoat pocket – at least I hope you won’t . . . That manuscript will be one of my real treasures and Emily said I might want to burn it. Will she never learn that we understand and love each other – you (Small) and I?23

In February of the following year, after a period spent convalescing in a Nursing Home, Carr writes to Dilworth: Dear Ira It’s Small – such a happy me at being home . . . I know Emily has a tougher heart than they think. She says to tell you she’ll try & be patient & have courage Ira & to thank you for your dear brave letters & strength that she has leant on & felt so comfortable with. The kind things you said about the Mt. Douglas sketches

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helped her enormously. Thank you for your understanding and your love & prayers for Emily. Always your loving ‘pocketgirl’ Small24

At the time of this correspondence Emily is seventy-two: a woman who has challenged with some success the literary and artistic establishment of her day. She is a woman who has proven she can stand her ground, set it shaking, and remain standing. Yet, there is something very needy and even perverse in the revealed nakedness of her small creature self that hungers for the protection afforded by the combination of imagined father and guardian (and lover). ‘Small’ affords Carr the protection of ‘a man’s waistcoat pocket’ and the persona allows her a measure of freedom of expression otherwise unavailable to her. The persona of ‘Small’ allows Carr to diminish the antagonistic effect of an unacceptable, because unwomanly, Bigness that accords with vulgarity. In her correspondence with her male patron and protector she is charming; she is coy. In January 1943, Carr signs off her letter, ‘Yours lovingly, Emily’ and writes a P.S. ‘How do you like my dress of leather Look almost like a bible don’t I? Small’.25 The pocketgirl/pocketbook26 also allows her a little dubious, even blasphemous sex-play, otherwise also unavailable and even more certainly frowned upon by the social class and religious community of which she was a member, and whose membership she valued despite numerous protestations to the contrary. Carr’s ‘Small’ persona is a deflective device that works through naivete to claim a protective space under the guardianship of male authority and power. This is of course a familiar strategy, familiar to all women who step outside the bounds of allotted feminine space for whom a male champion guarantees a degree of social acceptance; but women have also chosen the company of other women to bolster their confidence. This was either an option that was unavailable to Carr, or one that she was unwilling to create. She was supported by a small group of women who read and offered advice on her writing, but of the women and the advice she was often scathing; and of female artists she knew few. Her isolation was exacerbated by her artistic choice to remove herself from the only artistic group with whom she had affinity – the Group of Seven. Feeling ‘a little depressed again’ after reading Gertrude Stein’s 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Carr compares her isolation to ‘all the artists there in Paris, like all the artists in the East, jogging along, discussing, condemning, adoring, fighting, struggling, enthusing, seeking together, jostling each other’. Where they are supported in their creative endeavour by each other, she is solitary: ‘no shelter,

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exposed to all the “winds” like a lone old tree with no others round to strengthen it against the buffets with no waving branches to help keep time.’27 Ultimately, Carr kept Green time, her paintbrush and her soul dancing to the rhythms of the forest. The ‘waving branches’ with which she kept time were not an image for something else; they were themselves and she akin to them. Yet awareness of her difference and her incapacity as an artist to capture the living force of that Green led her time and again to God: ‘Surely’, she writes, ‘the woods are God’s tabernacle’. On 29 September 1935, Carr makes the last sketch of her ‘[cara]van season’ and thinks of the morning when she will have to say goodbye to ‘these intimate friends, the trees’. She despairs of expressing this ‘helter-skelter magnificence’, this ‘robust grandeur’, this ‘awful force’ that paradoxically ‘holds out gently swaying arms of invitation.’ Claiming ‘there are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life’, Carr recognizes that an artistic struggle that renders her small and inadequate time and time again does so because it arises from her longing to paint ‘God in His wood’s tabernacle’.28 In the last month of 1940 she declares God to be ‘like a great breathing among the trees. In church he was static, a bearded image in petticoats. In the open He had no form; he just was, and filled all the universe.’29 This points to an inherent contradiction, for if God has no form, how can ‘He’ be painted through ‘form’. Even abstract form is problematic. In a sense it was not the woods, or not only the woods, that Carr was painting: painting the woods gave her an avenue through which to express for herself and for others her comprehension of ‘God’. Perhaps this explains the various shifts in style from abstract tree forms (see Figure 12) to wide prospects of sky whose swirling or radiating movement is a kind of energized light.30 They are part of her struggle to find an adequate form or idiom. If we look to Carr’s last productive years of the early 1940s, that struggle to reveal God turns back to the Native Totem Poles of her youth – an upward thrusting that connects forest with sky and human with nonhuman, material with spiritual;31 and then to the dark green heart of ancient cedar forest – a turning inwards to quietness and sanctuary. Barely any light penetrates this dark, and yet the fluid graceful movement of greens and browns that does not strive beyond itself but just is, might represent what T.S. Eliot expresses so beautifully in the last stanza of his last published poem, Little Gidding (1942): We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.32

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Ira writes to his ‘dear Emily’ in October 1943, ‘Remember, my dear, that the great Italian composer of opera, Verdi, did his most original and, in many respects, his most significant work after he was 80 years old.’33 In a set of lectures delivered in the early 1990s at Columbia University, Edward Said argued that the work and thought produced by ‘great artists’ ‘acquires a new idiom’ in the latter stages of their lives.34 In these cases (and it needs to be said that his examples of ‘great artists’ include no women) he makes the claim that the realization of approaching death does not produce works of harmony and resolution; rather, this ‘late style’ is one of ‘intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction’.35 The artist is unreconciled. But intransigence and difficulty are hallmarks of Carr’s career and personality rather than a late turn; and if we look to the late works of the early 1940s like Cedar, Quiet,36 and Cedar Sanctuary(Figure 17), there is a depth of quiet and a softening of rushing movement that seem to express ‘harmony and resolution’. If we compare the 1942 painting Cedar Sanctuary (Figure 17) with Tree Trunk of 1931 (Figure 7), we might read the two paintings of trees as representative of the aging (female) body: the ripe fullness of summer flesh (Tree Trunk) falls back to reveal its skeletal frame (Cedar Sanctuary), as evoked in Wright’s late poem, ‘Moving South’. Published in her penultimate volume, Fourth Quarter, the poem not only reflects upon the prospect of the poet’s move from the lush warmth of the north (Mount Tamborine, Queensland) to the cooler dry of the south (Braidwood, New South Wales), but the simultaneous shift from the summer of life to its wintry endgame. The poet asks: Doesn’t summer half know itself a cheat, conjuring all this green foliage to hide the rocks, the earth that waits to take it back? Beauté de diable its enchanting flesh already beginning to droop like an old breast on ribs of bone.37

Like The Little Pine (Figure 5), Carr’s Cedar Sanctuary might be read from a biographical perspective, might be understood as self-portraiture. This is a portrait of a mature tree that takes full front stage, but perhaps disconcertingly, reveals what lies beneath with no coyness or shame. In a sense it is not only a painting in which the (auto)biographical subject takes centre stage, it is a ‘full

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frontal’. The resplendent green foliage of downward feathered dress is opened – more like flesh under the surgeon’s knife than the titillating flash of a can-can dancer – to lay bare the skeletal structure of a trunk and branch that resembles a somewhat twisted spinal cord and vertebrae. Here Carr is both artist/surgeon and subject/patient. Light penetrates the darkest realms of inner being and lingers softly on the green drapery in which the self is clothed. This is a painterly vision of Wright’s summer of fleshly ‘green foliage’, a painting that, like Wright’s poem, refuses to hide ‘the rocks the earth . . . ribs of bone’ from the artist herself or from the world. This is a painting that achieves, in very personal, female form, the ‘naked soul, pure and unashamed’ that so astounded and motivated Carr on first seeing the work of the Group of Seven. But it has a voyeuristic quality that brazenly celebrates the painter’s eye that dares to lift the skirts of convention and pretension – of others and her own. This is the representation of ‘the undergrowth’ that so intrigued and frustrated Carr throughout her life. Although even as late as the mid-1930s Carr is struck by the difficulty she encounters in giving painterly expression to the truth of life that dwells ‘down under the top greenery’ – ‘untilled, unpampered, bursting forth rude, natural, without apology’; although she feels ‘There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life’, this is what her life’s work achieves.38 But what she achieves is never enough for the artist who would paint God or for the woman who cannot entirely escape the reality of a woman’s smallness in a world dominated by men. Doris Shadbolt remarks that Carr’s late works of the early 1940s ‘do not enlarge on her cumulative vision of nature but restate aspects of it in a mood of lyrical tranquillity’ and that ‘the uncomfortable sense of striving for identification with the forces underlying nature . . . is gone.’39 Yet, when we read Emily’s correspondence with Ira we hear Carr expressing her artistic frustration that she is not there yet; she writes: ‘Emily has not got the cedar rhythm yet nor their particular idiom.’40 Carr keeps striving for the ‘right’ idiom – building on what she knows, getting closer, but that knowing is never entirely satisfactory. ‘Arrival’ is never an end but another beginning. She does not cease from exploration. It is in this way that Carr can be understood to be unreconciled. While she acknowledges an essential intransigence at the heart of her artistic project, she also recognizes the artistic value of the battle for bigness, the battle for Truth. Here lies unresolved contradiction that does not come to light in an appraisal of late style as such, but rather, in the correspondence with the man who afforded her human sanctuary and unshakeable belief in her art. In the letter of her ‘Last Will and Testament’ Emily instructs Ira, if asked ‘Who is Small?’ to reply: ‘Just a

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fun girl belonging to a woman named Emily – her little self – I offered her sanctuary in my waistcoat pocket’.41 Towards the end of 1943, Emily reflects on the nature of their correspondence: ‘As I told your mother in very truth “I love to write to Ira.” It is as though a bubble burst in my heart (the feeler) and released something that wanted to fly to you . . . A letter to be a correspondence must be a spontaneous loving outpour from one to another’.42 We can only imagine that such was the case in the correspondence between Wright and Nugget Coombs, for very few of his letters to her remain. But response ‘that answer[s] love in kind’43 can be detected in Wright’s surviving correspondence, as in this letter to Coombs from New Plymouth, New Zealand, that begins, ‘My dear love, Two letters here from you, a great joy!’ and ends: ‘Yes, with you or without your actual presence, there’s a warmth and focus centring between us, my love, that doesn’t leave me . . . My hands across all these seas (very rough today) and my love and love again. Your J.’44 Although it makes more sense to read seas rather than hands as rough, nevertheless a roughness of hands by association is a reminder of the aging body that houses the quickening heart. Although a reading against the grain, ‘Love and love again’ is also a reminder of the heart that quickens again, despite or perhaps even in response to, age. Here, as in Wright’s penultimate volume of poetry, Fourth Quarter, old and new loves are brought together in acknowledgement of the heart that can love and love again. Love is a bigger truth than grief or death. In the poem, ‘Half Dream’, the poet feels the old boat ‘rock at the lake shore’: ‘Half awake my heart / tested its moorings’ but although turning back to sleep, ‘the regular ripple and slack / fray at the strand.’45 The poem records that half-awake awareness of emotional shift – a gentle pulling at the heart strings, as the volume of poetry itself records change of home, body and heart. The volume Shadow, published in 1970, is many things, but among them is a reflection on the life lived with Jack McKinney, his legacy to Judith as person and poet and to the world, and her struggle to live without him – ‘Love Song in Absence’ begins: ‘I sighed for a world left desolate without you, / all certainty, passion and peace withdrawn’.46 But with that sigh comes knowledge: . . . as I sighed, I knew: incomprehensible energy creates us and destroys, all words are made in the long shadow of eternity. Their meanings alter even as the thing is said.

A love poem ‘in absence’ becomes a philosophical reflection on life, but more importantly to a poet, on words and the slipperiness of meaning. The poet’s

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tools are words – the magic words, of shape-shifting, necessary to the revelation of Truth. ‘The Vision’ concludes with a touch, not of goodbye but of acknowledgement of the rightness of McKinney’s love and ‘a kind of promise’ to carry on the search for Truth, knowing Truth to be elusive but nevertheless sure that the search for Truth is the only search of value to humankind. Wright concludes that: . . . I am only I, as I was you; but you were man, and man is more than man – is central to the maze where all’s made new. That was the end of the path had led you to, the turning search that ends where it began yet grows beyond itself into the vision . . .47

The words are again, like Carr’s painting, reminiscent of Eliot’s journey’s end in ‘Little Gidding’. Exploration does not, should not, cease. ‘The end’ is a beginning: ‘to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’. After McKinney’s death, Wright became increasingly involved in Aboriginal and environmental activism. This very public political work brought her into frequent contact with the prominent and enormously influential government administrator H.C. (‘Nugget’) Coombs. Trained as an economist, Herbert Cole Coombs was appointed Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction in 1943. He became Governor of the Commonwealth Bank in 1949 and, on its foundation in 1960, first Governor of the Reserve Bank – a position he held until 1968. Coombs was also involved in the establishment of the Australian National University, was a member of the University Council from 1946–1968 and Chancellor from 1968–1976. Most significantly in terms of his professional relationship with Wright, he was Chairman of the Council for the Arts and the Council for Aboriginal Affairs from 1967–1976 and founder with Wright of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee. Initially meeting in the 1960s, it was not until 1972 that Wright introduced Nugget to her daughter as ‘the new love in her life’ – a relationship which lasted for the next twenty-five years until Coombs’ death in 1997, but which was not made public until 2009.48 Coombs had long been estranged from his wife, but loyalty to her and his children meant he did not wish to put them through a divorce. The correspondence between Coombs and Wright was placed in the Australian National Library but embargoed until three years after both they and Coombs’ wife, Mary, were dead. Two accounts of the relationship have now been published by Fiona Capp – one in an article in The Monthly in 2009 and the other in her book My Blood’s Country in 2010. She

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comments that ‘the relationship remained one of the best-kept open secrets in Australian literary history’ and writes that: According to Wright’s daughter, Meredith McKinney, Wright was even more determined than Coombs to keep the relationship secret. She’d been in a similar position with her late husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, when they first met and she still carried guilt about the pain she felt she’d caused his family.49

Wright’s fame as a writer and activist must have made it difficult to keep the relationship secret, especially with a lover who was himself a high-profile figure. Another reason for secrecy was her concern about surveillance by government agencies like ASIO and some of the big resource companies opposed to her environmental activism. Capp notes how, in her public writing, ‘Judith spoke of Nugget as a valued and respected colleague . . . always careful to keep her tone detached and professional’, but Nugget ‘did not feel quite so constrained. In his book Aboriginal Autonomy . . . he warmly acknowledged his fruitful thirty-year partnership with Judith’, remarking ‘it is difficult for me to identify much which was not, to a greater or lesser degree, the product of that partnership.’50 In 1975 Wright’s move from ‘Calanthe’ to ‘Edge’, put her within relatively easy access to Canberra where Coombs was living, but by the late eighties Coombs began to spend half the year in the Northern Territory, continuing his work among Aboriginal communities. These separations meant that he and Wright corresponded frequently, but Wright’s fear of surveillance led her to burn most of his letters (although he preserved hers). She writes in explanation: Well, my love, . . . it is a dreadful thing to have done but I see no alternative after weeks of thinking. Simply, there is nowhere they couldn’t be found and probably nowhere that somebody wouldn’t suffer for it . . . Forgive me for the holocaust of such a beautiful record . . . of years of love and work. Those letters were a joy to get, a personal window on your work . . . Whatever we’ve lost, it isn’t possible to lose the story-line now, and we’ve worked together long enough to be remembered for that.51

The one-sided nature of the record makes it difficult to see the full picture of their relationship, but what can be gleaned is a sense of an intimate entanglement of their love and their sometimes separate, sometimes co-operative, work. Writing to Coombs from ‘Calanthe’ in May 1975, Wright remarks that her upcoming sixtieth birthday party ‘will be an occasion for me to announce it’s time I stopped doing so much and got back to my proper business . . . it’s not

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exactly conducive to verse, this being an activist’ and concludes, ‘This place will be hard to leave.’ A handwritten addition to the bottom of the letter assures her love that she thinks of him, and wishes they could be together more, but that this lack of time together is ‘one of the conditions we can’t help.’52 ‘After the Visitors’, a poem included in the collection Fourth Quarter that Wright describes in interview with Heather Rusden as ‘not altogether satisfactory’,53 appears to refer to the birthday party, although it might be any convivial gathering in which a public face is assumed: ‘All day I have lived in front of myself, my house / a hollow box of talk’.54 As the guests begin to leave, the poet speaks of a return ‘to myself ’, of ‘going back to my proper house, / my private face.’ The crossing glances, and crossed purposes of the mêlée that feature in the first stanza become more personal in the third, where lovers are caught in the ‘slant and balance to and away’ of a dance reminiscent of the ‘lobster quadrille’ from Alice in Wonderland: ‘Yes yes, of course I love you, I think I love you, / I think we agree, no we do not agree, / I do not believe you, yes darling I believe you –’Although in interview in March 1988, Wright does not mention Coombs, she refers to the poem as autobiographical, glossing it as a description of how she felt about ‘all this rushing off to conferences, and on political missions and so forth.’55 But it is more than this. The poem, also described by Wright as ‘not a terribly good poem’56 (perhaps a deflection from the very personal nature of the subject matter) gives expression to the artist’s need to be apart, to turn inwards: But now you are gone I shake you off and return no longer needing to question or reply. House settles. Walls calm. Air cools. I put away glasses, adjust the house to my shape and turn to my work. Is it you again, alone? We are old companions, self. We can go on, sometimes in love, sometimes lonely with the old pang, the old delight

Love is important but the ‘proper business’ of art – of ‘work’ – is more important. The phrase, ‘and turn to my work’ is reminiscent of Aurora Leigh’s impassioned response to Romney’s proposal of marriage and criticism of the female poet in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘poem novel’, Aurora Leigh. Here the heroine declares: ‘I too, have my vocation, – work to do . . . Most serious work, most necessary work, / As any economists’.57 But while Jack and Judith shared not only a bed and a child, but a love of things literary and philosophical, Nugget was not a literary man (although Capp notes that he found Judith’s poetry ‘very

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moving’)58, nor a particularly philosophical one. Nevertheless, their partnership, like Wright’s partnership with McKinney, was both personal and professional. Wright and Coombs shared a belief in the importance of the arts to compassionate human society on earth, and an awareness of the increasing problems to human society and the planet of rampant industrial capitalism. In addition, they shared a determined will to right the wrongs done to indigenous peoples by the violence and perpetuated injustice of Australian colonization. In response to a letter from her ‘dear Coombs’, Judith writes: Certainly those last 25 years have been disastrous, but I don’t think any revising of the public service could have helped. The times just were like that – the rush of affluence, the forgetting of all the fine words about a New Order after the war, in favour of the two-car, all-electric household and the keeping ahead of the Jones; and that in turn of course came out of the technological madness (not that I want to do away with all the machines, just to put them in perspective.) . . . But attitudes do change & are changing in some areas at least. The trouble is that the momentum of the old attitudes is so strong . . . We’ve denied so many of the real powers & capacities of humanity, tied people to such a monstrous view of what life’s about, that a reappraisal in depth is very much to be welcomed . . . The trouble is too that things are so large & complex now and move so fast that they are more & more difficult to understand and control. Well, if you like to talk to me I obviously [. . . unreadable] like to talk to you too! ... I love you – J.59

This talk however, was not talk about poetry nor even of language. This talk was about social change that required a public voice, a public face, a public body; and increasingly, Wright found herself called upon to take up the causes about which she felt passionate in a way that not so much precluded poetry as had the effect of stopping the poetic well-spring. This was a question of available time, available quiet, available sanctuary. Although ‘Edge’ provided Wright with the room of her own deemed by Woolf to be so important to the woman writer, she either didn’t have the time or the state of mind to put it to poetic use. ‘Edge’ might have provided a sanctuary for the lovers that for Coombs gave ‘balm to my troubled spirit and a joy to my body and mind’,60 but increasingly for Wright the business of public life was displacing the business of Art. As Wright came to recognize how difficult the task was to turn the world from its catastrophic trajectory, poetry became more elusive, more fugitive. The poem that follows ‘After the Visitors’ begins, ‘How shall I remember the formula for poetry?’ and

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ends with an image of pollution – plastic bags, broken beer bottles and effluent from a pig-farm that ‘blur an old radiance’.61 In August 1984, a year prior to the publication of Wright’s last volume of new poetry, Phantom Dwelling, she explains to fellow poet and friend, Jack Blight: I’m not publishing any poetry to speak of – not until we have the xerographical rights established – I’m sick to death of being stereotyped in school syllabi and photocopied until the book’s worn out. After that, who knows – I have about a book of various verses organised. But the prose seems a necessity . . . I’m a slave as usual to Causes and don’t really want to escape.62

Earlier, in the 1975 ‘Foreword’ to a collection of prose pieces brought together under the title, Because I was Invited, Wright had stated that, ‘Our times have not been kind to poetry’63 and questioned whether poetry could still be seen as ‘a valid form of communication’, whether it could still ‘bear the burden of interpreting a world that had become so complicated’.64 She affirms that it is, by continuing to write and publish poetry for the next ten years. ‘Moving South’, one of the last poems of Fourth Quarter, not only charts the autumnal shift into the winter of old age, but importantly, it also records Wright’s consideration of a shift in poetic mood and form: a luxuriance of summer growth – the artistic and personal blossoming of life with Jack in Queensland will be replaced with something sparer: Where I’m going you will be more succinct; just time for a hurried embroidery of bud, leaf, flower, seed before the snow-winds snip you to a root’s endurance.65

This is an apt description of the poetry of Phantom Dwelling in which poetic forms new to Wright’s oeuvre – haiku and ghazal – resemble a kind of delicate, sometimes stark, tracery.66 Phantom Dwelling is in part a public tribute of the ‘open secret’ kind to the other ‘half a lifetime’ of Wright’s years with Coombs and the landscape of their love – when her lover is present (Braidwood, Canberra, and Edge) and absent (New Zealand). This declaration of love is also, necessarily, a delicate tracery – seen by those with knowledge, hidden to those without. Phantom Dwelling begins with ‘Four Poems from New Zealand’67 in the last of which, ‘The Beach at Hokitika’, Wright chooses a gift for her beloved from whom she has been absent: Here in the chant of sea-edge, grind of shingle, I choose one stone,

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... I take you this for love, for being alone; for being, itself. Being that’s ground by glaciers, sea and time. Out of the sea’s teeth I chose it for you, for another country, loving you, loving another country.68

Although the poem does not name names, Wright’s letters to Coombs over this period of a six-week absence from Australia suggest Coombs is the distant beloved, waiting ‘alone’ in ‘another country’. In this poem the beloved is person and country – they are intimately entwined, they intermingle, like ‘the very last flower of the autumn’ and ‘the wind-worn bee’ in the poem, ‘Late Meeting’: They meet, they mingle, tossed by the chilly air in the old ecstasy, ... as though from this late take-and-give some seed might set.69

‘Late Meeting’ is one of eleven poems in the second section of Phantom Dwelling that concludes with ‘Rainforest’. Here the ‘ages long’ croak of the treefrog now threatened with the silence of extinction creates a philosophical and poetic bridge of joy and fear, life and death, nature and culture, between Tamborine (and Jack) and ‘Edge’ (and Coombs). The poems included in ‘Notes at Edge’ take the form of brief verbal sketches, similar to those penned or painted by visual artists – visual ideas that will be given fuller, more complete form in the studio over the weeks, months or years to come. But for Wright, these ‘notes’ are complete in themselves. They are emblematic of the transitory nature of life at ‘Edge’ and ‘on the edge’ – the edge of Wright’s time on the earth, and the edge of a human and environmental catastrophe, although this concern is less in evidence in these poems than elsewhere in her poetic oeuvre. These ‘notes’ capture the ephemeral nature of experience and our memory of experience. They are a poetic trace like the delicate embroidery of moss and lichen on the ancient forest floor.70 In ‘Brevity’, the opening poem of the set, Wright explains her shift in poetic style: Old Rhythm, old Metre these days I don’t draw very deep breaths. There isn’t

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much left to say. ... I used to love Keats, Blake. Now I try haiku for its honed brevities, its inclusive silences. Issa. Shiki, Buson. Bashō.71

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is probably the most popular Japanese haiku poet in the English-speaking world, in main due to the translations of his ‘travel sketches’ that combined poetry and prose in the form known as haibun of which Oku No Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the most well-known in English; and his short prose piece, Genjūan no ki or Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling.72 In her opening address to the 1985 annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Wright began with Bashō’s advice to poets: ‘Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo . . . Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object become one’;73 and in a letter to Stephen Murray-Smith in June 1986 she thanks him for ‘the nice words about Phantom Dwelling’ and notes that Meredith has ‘found Basho’s original site of the Phantom Dwelling near Kyoto, now kept up as a meeting place by haiku poets with a little hut and all’, ending on a note of wistful envy, ‘Japanese are a poetic lot still.’74 Importantly, it is Bashō with whom Wright’s autumnal theme and tone is closely associated: ‘Farewell, my old fan,’ writes Bashō in the late stages of his travels on the Narrow Road, ‘Having scribbled on it, / What could I do but tear it / At the end of the summer.’75 Lonelier I thought Than the Suma beach – The closing of autumn On the sea before me.76

Politically, Wright was more engaged than ever in her beloved causes, but poetically, this move south might be understood in the same light as Bashō’s travels on the ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’. It was a poetic move away from the social world and deeper inward,77 a ‘wry relinquishing of self ’ that paradoxically, in Brigid Rooney’s words, ‘opens it to the world’.78 It is a move towards a succinctness of poetic form, a sparseness of emotion, a sharpening of the senses, an appreciation of life in and of the moment, in the knowledge of human life on earth as a Phantom Dwelling.

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All life is ephemeral, transient, the acknowledgement of which brings an appreciation of the fragile beauty of the earth that is nevertheless tenacious. Here the ‘steam-scented gardenias’ of a Tamborine garden are replaced by the ‘delicate crushable tundra’ of ‘Edge’. Here in these field notes from autumn days that sliver into winter, the vivid colours of summer parrot and wattle are replaced by the quieter colours of rust, olive and white-grey. The living world is recorded in its fleeting moment of fragile beauty – the image passes across the retina and is gone, but the poet is bent on capturing the moment – the flash of brilliant colour that gives the lie to first impressions. The humble stick insect or caddis fly are worthy of note. The poet looks and looks again – contemplating the world with the loving attention it deserves; and yet ‘Notes’ suggest an impression rather than something filled-in, filled-out, elaborated and elaborate. This is the poetry of suggestion rather than a pronouncement or statement. There is a humility here that echoes Bashō: In the utter silence Of a temple, A cicada’s voice alone Penetrates the rocks.79

Wright’s poems come to resemble the haiga of Buson and Shiro.80 As she ‘explains’ in the poem ‘Rockface’: ‘I’ve no wish to chisel things into new shapes,’ for ‘The remnant of a mountain has its own meaning.’81 ‘Rockface’ is a ghazal – the poetic form featured in the last section of Phantom Dwelling, ‘The Shadow of Fire’. Here, although ‘two dragonflies dance on the narrowed water’82 they are the only two – perhaps implying the romantic idyll of lovers entire unto themselves but also suggestive of a natural world under threat: ‘the frogs aren’t speaking’ for ‘their swamps are dry’ and ‘The river’s noise in the stones is a sunken song’.83 Although the poem ‘Memory’ retains a sense of hope in the frogs’ eggs where ‘memory [of life] lasts’, this poetic landscape might also reflect the diminished life of the aging poet for whom ‘Fallen leaves on the current scarcely move’.84 But, the stimulus of new form (a kind of old wine in new bottles) vitalizes poet and word: ‘the azure kingfisher flashes upriver still.’85 Like haiku, the ghazal was a new poetic form for Wright that replaced ‘Old Rhythm, old Metre’ – one which might also serve a sense of ending given its enclosed couplets. The ghazal entered English-language poetry primarily through translations of the fourteenth-century Persian poet, Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muhammad, ̣ who is better known by his pen-name, Hafiz. Of the approximately six hundred poems attributed to him, most are ghazals. There is much debate on the origin of the ghazal – some scholars assigning it to an ancient Persian

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tradition of court songs or of love songs performed by minstrels. Aptly, given the relationship between Wright and Coombs to which this volume speaks silently, ghazal in Farsi translates as ‘a conversation between lovers’. The other suggested root/route is ancient Arabic, the ghazal being traced to the quasida – a praise song, or panegyric, of fifteen to sometimes over one hundred couplets. In Arabic ghazal is derived from the root gazl, meaning to spin, thread or twist, and indeed, the form of a ghazal is circular or spiral in nature. This is also fitting, given the circular nature of Wright’s poetic return to formative influences in this volume,86 and the sense of an end that is also always a beginning to which Wright refers in ‘The Vision’. But whether of Persian or Arabic origin, all scholars are agreed that the ghazal achieved the form and style as we know it today through the work of Hafiz and the poets of Shiraz during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the ghazal, the poet sings praises of his beloved; he yearns for his love to be returned, but is always kept at a distance. The human and Divine are united through a mystic tradition: ‘The beloved becomes the Divine Lover; separation from Him, in its various degrees, is the Dark Night of the Soul, union with Him the mystic’s ecstatic absorption in the Absolute.’87 In addition, the poet sings both of and within a landscape of natural beauty that is allied with the beauty of the human beloved and the spiritual beauty of the divine Beloved. The ghazal is ‘signed’ in the concluding couplet where the poet refers to him/herself in third person, for example: You are not moved, witnessing Hafiz’ tears? I cannot understand that heart, harder than stone.88

This authorial naming would appear to operate as a signature in an oral tradition; but it also allows for self-reflection or commentary on the preceding material and direct address to the audience; a poet might revise his/her view, offer another perspective or signal irony; or overtly include him/herself in what might appear to have been directed only towards others.89 In the ghazal, ‘Dust’, Wright does not name herself in the final couplet, but rather Bashō: ‘We all live, said Bashō, in a phantom dwelling.’90 In ‘Winter’, she names Hafiz: ‘Let’s drink to that point – like Hafiz.’91 This appears most obviously, to pay homage to poet masters whose chosen form she puts to her own uses; but it might also assert the recognition of an intimate, even indivisible, relationship between the living poet and her poetic progenitors. In this, Wright again calls T.S. Eliot to mind, in particular his essay on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in which he claims that, ‘not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their

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immortality most vigorously . . . No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.’92 To call up Eliot in relation to a poetry of late style, is also to again call up ‘Little Gidding’: Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended. ... Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph.93

Wright speaks of her admiration of and indebtedness to Eliot, and Four Quartets in particular, in the 1980s interviews with Heather Rusden, remarking: ‘Eliot is still, to me, one of the best poets of the twentieth century, and still highly relevant at times to me.’ She specifically mentions Four Quartets, observing that: It is in itself a major mandala and the mandala is meant for meditation. I can go back to other things, other mandalas for meditation, but Four Quartets is a very centring poem for me. It’s a major poem in other words. I would have liked to have been able to have written something like that.94

In Wright’s late work Wests meets Easts; moderns meets ancients; old worlds meet new. We see a truly antipodean sensibility that creates new forms to fit and enable new ways of seeing and new modes of being whose contemporaneity can only make sense in relation to origins, ends in relation to beginnings. The ghazals that comprise the last section of Phantom Dwelling stray far from the ghazal as ‘perfected’ by Hafiz in thirteenth-century Persia. Wright’s ghazals do not follow any stricture of rhyme, refrain, scansion or metre; the poet does not refer to herself in the final couplet; and perhaps most importantly, they do not appear to be about unrequited love or the desire of the lover for the beloved, lower or upper case ‘b’.95 But although Wright’s ghazals might seem to stray a long way from their original form, they are true to the nature of the poetic form as shaped by personal and antipodean contexts. The writer of ghazals may not, need not, write with his or her personal beloved in mind – the beloved might be imagined or the poet might act as a surrogate lover for a friend or patron – nevertheless, the absence of the beloved in Wright’s ghazals makes personal and poetic sense when we recall that she composed and published the poems during the years of relationship with Coombs about which silence in public was maintained. We might then read the absence of the beloved in the ghazals

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as signalling a presence that cannot be spoken but might be discerned by those familiar with the conventions of the form and who know of the lovers’ relationship. This choice of form might have enabled Wright to make a poetic declaration of love and loss, of absence and desired presence that could otherwise not be spoken or acknowledged. The reference to the unnamed aging other in ‘Winter’ for example – Old age and winter are said to have much in common. Let’s pile more wood on the fire and drink red wine. ... The paths that energy takes on its way to exhaustion are not to be forecast. These pathways, you and me, followed unguessable routes96 – could be read as a reference to Coombs.

In addition, if we consider the impetus or central concern of Wright’s work in general and this collection of poems in particular, it might be identified as the desire for belonging to the Beloved – the Beloved being the Natural world in which the poet lived but with which she could not achieve the loss of self required of complete union.97 This is a religious/spiritual or existential problem, but it is also, in the case of the daughter of the Australian squattocracy, a postcolonial problem. In the poem, ‘At Cooloolah’, the poet identifies herself as a stranger: The blue crane fishing in Cooloolah’s twilight has fished there longer than our centuries. He is the certain heir of lake and evening, and he will wear their colour till he dies, but I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people. I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake, being unloved by all my eyes delight in98

The poet’s love is an unrequited love: she is the lover who stands at the gate requesting admittance to the Beloved’s chamber, but is refused entry. It is not the Beloved but her own unworthiness that keeps her from all she desires: White shores of sand, plumed reed and paperbark, clear heavenly levels frequented by crane and swan – I know that we are justified only by love, but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.

Wright’s ghazals recognize the essential oneness of all things – the All in All – at the same time that they too, necessarily, still speak the recognition of separateness

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of the Human from the Natural. In ‘Connections’ she observes the flowering whitebeard heath whose scent attracts moths from vast distances and concludes: I can smell the whitebeard heath when it’s under my nose, and that should be enough for someone who isn’t a moth; but who wants to be a mere onlooker? . . . . . . the cream-coloured moths vibrate their woollen wings wholly at home in the clusters of whitebeard heath.99

The Culture/Nature divide cannot be bridged because the poet’s love is sullied by guilt, and, from a Western philosophic tradition, because being human, the poet’s consciousness sits outside looking in. Even the poet’s language works to estrange her from the natural world of lizard, spider, wombat and kookaburra: ‘I try to see without words / as they do. But I live through a web of language.’100 It is only in death that the desired consummation will be achieved. The season of this endgame is ‘Winter’: Today’s white fog won’t lift above the tree-tops. . . . But all of us end at the same point, like the wood on the fire, the wine in the belly. Let’s drink to that point – like Hafiz.101

Phantom Dwelling is an endgame that for Wright signals acknowledgement of the influence of a poetic and philosophical well-spring fed as much by Eastern as Western streams: John Keats and T.S. Eliot; Bashō and Hafiz. It represents a return to the beginning (of Wright’s interest in Eastern aesthetics and the European modernists) that fulfils the promise made to McKinney in ‘The Vision’ – to pursue the Truth beyond a perceived end into the ‘central maze where all’s made new.’ In this sense then, Phantom Dwelling is a tribute to both loves, and in this sense it is recalcitrant in the mode of Said’s ‘late style’ because it both signals and refuses ‘the end’. For Wright as for Carr, Love is not singular nor is it an end point, and Art is the promise of Life – always becoming. In the last years of her life Carr muses: It seems to me that a large part of painting is longing, a fluid movement ahead, a pouring forward towards the unknown . . . A picture is just an on-the-way thing, not something caught and static, something frozen in its tracks, but a joyous going, towards what? We don’t know. Music is full of longing and movement. Painting should be the same.102

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Conclusion: The Dream is the Truth

The opening image of Wright’s poem, ‘For M.R., in Return’,1 is one of native Australian water lilies (nymphea gigantia) which bloom throughout summer. As they ‘push up arrowhead after arrowhead / burst into smoke-blue, hit the central gold, / and then retract themselves into bulb and mud’, the lilies serve as a symbol of the natural cycle of birth, life and death; while the poem speaks of and enacts the aesthetic relationship between the everyday and the symbolic. The poem is a response to a letter received from Martin Robertson, a fellow poet with whom Wright corresponded on an almost monthly basis for twenty-five years. Their letters to each other recorded the writers’ daily round of ‘joys, griefs, happenings, / family gossip’ that correspond in turn to the summer density of ‘crowding leaves’ from which the water lily buds emerge. The open flowers – ‘a centring blaze in the field’ – are equated with poems which, though rooted in and nourished by the ordinariness of everyday life, achieve a permanence that both transcends and preserves it, however harsh the preservatives: All that is personal, said Yeats, soon rots unless packed in ice and salt.2

Wright’s allusion here is to an essay exalting the poet’s role and expressing Yeats’ longing to connect linguistically with an Irish past, while lamenting his inability to do so: ‘Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue’.3 Wright herself experiences a similar predicament, dissatisfied with a cultural and linguistic heritage she considers inadequate to express the land she lives in even though it is her indispensable resource for creating poetry: I battle that heritage for room in another country, want to speak some quite new dialect, never can; it grows from my roots, it is my foliage. Any time I flower, it’s in the English language.4 185

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The poem comes full circle, ending, as it began, with an image of the water lily sprung from ‘the crowding leaves’, flowering into a poem prompted by her correspondent’s news of everyday doings, and reaching a triumphant conclusion: ‘the arrow sprung to the target, / the shaft trembling in the central gold.’ Carr also uses the motif of circularity in her painting Among the Firs (c. 1931) portraying a joyful, harmonious grouping of trees around a forest clearing, though the image does not directly correspond to the process of artistic creation in the same way as Wright’s water lilies (Figure 18). Four large trees dominate the foreground as light shines down on them emphasizing the warm reds and browns of their trunks, especially the two on the left. Rich green foliage drapes across the top of the painting like a curtain, with a swathe of dark blue foliage immediately below weaving through the tree trunks as if binding them together. Highlighted in places by light descending from above, this indigo foliage conveys a sense of abandon. The viewer’s eye is directed towards a central opening edged by many slender trunks in the more distant background apparently completing a circle of which the large foregrounded trees form part. Circularity is further emphasized as the forest floor reflects light coming from above in a swirling movement that seems to gather all the trees in relation to one another as they appear to dance together. As in so many of Carr’s forest paintings, the trees assume a very feminine aspect with slender sinuous trunks and swathes of foliage resembling abundant, flowing locks of hair. The cyclical nature of the life force and woman’s place at its centre is integral to the art of Carr and Wright – an art that triumphs over despair. ‘In this last of meeting places’ in T.S. Eliot’s poem of 1925, The Hollow Men, the poet envisages a bleak gathering at the end of the world where humankind is sightless and voiceless. This ‘twilight kingdom’ is the only hope of ‘empty men’; but it is also the hope ‘only of empty men’.5 This is a world in which ‘The Shadow’ falls between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, between the conception and the creation.6 But we are women, and our story is one of promise, potential and accomplishment. Some ten years after Eliot published The Hollow Men, Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God. She begins her novel of a woman’s arduous journey to self-realized vision and voice with these words: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

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Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.7

The life and art of Emily Carr and Judith Wright are testament to this belief in women’s determination and agency. For them the dream was the truth and they acted accordingly. The ‘problem’ of being a woman spurred them on rather than deterred them. Of course the energy required to surmount gender specific difficulties comes at a cost, most often having a detrimental impact on emotional, psychological and physical well-being. In the later stages of their lives both women found it difficult to summon the energy required to pursue their artistic calling: Carr turned from painting to memoir and Wright from poetry to essay. But they were indefatigable in the pursuit of Truth, regardless of the form it took. The final story of Growing Pains, ‘Wild Geese’, is a story about aging that connects child to woman, the hopeful determination of the young artist to the tenacity of the dream in the aged woman who might be ‘grounded’ but still lifts her face to the sky.8 At seventy years of age Carr sits sketching in a clearing that has been ‘given over to second growth – baby pines, spruce, hemlock, cedar and creeping vines, fireweed, bracken’. ‘Second growth’ is a reference to the new growth of a forest that has been logged, or as Carr describes it, ‘maimed’; a metaphor of her own suffering; and an allusion to story-writing that has given her a new creative outlet. As she sits in the clearing – ‘planted’ in ‘a thick lonely place just off the high road’ – Carr thrills at the sound of the wild geese flying overhead, ‘far far above man’s highest shooting’. She remarks that, ‘On the ground the wild goose is a shy, quiet fellow. In the sky he is noisy and bold.’9 Carr describes the single cloud in a clear sky and the leader who dives into it, followed by his company, to emerge on the other side in a ‘glad rush’. Although the gender of the leading goose is male, Carr herself might be read into the ambition of youthful leadership that meets the particular challenge of the female artist by flying so high she cannot be shot down by the hunters. But the story also considers the fate of the old goose who cannot ‘rise and go with the flock’. She asks, ‘Did despair tear his heart?’ and answers, ‘No’: the animal goose is ‘quietly accepting’ while Carr, the aged human goose, continues to dream and act accordingly.10 Like Mother Goose, Carr continues to fly high and far in the story world she creates. In a diary entry recorded seven years earlier, the aging Carr rejoices in the opportunity The Elephant gives her to work in and with nature. Here in the spring forest she is part of an earthly rejoicing, but also sufficiently apart to pay

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the kind of careful attention to the material world required of spiritual connectedness and artistic creation: March 26th [1934] Heavy today. Such a weight upon me. Weather grand – several hours’ good rain, and the earth, flowers, birds whooping it up and rejoicing in mellow deliciousness. I did a fair sketch this morning, too. Am working intensively this week. I make a sketch one quarter size, loose-knit and superficial but observed, bring it home and make a full-sheet one (oil on paper). I try to take it further than the small one and express all I know of that particular theme and the purpose of the sketch to wake and enter the place of it. What I am struggling most for is movement and expanse – liveness.11

The weight Carr feels is not only the weight of desire and sense of responsibility that she feels as an artist, but also the weight of small-town colonial values. Carr’s struggle to express the ‘movement and expanse’ – the ‘liveness’ – of her internal and external world in her writing and painting was a monumental undertaking, in part because it put her at odds with received ‘ways of seeing’ God, Nature, Art and Woman.12 But although Carr often represents herself as small in relation to the greatness of the task she has set herself and the enormity of her artistic and spiritual aspiration, the reader/viewer is encouraged to understand that smallness as big. Think back to our autobiographical reading of Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky discussed in the first chapter (see Figure 4). The spindly tree that stands isolated in the foreground – saved where her apparently more worthy brethren have been cut down – might be unfit for the prosaic uses of human society, but she is ‘saved’ for God or what might be understood to be her artistic calling. The head of green at the top of the slender tree reaches to the heavens in an expanse of radiating light. This is the light of Truth that transforms a painting into Art. Carr is best known for her forest-scapes, but her sea- and sky-scapes might better represent the expansiveness and spirituality of her vision. Though drawn from life in the sense that they are experienced in situ and are of biographical significance, many of these paintings seem less personal than Carr’s tree-scapes: they are less a portrait than a state of being. Although Lagoon at Albert Head (Figure 19) is dated circa 1940 it seems likely to have been sketched if not painted during the years 1934–6 when Carr had her caravan towed to semi-wild areas in close proximity to Victoria (Vancouver Island). ‘Its beach edged with trees and strewn with driftwood’, Albert Head is described by Suzanne MacNeille in a 2017 travel piece for the New York Times as, ‘an understated arc of paradise on this developed shore’.13

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‘In the Caravan at Albert Head’ in mid-June 1935, Carr pens some of her aesthetic ideas so as to ‘clear things up in her mind’ and thereby enable a smooth transition from conception to creation. She writes: I figure that a picture equals a movement in space. Pictures have swerved too much towards design and decoration. These have their place too, in a picture but there must be more. The idea must run through the whole, the story that arrested you and urged the desire to express it, the story that God told you . . . The picture side of the thing is the relationship of the objects to each other in one concerted movement, so that the whole gets up and goes, lifting the looker with it, sky, sea, trees affecting each other.14

A few days later Carr notes that ‘This is a place of high skies, blue and deep and seldom cloudless . . . Everything is eternally on the quiver with wind’, and having set up a comfortable camp she exclaims, ‘Life is lovely. The Simcoe Street house and all its troubles and perplexities are in another place in my mind.’15 Recognizing the difficulty of combating what she worries is the ‘lazy indulgence’ of old age, Carr nevertheless makes time for ‘quiet meditation and pondering over things spiritual’,16 exclaiming: There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to life above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God.17

This need, this desire for oneness and expansiveness in God is realized in the tremendous radiating, pulsating rhythm of sky, mountains, sea and foreshore of Lagoon at Albert Head. The painting is simultaneously movement and stillness, rush and calm. Here Carr achieves tidal flow of air, water and earth in the lift and fall of brush stroke. It is a painting of celestial light – all blue and white and gold. Yet, in early July, reviewing the work of camp, Carr records her dissatisfaction with her Albert Head sketches, calling them ‘rather disappointing’, and offering analysis of the problem: ‘Subject not enough digested. Spirit not enough awake.’18 Perhaps what was required was some Wordsworthian‘recollection in tranquillity’.19 If dating of the painting is correct, the intervening period of some five years resulted in the achievement of the artist’s goal to ‘lift the looker’ with the subject of the painting ‘in one concerted movement’. In the early autumn of 1935, Carr considers the difficult relationship of the material to the spiritual world: How we do try to make God into an image! No conceivable image could permeate through all time, space, movement as spirit, that which is though it is

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not formed or made. We cannot elude matter. It has got to be faced, not run away from. We have got to contact it with our five senses, to grow our way through it. We are not boring down into darkness but through into light.20

Like Carr, Wright acknowledges the intrinsic work of her senses that ‘gather into a meaning / all acts, all presences’;21 and although Wright does not speak of her art in relation to God, she too finds that the mystery of artistic process can only partially be accounted for by the material world. The poem, ‘Five Senses’, from which the volume of 1963 takes its title, imagines the artist, like a lily, gathering the elements together into a whole of truth and beauty that is more than the sum of its parts, and more than the work of the artist herself: and as the lily gathers the elements together, in me this dark and shining, that stillness and that moving ... become a rhythm that dances, a pure design.

The five senses are thread for the weaver – the poet – ‘whose web within me growing / follows beyond my knowing /. . ./ some pattern sprung from nothing – a rhythm that dances / and is not mine’. 22 Even in her last volume of poetry, the nature of the poetic act and its relationship to a larger Truth retain their sense of mystery, remaining a puzzle that refuses resolution but at which Wright continues to work.23 In the poem, ‘Words, Roses, Stars’, the poet deliberates upon the difficult relationship between the symbolic nature of her word art and the sensuous materiality of its source: If I could give a rose to you, and you, it would be language; sight and touch and scent join in that symbol. Yet the word is true, plucked by a path where human vision went.24

The poems of Phantom Dwelling are, like Carr’s late work, deeply philosophical – reflective, meditative. But they too refuse what Carr describes as the tendency to laziness of the aging body and mind: as expressed by Wright, though ‘Fallen leaves on the current scarcely move’, ‘the azure kingfisher flashes upriver still.’25 ‘Every phrase and every sentence’, every brush stroke,‘is an end and a beginning’.26 The poems and paintings of the artists’ old age never cease from exploration.27 Like Virginia Woolf ’s elusive fish of a thought that flashes hither and thither,

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setting up ‘such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still’,28 Carr’s wild bird singing above her head teases her into determined action despite, or even to spite, the exigencies of old age. The bird/fish continues to elude her grasp, but for the elderly Carr it is not the domineering figure of a man (painter or poet, scholar or critic) that sends her little bird into hiding. Rather, she surmises that it is the nature of thought to be elusive and the challenge of art to keep reaching for the unobtainable – for, in the words of Hurston, ‘the dream is the truth’. Carr writes in her journal: There’s words enough, paint and brushes enough, and thoughts enough. The whole difficulty seems to be getting the thoughts clear enough, making them stand still long enough to be fitted with words and paint. They are so elusive, like wild birds singing above your head, twittering close beside you, chortling in front of you, but gone the moment you put out a hand. If you ever do catch hold of a piece of a thought it breaks away leaving the piece in your hand just to aggravate you. If one could only encompass the whole, corral it, enclose it safe, but then maybe it would die and dwindle away because it could not go on growing. I don’t think thoughts could stand still. The fringes of them would always be tangling into something just a little further on and that would draw it out and out. I guess that is just why it is so difficult to catch a complete idea. It’s because everything is always on the move, always expanding.29

Faced with this challenge, Emily Carr and Judith Wright took action and did things accordingly: they painted pictures, they wrote poetry. The search for Truth was their passion; the attempt to grasp it, their Art.

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Epilogue: Thinking Back Through Our Mothers

In the penultimate ‘chapter’ of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf randomly selects a novel ‘from the shelves which hold the books by the living’ – a novel published ‘this very month of October’.1 The novel, Life’s Adventure, is written by ‘Mary Carmichael’ and contains the astounding pronouncement that ‘Chloe liked Olivia’, upon which Woolf reflects at length across the chapter. Although unremarkable to readers of the twenty-first century, Woolf claims this simple declaration of affection between women to be of great moment in the history of literature and a marker of significant social change: ‘Chloe liked Olivia’, I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature . . . Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity. ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together’ I read on . . . Now if Chloe liked Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itself will make their friendship more varied and lasting because it will be less personal; if Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own – but that remains to be proved – then I think that something of great importance has happened.2

That ‘something of great importance has happened’ for us – the writers of this book. Changes to the scope of what a woman ‘might do’3 has enabled us to share a friendship that has been varied and lasting because we have also shared professional interests. So, it seems fitting that we should braid ourselves, our mothers and grandmothers into this feminist biography. This is an epilogue not so much as an addendum or a ‘what happened next’ but rather as a backward look that allows us and our readers to reflect on the process and progress of women in the professions, in particular, women in ‘the Arts’. Anne liked Dorothy; they shared an office in the English Department of a regional university in Australia. They read and wrote and talked about writing by 193

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women, particularly the women of the British colonies – Australia and Canada, but also New Zealand, South Africa, India and the Caribbean. They visited art exhibitions together – particularly those that had something to say about women artists in the colonies. They were prompted to think about a gendered colonial modernity. To them, these women writers and painters of the modernist period were more interesting than the men – more diverse, more enterprising, more adventurous, more idiosyncratic; less visible, less talked about; marginalized but central to new ways of thinking, looking, doing and being in the twentieth century. What if less was more? What could be learnt by thinking about a poet and a painter, an Australian and a Canadian who shared ‘the problem’ of being ambitious female artists in the colonies? Wright and Carr were not women who enjoyed a little dabbling with paint and pen in snatched small moments of respite from the domestic work of home and family. They were women who conceived of themselves as Artists; women who wanted to do something of great moment – something big. They wanted to have an impact on the world. And so the project that brought Judith Wright and Emily Carr together was conceived. This was an act of thinking together as women – women skilled in a profession that demands careful observation and creative expression. The project might be understood as part of what Rachel DuPlessis calls a ‘Female Nexus’.4 It advocates the value to which Australian literary and cultural critic Susan Sheridan attests, of placing women together ‘centrally in a picture that includes their male peers’ and thereby produces ‘fresh configurations’.5 But our case is somewhat different to that considered by Sheridan or DuPlessis in that it does not look at women of a particular generation, or located within a particular place, or engaged in a single artistic endeavour; neither were these women conversant with or even aware of each other’s work. Yet our reflection on the lives and art of these white settler women nevertheless enabled the discovery of ‘patterns of cultural production and reception’ as described by Ann Vickery in the introduction to her study of Australian women poets of the early twentieth century.6 Our collaborative project of reading a female poet and painter together is an act of what DuPlessis calls ‘feminist reception’. In Blue Studios she writes: To maintain feminist (that is, gender-alert) reception is crucial . . . Gender-alert, materialist-inflected reception is interested in the discussion of social location not only of artists but of genres, discourses, images, textualities, ideologies, communities and of critics . . . And [it] can solve the problem of grouping women poets together for whatever reasons – for this is an act of reception.7

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Thinking and writing together as women who could draw upon similar disciplinary training within settler colonial parameters (for better or worse) gave us the common ground upon which to begin our conversation. Our generational difference gave us a breadth of experience and perspective unavailable to single authorship. Our pre-existing friendship encouraged the sensitive resolution of differences. A shared tendency to self-effacement but secure in ourselves and our abilities, it was easy to concede a better point, a better phrase, a better reading. Writing is very personal and ego is necessarily exposed and vulnerable, but we learnt to recognize and value what was best in each other’s writing, and to eschew individual ownership. This was a joint project, a true collaboration that strengthened our friendship. During the years of working together we often spoke of our personal and professional experiences as women. In this book we have talked about the lives and impact of mothers and grandmothers on the art of Wright and Carr; but what of our own mothers and grandmothers? So in bringing this project to a close we have taken this opportunity to acknowledge the women who made us.

My mother, Bessie My mother, Elizabeth Jamieson, known in her family as Bessie, was born in Edinburgh in 1902, the fifth of ten children. The family was very poor, living in a tenement at 9 Robertson Ave, just off the Gorgie Road. I visited the building in the early 1960s and, while built of stone and obviously very substantial, it was in a poor area of town, right next to the McVitie and Price biscuit factory with a railway embankment across the road. I wanted to knock on the door of the third floor flat where mum’s family once lived and ask if I could see inside, but I wasn’t quite game. Many of my mother’s stories described her family poverty. My grandmother had to go out to work even when her children were little. My grandfather, who I think was a milkman, earning thirty shillings a week, died when mum was twelve. During the First World War he ended up working in a factory where cloth was being dyed khaki for military uniforms and the wet steamy conditions were bad for his weak chest and caused his death. This meant mum had to leave school at twelve and cried bitterly about having to do so. Losing the opportunity to learn was a grief I think she never quite got over. She yearned for education. One of her teachers begged my grandmother to let her stay on at school but the family’s economic situation made that impossible.

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Mum’s first job was delivering baskets of fish round Edinburgh. At the age of fifteen she was sent into service down in London to a family where my great aunt was housekeeper. She started as a housemaid in the house of Sir Philip Sassoon (uncle to the poet), and then took a job as scullery maid in the household of the Earl of Dudley. (Ironically, this too had a literary association – not that mum would have known at the time – for this was the noble family to which Philip Sidney once belonged.) After a few years in service (which she hated) Mum wrote to my grandmother to see if she could come back home to Edinburgh and take an apprenticeship in tailoring, eventually completing it to qualify as a tailoress. Her older sister, Cathy, who took more kindly to being in service, ended up as second cook in the household of Lord Jellicoe who had been a Lord of the Admiralty and when appointed Governor General of New Zealand had taken his household staff there with him. Cathy enjoyed life in New Zealand, believing it would offer a much better life for her widowed mother and younger siblings. On her urging, they all emigrated, though my grandmother found it extremely hard to adjust to the new life. But her offspring ended up marrying and settling in their new country, hence my identity as a New Zealander, though of Scots descent. I owe an enormous debt to my mother. She had great quickness of mind, a keen sense of humour and an ability to analyse the character and behaviour of those around her. She could speculate on the motives of other people while also analysing her own, prompting me to do the same. She was eager I should have the education she had been denied, encouraging me at school and at university, even though my results were never quite as good as she felt they ought to have been. She and my father both were keen readers so I grew up with a delight in reading and learning and the enlargement of life this made possible.

Elsie and Elva My mother, Elva, is of Dorothy’s generation, in fact they were born in the same year, so I have also included what I know of my grandmother Elsie’s life as this would equate more closely with Bessie’s lifetime and experiences as women of the antipodean colonies. I remember my grandmother as a very stylish woman – a natty dresser who took enormous care of her appearance, even into her midnineties. She always dressed in the latest fashion, not a wrinkle not a smudge not a hair out of place; beautiful shoes, matching handbag, showy earrings, red lipstick. My grandmother was a very vital, independent woman, proud of her skills –

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whether that be playing the piano, cards or competitive croquet, growing flowers or cake-making – and proud of her compact physique and good health. I’m not sure if she was clever but she was certainly knowing – she knew when and how to play her cards to best advantage. Born in 1891 in the small town of Bundaberg, Queensland, Elsie was one of five children, and the middle sister of three girls. Her father had emigrated from Manchester, England as a young man and, after marrying an Australian-born girl, gained employment as a ‘floor walker’ in the Manchester business of Ipswich (now a city within the Greater Brisbane region). Like Bessie, my grandmother only received a limited primary-school education and for reasons not dissimilar – in times of economic need she was required to help at home. Elsie was charged with the care of her elder sister’s illegitimate child so her sister, Louie, could continue to work as a seamstress. The family avoided shame, and Louie social ostracism, with the pretence that the child was a younger sibling. The pressure to maintain public face must have been particularly strong given Elsie’s father was a Methodist lay preacher; but being the next eldest girl, her mother unwell and her sister working to bring additional income into the family, the responsibility of child rearing ‘naturally’ fell to Elsie. It is not surprising then, that when her charge was old enough to fend for herself, Elsie left home. She might have chosen Brisbane if it was only the city life that attracted her, but she chose Sydney – a city that removed her far from smalltown rural Queensland, probably as far as her limited resources would allow. My grandmother loved music and like so many musicians from poor families the world over, her talents were developed within the church where she taught herself to play the organ. Sydney not only afforded her economic independence (as a shop assistant in a shoe store) and escape from family responsibilities, it also gave her the freedom to enjoy the hedonistic years of jazz age fashion and fun. A single woman in the city, removed from family, could escape the grim conservatism of Australian small-town values. My grandmother not only played the piano or organ for church services, she also played at local dances and for the silent movies. It was here that she met my grandfather – a public servant during the day, a fiddle player at night. Together they worked the town. Unusually for a woman of her generation, but understandable given her early experience of mothering, Elsie did not want to have children and managed successfully to avoid becoming pregnant for the first ten years of marriage. Born when Elsie was forty-two, my mother, Elva, must have been something of a shock. She was the apple of her father’s eye, a precocious child with a surprisingly confident sense of her place in the world, and the very young daughter to whom her mother turned for support when the family was bereft of

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male authority during the years of the Second World War. Successfully passing the scholarship exam at the end of primary school, my mother was placed in a selective girls’ high school where she did well, although not as well as her abilities suggest she could have done. But I recall her telling me how difficult it was to complete her homework when she was expected to join her mother and father in the living room during the evening, listening to the radio together. Elva was a skilled musician whose talents were encouraged by her mother but proved difficult to pursue as a career when a choice had to be made between married life and a family of her own, or the risky, indeed, risqué, life as a singer in the big band era. So my mother became a primary school teacher – one of only a few career options approved by aspirational but conservative middle-class Australian families of her era. With sufficiently good school results, she bravely undertook an interview for a scholarship to study law, but as she explained to me recently, she had no real knowledge of what the law entailed, or what might be expected at interview, and was thus utterly unprepared, and certainly didn’t do herself justice. She would have made a brilliant lawyer. But instead, she chose between typist, nurse and teacher – a teacher being a career she could pursue as a single woman and while married until she fell pregnant, at which point she would be expected to resign. Then she would take up her ‘real career’ as wife and mother to four children. My mother was unusual in that she chose to return to work, her children cared for by a nanny during the working day. This choice was enabled by changes to gender-based rules in the teaching profession; but as she commented, she could only return to work on a non-permanent basis, as a permanent position stipulated you could be sent anywhere in the state – hardly an option that a wife and mother of her era could consider. Elva made a successful career of teaching, although I have never felt it was one that she was either entirely comfortable with or best suited to. If she had been a woman of my generation, she might have made different choices – the kind of choice I could make to pursue my love of English Literature, to complete a PhD and combine the life of an academic with that of wife and mother. My mother did complete a Bachelors and then a Masters degree as a part-time student while she continued to teach and manage a family. She went on to become a teacher librarian and later, a head administrator in the TAFE colleges of higher education. I am enormously proud of the example she set. She is a remarkable woman – a feminist whose engagement in the world is full and vital. What was available to me as a young woman was more than that for my mother or her mother, but there is still a way to go. Finishing top of my honours year in the late 1970s, a male professor from whom I requested advice about the pursuit

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of further studies told me he couldn’t really see why I would bother. Such a course would be of negligible value as a wife and mother (I had married in my second year of university, but was yet to become a mother). I am still shocked; I still feel hurt and angry; but also vindicated. My determination and success can in part be attributed to the model my mother set, successfully managing a career as wife, mother and teacher, enabled in no small part by marriage to my father, a feminist ahead of his time.

Last last word In ‘Generations Lost and Found: Reading Women Writers Together’, Susan Sheridan asserts that: Feminism still has work to do . . . de-naturalising assumptions about gender and power in every sphere of activity and knowledge, and opposing all forms of discrimination based on gender and sexuality. Not to mention its wider responsibility for keeping in sight the intersections of gender with regimes of class, race and colonial power.8

We hope our book has gone some way to further the important work of feminist intervention and vigilance. In 1931 Virginia Woolf brought her talk to a gathering of the National Society for Women’s Service to conclusion with these words: Even when the path is nominally open – when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant [a poet, a painter] – there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties solved.9

So with all our passion and our art we give you this book, our labour shared.

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Notes Acknowledgements 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Bk V, Ll.1786–1798, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 479.

Introduction 1 Judith Wright, ‘Unpacking Books’ [Fourth Quarter], in Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 389. 2 Referred to locally as ‘the Bushman’s Bible’, and in its early years operating proudly under the masthead ‘Australia for the White Man’, The Bulletin was founded by J.F. Archibald and John Haynes in January 1880 as a nationalist response to widespread media genuflection to Mother England and all things British. It published unashamedly Australian, often controversial, material and promoted (predominantly male) Australian writers that included iconic figures like Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Breaker Morant and Norman Lindsay. Although the weekly magazine was produced up to 2008 making it Australia’s longest running magazine publication, it was particularly influential in Australian culture and politics throughout the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. The Heidelberg School refers to a group of nineteenth-century Australian landscape painters who worked together in artists-camps during the 1880s and early 1890s in the Heidelberg area, east of Melbourne. The group is known for its scenes of Australian bush and rural life, consciously nationalist in subject matter and subsequently identified as Australian Impressionism. The original members included Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin. 3 Self-consciously modern and nationalist, and influenced by the symbolists and post-impressionists of the European fin de siècle, the Group of Seven was founded in 1920 in response to what they saw as the conservative nature of Canadian art that had still to escape the constraints of nineteenth-century (European) naturalism. Friendships between the artists were cemented in Toronto between 1911 and 1913. The original members of the group were all male, including Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and F.H. Varley. Although not exclusively landscape painters, they began to identify

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4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Notes

themselves as a Canadian landscape school after their first joint exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in 1920. We have used the word ‘indigenous’ to refer to the peoples who inhabited Canada and Australia before European invasion. The indigenous peoples of Australia are referred to as Aboriginal. Terminology is more complex in relation to Canada: ‘Native’ or ‘Indian’ is used by Carr herself and is in general usage from the nineteenth through to mid-twentieth centuries; otherwise First Nations is the term we have chosen. Wright co-founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1962, a society that is still active. Wright’s and her co-activists’ battle to save the Great Barrier Reef is recorded in Judith Wright, The Coral Battleground (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1977). The record of this battle can be found in Judith Wright, We Call for a Treaty (Collins/ Fontana, 1985). Letter Wright to Pam Bell, 29 March 1989, With Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 443. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Emily Carr, Journal entry for 12 November 1931, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 31. Emily Carr, ‘Vancouver’ in Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 211. Ira Dilworth, ‘Foreword to the 1951 Education Edition’ in Klee Wyck (Toronto/ Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1951/1962), vii, ix. ‘Judith Wright Papers’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 5781, Box 84, Folder 605. Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 148. ‘Judith Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 703. ‘Judith Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 704. Letter Wright to Tom Errey, 3 February 1987, With Love & Fury, 420. Letter Wright to H.C. Coombs, 30 April 1993, ‘H.C.Coombs’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 802, Folder 382 (Correspondence). Max Harris, ‘Judith Wright’, in The Literature of Australia, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 360. Vincent Buckley, ‘The Poetry of Judith Wright’ [1957], in Critical Essays on Judith Wright, ed. A.K. Thomson (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1968), 73. Judith Wright, ‘Transcending Womanliness’, in Poetry and Gender, ed. David Brooks and Brenda Walker (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 70. Carr, 15 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 5.

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22 Carr, 16 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 6. 23 Carr, 18 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 8. 24 From Gazette des Beaux Arts [1860], quoted in Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 40–41. 25 Tamar Garb’s study of the Union (Sisters of the Brush, Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris [New Haven, 1994]) is discussed by Gerta Moray in ‘ “T’Other Emily”: Emily Carr, the Modern Woman Artist and Dilemmas of Gender’, Revue d’art canadienne 26.1–2 (1999) [published 2002], 78–79. 26 Carr, October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 63–4. 27 Quoted in Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987), 221. 28 Carr, October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 63. 29 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (London: Penguin, 2004), 48–9. 30 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 125. 31 Virginia Woolf, diary entry for 24 October 1928, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press/Penguin Books, 1979), III, 20. 32 Emily Carr, The Little Pine, 1931, oil on canvas, 112.0 × 68.8 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.14). 33 ‘The Angel in the House’ is a reference to Coventry Patmore’s enormously popular and influential mid-Victorian poem The Angel in the House [1854], a portrait of ideal female virtues, with which Woolf and her literary sisters who would be professional artists, do battle. (See Woolf ’s essay ‘Professions for Women’, included in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays [1942] [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961]: 201–207.) 34 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 88. 35 Wright, ‘Unpacking Books’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 388–9. 36 Wright, ‘Moving South’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 386–7. 37 Wright, ‘Unpacking Books’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 388–9. 38 Thomas Traherne, 1. of The First Century, Centuries of Meditations in Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 167. (Traherne’s writing appears not to have been published in his lifetime; much of his poetry including the Meditations was discovered in a London bookstall in 1896–7. His notebook is currently held in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.) 39 Carr, 1 December 1936, Hundreds and Thousands, 267. 40 Emily Carr, Sombreness Sunlit, ca. 1937, Royal British Columbia Museum. British Columbia Archives (PDP00633). The date of this painting is unclear, 1937 being an approximate year, although it has also been dated 1938–40. 41 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, V, 1–6 in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 579.

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42 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), 15. 43 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 76.

1 Self-Portraits, Painted and Written 1 Michel de Montaigne, Essais [1580] (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1962), 1. 2 Montaigne, Essays, tr. J.M.Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 23. 3 Louis Marin, ‘Topic and Figures of Enunciation: It is Myself that I Paint’, in Vision and Textuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 197. 4 Melville and Readings, ‘General Introduction’, Vision and Textuality, 8. 5 Melville and Readings, Vision and Textuality, 10. 6 Emily Carr, Journal entry 26 November 1933 in Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 22. 7 Letter Wright to Barbara Blackman, 24 May 1953, in Portrait of a Friendship. The Letters of Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright 1950–2000, ed. Bryony Cosgrove (Melbourne: Meigunyah Press, 2007), 13–14. 8 Nancy Benko, The Art of David Boyd (Adelaide: Lidus, 1973), 1. 9 Wright, ‘The Poem as Art’, in Going On Talking (Springwood: Butterfly, 1992), 18–19. 10 Carr, 31 December 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 330. 11 Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, M.E.: A Portrayal of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1969), 44. 12 Hembroff-Schleicher, M.E., 45. 13 Included in a note by Doreen Walker in Dear Nan. Letters of Emily Carr, Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990), 383. 14 Wright to Dorothy Green, 29 April 1988, in With Love & Fury. Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 431. 15 Wright, ‘Bachelor Uncle’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 192. 16 Wright, ‘Remembering an Aunt’ [The Other Half], Collected Poems, 234–5. 17 Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, ed. Patricia Clarke (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 1. 18 Wright, ‘Wedding Portrait 1913’ [Alive], Collected Poems, 326. 19 The two photographs are reproduced opposite one another between pages 178 and 179 in Veronica Brady, South of My Days. A Biography of Judith Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998).

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20 Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (London: Scarlet Press, 1996), 75. 21 Emily Carr, Alice Carr, 1909, watercolour 44.5 × 34.6cm, private collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver & Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 25. 22 Letter Carr to Nan Cheney, 7 February 1932, Dear Nan, 14. 23 Letter Nan Cheney to Eric Brown, 1 December 1938, Dear Nan, 140. 24 Emily Carr, Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1946), 171. 25 Emily Carr, Clara Russ, 1928, watercolour, ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, British Columbia Archives PR2378, Item PDP00630; William Russ, 1928, watercolour, ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, BC Archives PR2378, Item PDP00595. 26 Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver/Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 83. 27 Marin, ‘Topic and Figures’, 206. 28 Marcia Crosby, ‘Foreword’ in Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters, vi. 29 Carr, The Rum Un and the Oddity, c. 1905, ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, British Columbia Archives, PR2378, Item PDPO9009. 30 Emily Carr, Growing Pains (1946). The self-portrait is inserted between pages 40 and 41. There is no indication of the painting’s provenance, date or dimensions. 31 A privately owned self-portrait in watercolour, dated c. 1899. Reproduced in Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 28. Moray describes it as ‘A youthful and feminine self-image’. 32 Carr, ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’, Growing Pains, 105. 33 Carr, ‘London Tasted’, Growing Pains, 154. 34 The paintings are in the British Columbia Archives, ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, PR2378, Item PDP06 118–127; and the accompanying verse is printed in Charles Hill, Johanne Lemoureux and Ian Thom, Curator eds, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), 310. 35 Lewis DeSoto, Emily Carr (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008), 122–3. The portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, painted in 1638, is held in the Royal Collection in London. 36 Laura Cumming, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (London: Harper Press, 2009), 101. The emblem Pittura from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603) is reproduced in Joanna Woodall, ‘”Every Painter Paints Himself ”: Self-Portraiture and Creativity’ in Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, ed. Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall (Sydney: National Portrait Gallery, London & Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005), 26. 37 Meskimmon, Art of Reflection, 28 and 29. 38 James McAuley, A Map of Australian Verse (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), 163.

206 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

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Wright, ‘Advice to a Young Poet’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 270. Wright, ‘Turning Fifty’ [The Other Half], Collected Poems, 252. Letter Wright to Dorothy Green, 1 March 1970, With Love & Fury, 207. Emily Carr, Self-portrait, 1938–9, oil on wove paper, mounted on plywood, 85.5 × 57.7, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (30755). ‘Went to see oculist as my eyes worried a bit. He changed my glasses & gave me some to paint in which will be a comfort, I think. I’ve always fought them, dirty brutes cost $20, too, but he said it was well I went today.’ Letter to Ruth Humphrey, 26 June 1937, included in Ruth Humphrey, ‘Letters from Emily Carr’, University of Toronto Quarterly 41.2 (Winter 1972): 104. Humphrey Toms, who hoped one day to acquire Carr’s self-portrait writes in a letter to Nan Cheney, dated 7 June 1940, that it is ‘very like Emily [when] disturbed in her painting smock, glaring at an intruder through her specs’ (Walker, Dear Nan, 227). Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 97. Carr, 31 December 1930, Hundreds and Thousands, 330. Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 182. Carr, 5 October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 64. Meskimmon, Art of Reflection, 98. Carr, 7 March 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 101. Hembroff-Schleicher, M.E., 44. Letter Carr to Nan Cheney, postmarked 14 December 1931, Dear Nan, 10. Walker seeks to reproduce Carr’s spelling and punctuation as accurately as possible and the square brackets indicate her uncertainty in interpreting Carr’s handwriting. Marina Warner, ‘Signs of the Fifth Element’, in The Tree of Life. New Images of An Ancient Symbol, ed. Roger Malbert (London: South Bank Centre, 1989), 31. Wright, ‘The Wattle-Tree’ [The Two Fires], Collected Poems, 142. W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’ [1927] in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: J.M. Dent, 1994), 263. Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in The Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 56. Meskimmon, Art of Reflection, 68. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 289. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 289–90. Timothy Adams Dow, ‘ “Painting Above Paint”: Telling Li(v)es in Emily Carr’s Literary Self-Portraits’, Journal of Canadian Studies 27. 2 (1992), 37. Dow analyses works by a wide range of commentators, including Carr’s biographers, Maria Tippett and Paula Blanchard, to demonstrate that she writes ‘not to deceive through lies’, but to reconcile ‘life with itself ’ (56).

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2 The Artist as a Young Colonial Girl 1 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 64. ‘Nessa’ refers to Woolf ’s sister, Vanessa Bell. 2 Woolf, ‘A Sketch’, Moments of Being, 64. 3 Woolf, ‘A Sketch’, Moments of Being, 64. 4 Some material in this chapter was published by Collett and Jones in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Colonial Girl’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.3 (2009): 51–6. 5 For example, Janet Frame follows Joyce’s structure in her three volumes of autobiography, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy From Mirror City (1985) and Alice Munro also draws heavily on Joyce in her fictional work, Lives of Girls and Women (1971) which portrays the childhood and youth of an aspiring writer in provincial Canada. 6 As Virginia Woolf also does, noting in her recollection of St. Ives: ‘If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green . . . I should make curved shapes showing the light through; but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim . . .’ (‘Sketch’, Moments of Being, 66). 7 In Portrait Stephen Dedalus declares: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] [London: Jonathan Cape, 1956], 207.) Although Stephen stands ready to launch himself into flight at the end of Portrait, the reader discovers in Ulysses that he has not flown far: ‘Me, Magee and Mulligan./ Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? New-haven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.’ (Ulysses, [1922] [London: Bodley Head, 1937], 199.) 8 Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 3. 9 Veronica Brady, South of My Days. A Biography of Judith Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998), vii. 10 Klee Wyck, The Book of Small and The House of All Sorts were published in Carr’s lifetime. Her other books all appeared posthumously. 11 Letter Carr to Ira Dilworth, 12 December 1944, in Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth, ed. Linda Morra (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 283–4. 12 Wright, ‘The Marks’ [Fourth Quarter], in Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 373. Childhood is an important artistic motif for Wright and the subject of many of her poems including ‘Women’s song’, ‘Woman to Child’, ‘Child and Wattle-tree’, ‘The Child’, ‘The World and the Child’, ‘Night and the Child’.

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13 Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 98. 14 Emily Carr, The Book of Small, 64. 15 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 3. 16 Judith Wright, The Generations of Men (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1959). 17 Judith Wright, The Cry for the Dead (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981). 18 Carr, Small, 105. 19 Carr, Small, 23. 20 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 65–67. 21 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 48. 22 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 48 and Carr, Small, 68. 23 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 34 and Carr, Small, 5. 24 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 94. 25 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 53. 26 ‘Judith Wright Papers’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 702. 27 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 89. 28 Emily Carr, ‘Drawing and Insubordination’, Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1946), 11. 29 Carr, Small, 29. 30 Carr, Small, 33 and 29. 31 Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, 130. 32 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 35 and 44. 33 Carr, Small, 15. 34 Carr, Small, 16. 35 Carr, Small, 9. 36 Carr, Small, 8. 37 Carr, Small, 77. 38 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 65. 39 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 69. 40 Kathryn Bridge, ‘The Almost Forgotten Manuscript’, Afterword to Emily Carr, Wild Flowers, ed. Kathryn Bridge (Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 2006), 83. 41 Carr, Wild Flowers, 31. 42 Wright, ‘Child and Wattle-tree’ [Woman to Man], Collected Poems, 31–2. 43 Wright, ‘Child and Wattle-tree’ [Woman to Man], Collected Poems, 31. 44 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 50. 45 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 6. 46 Carr, Small, 6 & 76.

Notes 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

209

Wright, Half a Lifetime, 59–60. Carr, Small, 76. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 79. Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), xi. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 49. Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 24. Angela Smith, ‘Landscape and the Foreigner Within: Katherine Mansfield and Emily Carr’, in Landscape and Empire, 1770–2000, ed. Glenn Hooper (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 142. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 32. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 33. Carr, Small, 124. Carr, Small, 109–110. Wright, ‘The Granite Rocks of New England’, in The Nature of Love (Sydney: Imprint Books, 1997), 188–92. This is predominantly a collection of short stories, but ‘The Granite Rocks’ is clearly memoir, referring by name to the family property and people working there. The collection was originally published by Sun Books in 1996, and corrected and revised in 1997 when ‘The Granite Rocks’ which had originally appeared in National Library of Australia News, was presumably added. Wright, ‘Granite Rocks’, 192. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 29–30. Carr, Small, 20. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 54. Carr, ‘Graduation’, Growing Pains, 15. Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, 104. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 121 and 122. From a newspaper interview with Arnold Watson, ‘In the Haunts of a Picture Maker’, Week (Victoria), 2.37 (18 February 1905), quoted in Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 30. Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 228. See Andrew Hunter, ‘Clear Cut’, in Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2006), 205–7. A.D. Hope, Judith Wright (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), 10. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 67. Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 32. Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, 151. Carr, ‘Alternative’, Growing Pains, 267. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 290.

210

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3 Death of the Mother 1 Emily Carr, ‘Mother’, Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 7. 2 Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, ed. Patricia Clarke (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 44. 3 Susan Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003), 85. 4 Heather Rusden, Transcript of Interview with Judith Wright, National Library of Australia Oral History Project, TRC 2202, Cassette 1: Side 1 (recorded 18 September 1987). 5 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 103. 6 Carr, ‘Mother’, Growing Pains, 4. 7 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 103. 8 Carr, ‘Drawing and Insubordination’, Growing Pains, 12. 9 Letter Wright to Caroline Mitchell, 6 June 1990 in With Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 530. 10 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 105. 11 Georgina Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright (Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016), 91. 12 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 110. 13 Susan Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries, 85. 14 Arnott, Unknown Judith Wright, 82. 15 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (London: Penguin, 2004), 88. 16 ‘Judith Wright Papers’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 707. 17 Carr, ‘Mother’, Growing Pains, 8. 18 Carr, ‘Mother’, Growing Pains, 9. 19 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 94. 20 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 702. 21 Wright, ‘Wedding Photograph, 1913’ [Alive], in Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 326. 22 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 711. 23 Wright, ‘Wedding Photograph, 1913’ [Alive], Collected Poems, 327. 24 Shirley Walker, Flame and Shadow (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991), 180. 25 Walker, Flame and Shadow, 110. 26 Walker, Flame and Shadow, 102. 27 Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987), 38. 28 Carr, The Book of Small, 21.

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29 Carr quoted in Crean, Opposite Contraries, 143. 30 Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 295. 31 Carr quoted in Crean, 62–3. 32 Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 371. 33 Letter Wright to Rosemary Dobson, 2 September 1991, in Love & Fury, 477. 34 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 703. 35 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 256–7. 36 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 702. 37 Letter Wright to Kathleen McArthur, 10 October, 1997, in Love & Fury, 540. 38 Wright, ‘Ishtar’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 101. 39 Geoffrey Grigson, The Goddess of Love (New York: Stein & Day, 1977), 27. 40 E.O. James, The Ancient Gods (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 78. 41 W.B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’ [1924] [The Tower], in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: J.M. Dent, 1994), 260. 42 Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, [The Tower], The Poems, 260. 43 Shirley Walker suggests a possible link to the Virgin Mary in Flame and Shadow, 113. 44 Carr, 9 March 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 101. 45 Carr, 9 March 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 101. 46 Gerta Moray, ‘Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native Images’, in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience, ed. Linda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 83. 47 Gerta Moray, ‘Wilderness, Modernity and Aboriginality in the Paintings of Emily Carr’, Journal of Canadian Studies 33.2: 52. 48 Emily Carr, ‘Kitwancool’, Klee Wyck (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1951), 119. 49 Marcia Crosby analyses Emily Carr’s account of her visit to the Douse family pointing out the many social and political nuances of which Carr as an outsider and a white woman would have been unaware or unable to interpret accurately. See Marcia Crosby, ‘A Chronology of Love’s Contingencies’, in Emily Carr. New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, ed. M. Thom, Charles Hill and Johanne Lamoureux (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), 157–169. 50 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 329. 51 Carr, ‘Kitwancool’, Klee Wyck, 120. There is uncertainty as to whether these were actually female figures, but Carr painted the images on the assumption that they were. See Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 369. 52 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 329. 53 Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography [1979] (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1982), 165. 54 Carr, 14 October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 66.

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55 Carr, ‘D’Sonoqua’, Klee Wyck, 39. 56 Emily Carr, Guyasdom’s D’Sonoqua, c. 1938, oil on canvas, 100.3 × 65.4cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2705), gift from the Albert H. Robson Memorial Subscription Fund, 1942. 57 Carr, ‘D’Sonoqua’, Klee Wyck, 42. 58 Carr, ‘D’Sonoqua’, Klee Wyck, 41. Carr did a watercolour painting of this image, Totem D’Sonoqua, dated 1930. See Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 313. 59 Wright, ‘Train Journey’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 75. 60 Wright, ‘The Watcher’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 105. 61 Wright, ‘The Watcher’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 105. 62 Wright, ‘Cyclone and Aftermath’ [The Two Fires], Collected Poems, 127–9. 63 Emily Carr, Strangled by Growth, 1931, oil on canvas, 64 × 48.6cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.42). 64 Johanne Lamoureux, ‘The Other French Modernity of Emily Carr’, in Emily Carr. New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, ed. M. Thom, Charles Hill and Johanne Lamoureux (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 50. 65 Carr, 1 February 1931, Hundreds and Thousands, 26. 66 Wright, ‘Waiting Ward’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 104. 67 See Veronica Brady, South of My Days. A Biography of Judith Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998), 147–8. 68 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 331. 69 Carr, ‘Sophie’, Klee Wyck, 27. 70 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 219. 71 Wright, Half A Lifetime, 261. 72 Wright, ‘Two Songs for the World’s End’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 107. 73 Wright, ‘Request to a Year’ [The Two Fires], Collected Poems, 152–3. 74 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 702. 75 Vincent Buckley, ‘The Poetry of Judith Wright’ [1957] in Critical Essays on Judith Wright, ed A.K. Thomson (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1968), 73. 76 See Carr’s journal entry of 16 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 6. 77 See Blanchard, 107. The quotations are from a draft of Growing Pains held in the British Columbia Archives, Series MS-2181 – ‘Emily Carr Papers’. BCFSA is the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts. 78 Carr, ‘France’, Growing Pains, 219–20. 79 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 326. 80 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 148. 81 Charlotte Bronte, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ [2nd edition of Wuthering Heights, 1850]; reproduced in Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. William Sale and Richard Dunn (New York/London: Norton, 1990), 315. The sisters’ first publication, a co-authored

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volume of poetry, was published in 1846 under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. 82 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 703. 83 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 704.

4 The Voyage Out 1 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out [1915] (London: Penguin, 1992). 2 Woolf, Voyage Out, 228. 3 Emily Carr, ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 105. 4 Meredith McKinney, ‘Introduction’, in The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters Between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney, ed. Patricia Clarke & Meredith McKinney (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004), 4. 5 Judith Wright, ‘A Dedication’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 184. 6 Carr, ‘Graduation’, Growing Pains, 15 7 Carr, ‘Mother’, Growing Pains, 8. 8 Carr, ‘Drawing and Insubordination’, Growing Pains, 11. 9 Carr, ‘Drawing and Insubordination’, Growing Pains, 11. 10 Carr, ‘Drawing and Insubordination’, Growing Pains, 12. 11 Carr, ‘Graduation’, Growing Pains, 15. 12 Carr writes that ‘[we] younger ones had no rights in the home at all. Our house had been left by my father as a home for us all but everything was in big sister’s name. We younger ones did not exist.’ (Growing Pains, ‘Graduation’, 15.) 13 Richard Carr nominated an old friend, James Lawson, to act as the official guardian of his children and executor of his estate (Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography [1979] [Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1982], 15). 14 Carr, ‘Graduation’, Growing Pains, 16. 15 Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 24. 16 Carr, ‘Home Again’, Growing Pains, 73. 17 Carr, ‘Sisters Coming – Sisters Going’, Growing Pains, 49. 18 Carr, ‘Sisters Coming – Sisters Going’, Growing Pains, 49. 19 Eminent Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning prefaced her 1844 collection, Poems, with these words: ‘Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing: there has been no playing skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work . . . not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being, – but as the completest expression of that being to which I could

214

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Notes

attain . . .’ (‘Preface to Mrs. Browning’s Poems Published in 1844’, in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1897], xiv.) Carr, ‘Sisters Coming – Sisters Going’, Growing Pains, 49. Carr, ‘Reasons’, Growing Pains, 24. Carr, ‘Sisters Coming – Sisters Going’, Growing Pains, 48. Carr, ‘Back to Canada’, Growing Pains, 68. Carr, ‘Mansion’, Growing Pains, 64. Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 38. Carr, ‘The Outdoor Sketch Class’, Growing Pains, 26. Carr, ‘The Outdoor Sketch Class’, Growing Pains, 26. William Wordsworth uses the phrase ‘a wise passiveness’ in his poem, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, published in Lyrical Ballads of 1798. (See The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 377. John Keats refers to ‘negative capability’ in a letter to his brothers, George and Tom, on 22 December 1817. (See John Keats: Selected Poetry and Letters, ed. Richard Fogle [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969], 308.) Carr, ‘The Outdoor Sketch Class’, Growing Pains, 26. Carr, ‘Mrs. Tucket’, Growing Pains, 57. Carr, ‘Mrs. Tucket’, Growing Pains, 57. Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography [1979] (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1982), 45. Carr, ‘Martyn’, Growing Pains, 145 (my italics). See ‘Mrs Tucket’, Growing Pains, 55: ‘Mrs Tucket was jealous of my youngness, jealous of my freedom.’ Journal entry 28 November 1937; recorded in full in Susan Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), 143. Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 66. Carr, ‘Difference Between Nude and Naked’, Growing Pains, 29. Carr, ‘Difference Between Nude and Naked’, Growing Pains, 29. Carr, 25 July 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 45. Carr, 9 September 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 57. Carr, ‘Difference Between Nude and Naked’, Growing Pains, 30. Carr, ‘Difference Between Nude and Naked’, Growing Pains, 31. American modernist artist, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), is particularly known for her close-up view of flowers, painted over a period of about 30 years from the mid-1920s to the 1950s. Although O’Keeffe was unhappy with (mostly male) critical interpretation of the flowers as erotica, it was perhaps more the Freudian interpretation to which she objected than the recognition of resemblance to female

Notes

45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62 63

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genitalia. Many of the magnified flower paintings might be better understood as intimate studies of naked female form – beautiful and unabashed. Ruth Stevens Appelhof, ‘Emily Carr, Canadian Modernist’, in The Expressionist Landscape: North American Modernist Painting, 1920–1947, ed. Ruth Stevens Appelhof (Seattle and London: Birmingham Museum of Art & University of Washington Press, 1988), 73. Carr, 29 September 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 199–200. Carr, 17 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 6–7. Wright, ‘Naked Girl and Mirror’ [The Other Half], Collected Poems, 239. For further discussion of this poem’s complexity (‘a complex interplay of multiple dualities’) see pp. 85–7 of Andrew Taylor’s chapter on Judith Wright in Reading Australian Poetry (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987). Wright, Half a Lifetime, 107. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 113. ‘Judith Wright Papers’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 701, Notes for autobiography, 12–14. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (London: Penguin, 2004), 43 and 49. ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 703, Early drafts of Half a Lifetime, Typescript section, III, 8. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 104. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 43. In a paper read to the Women’s Service League in 1931 entitled ‘Professions for Women’, Woolf speaks of a phantom with which she must do battle, that phantom being Coventry Patmore’s ‘Angel in the House’ – a woman immensely charming, pure and unselfish, a man’s ideal of a woman who prevents the woman writer from being true to herself; so Woolf writes: ‘I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her’, but she discovers that ‘It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her.’ (‘Professions for Women’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays [1942], [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961], 203.) Wright, Half a Lifetime, 53–4. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 103. ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 701, Notes for autobiography, 12–14. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 110. Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself ’ was first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal of July 1902 and included in the collection of Just So Stories that year. As described by Wright in section IV of the poem, ‘For a Pastoral Family’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 408. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 12–15.

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64 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 112. 65 See Woolf ’s playful discussion of Tennyson and Rossetti in ‘Chapter’ 1 of A Room of One’s Own (14–18). 66 Wright, The Generations of Men [1959] (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1964), 192–3. 67 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 117. 68 According to Georgina Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2016), 58. 69 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 84. 70 Wright, ‘Remembering an Aunt’ [The Other Half], Collected Poems, 234–5. 71 Wright, ‘Country Town’ [The Moving Image], Collected Poems, 14. 72 Wright, ‘Smalltown Dance’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 398–9. 73 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 54. 74 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 84, Folder 605. 75 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 123. 76 Interviews with Wright were recorded by Heather Rusden at the National Library of Australia and at Rusden’s home in Canberra between September 1987 and May 1988. The interviews take up over 1,100 minutes and are available in oral form (ORAL TRC 2202 [recording]) and as a transcript (ORAL TRC 2202 [transcript]) at the NLA. 77 Refers to the title of Georgina Arnott’s monograph, The Unknown Judith Wright (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2016). 78 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 123–4. 79 Arnott, Unknown Judith Wright, 216. 80 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 98, Folder 703, Early drafts for Half a Lifetime, typescript titled, ‘School to University’, 9–10. 81 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Sc.3, ll 70–2.

5 Many Roads Meet Here 1 The phrase is drawn from Judith Wright’s poem, ‘For New England’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 22. 2 Letter Emily Carr to Ira Dilworth, 19 November 1941, Corresponding Influence. Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth, ed. Linda M. Morra (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 56. 3 Emily Carr, ‘Queen Victoria’, Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 134–5). 4 Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, ed. Patricia Clarke (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 132.

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5 J.E.Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 164. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant also support Cirlot’s view in their Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin, 1996 [1969]), 327. 6 Carr, ‘Westminster Abbey – Architectural Museum’, Growing Pains, 97. 7 Carr, ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’, Growing Pains, 108. 8 Carr, ‘Martyn’, Growing Pains, 143. 9 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 133. 10 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 138. 11 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 135. 12 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 295. 13 Wright, ‘For New England’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 22. 14 Wright presents an account of her grandparents’ lives in The Generations of Men [1959] (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1964). 15 See Wright, Half a Lifetime, 69 for example. 16 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 333. 17 ‘The common name of dogwood is one given to various quite unconnected plants and in this case is said to refer to the smell from the wood when burnt’: ‘Australian National Botanic Gardens’, https://www.anbg.gov.au/gnp/gnp2/jacksonia-scoparia. html 18 ‘Judith Wright Papers’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 5781, Box 84, Folder 605. 19 ‘Wright Papers’, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 84, Folder 605. 20 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 137. 21 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 139. 22 Judith Wright interviewed by Romana Koval the year before her death in Speaking Volume: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, ed. Romana Koval (Melbourne: Scribe, 2010), 231. 23 Wright, ‘The Trains’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 12. 24 Wright, ‘The Company of Lovers’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 7. 25 Wright, ‘Foreword’, Collected Poems, n.p. 26 Emily Carr, Journal entry, 1 January 1935, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 163. 27 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 141–2. 28 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 158. 29 Carr, ‘Cariboo Gold’, Growing Pains, 202. 30 Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 207. 31 Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography [1979] (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1982), 73. Tippett quotes here from Carr’s unpublished journal.

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32 Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979/87), 24. 33 Carr, ‘Home Again’, Growing Pains, 76. 34 Carr, 8 February 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 315. 35 Wright, ‘Bora Ring’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 8. 36 Wright, ‘Niggers Leap, New England’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 15. 37 Judith Wright, The Cry for the Dead (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981). 38 Judith Wright, We Call for a Treaty (Sydney: Collins/Fontana, 1985). 39 Carr, ‘The Book of Small’, Growing Pains, 276. 40 Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’, in Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings, ed. Susan Crean (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), 191. 41 Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver/Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 82. 42 Emily Carr, ‘Sitka’s Ravens’, in The Heart of the Peacock [1953] (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1986), 80. 43 Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 211. Carr does not name the artist, whose work she disparages, leading Jay Stewart and Peter Macnair to question general assumptions that he was Theodore Richardson. They suggest it may have been James Everett Stuart, an inferior artist to Richardson, whom she actually met, while acknowledging ‘there is no primary evidence that either Richardson or Stuart was in Sitka in August 1907’ (Jay Stewart and Peter Macnair, ‘Reconstructing Emily Carr in Alaska’, in Emily Carr. New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, ed. M. Thom, Charles Hill and Johanne Lamoureux [Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006], 27). 44 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 38. 45 Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 211. 46 Carr, 8 February 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 315. 47 Carr writes to Dilworth on 18 January 1942: ‘I wrote this diary on the way to make her laugh. We called it the “funny book[.]” I would scratch down some trash with an illustration each night & we’d giggle.’ (Corresponding Influence, 102.) 48 James K. Nesbitt obtained Alice’s permission to publish extracts from Carr’s Alaska Journal, along with some of her accompanying illustrations in 1953 in the Vancouver News-Herald and the Victoria Daily Colonist. See Stewart and MacNair, 13. 49 Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 211. 50 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 67. 51 Emily Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’, Opposite Contraries, 202. 52 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 67. 53 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 42. 54 Emily Carr, Klee Wyck [1941] (Toronto/Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1951/1962), 123. 55 Peter Macnair and Jay Stewart reproduce a 1900 photo taken by the anthropologist C.F. Newcombe, House Interior, T’sadzis’nukuwaame’, which shows that though Carr

Notes

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77

219

represents the totems quite accurately, her impressionistic portrayal gives a softer effect than the photo suggests. See To the Totem Forests. Emily Carr and Contemporaries Interpret Coastal Villages (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1999), 27. Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 210–11. Stewart and Macnair give several examples of such misinterpretations in their catalogue essay in To the Totem Forests. Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 211. Glen McLeod, ‘The Visual Arts’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 194. Carr, ‘France’, Growing Pains, 216. Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 92. Carr, ‘France’, Growing Pains, 219. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123. Carr, ‘France’, Growing Pains, 218. See Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 94. Johanne Lamoureux suggests that the painting Indian Community House may have been one of these re-workings. (New Perspectives, 45.) Carr, ‘France’, Growing Pains, 216. Gibb’s nudes were actually very mild compared to the iconoclasm of paintings like Picasso’s 1907 Les demoiselles d’Avignon, portraying nude prostitutes in a brothel with angular contorted bodies, the drawing of their faces influenced by African tribal masks. Johanne Lamoureux, ‘The Other French Modernity’, Emily Carr: New Perspectives, 49. See Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 97. Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 138. Susan Sheridan, ‘Generations Lost and Found: Reading Women Writers Together’, Australian Literary Studies 24.3–4, (Oct–Nov 2009), 48. Barjai, title of the group’s magazine, was an Aboriginal word for a meeting place for youth. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 181. John F. Williams, Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913– 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31. Williams, Quarantined Culture, 241. Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral. The Making of a White Landscape (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007), 218. Jeanette Hoorn, ‘Women Make Modernism: Contesting Masculinist Art Criticism’, in Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender, ed. Jeanette Hoorn (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 27. Virginia Woolf, diary entry for 5 June 1920, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press/Penguin Books, 1979), 45.

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Notes

78 Prelude was published by the Hogarth Press in July 1918. 79 See Woolf ’s diary entry for 16 January 1923, in Bell, Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 225–8. 80 Woolf, diary entry for 11 October 1917, in Bell, Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, 58. For further discussion and analysis of the colonial complexity of the Woolf/Mansfield relationship see Sarah Ailwood, ‘Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Tensions of Empire during the Modernist Period’ (Kunapipi 27.2 [2005], 255–267) and Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Smith has also written on the relationship between Mansfield and Carr in ‘Landscape and the Foreigner Within: Katherine Mansfield and Emily Carr’ (in Landscape and Empire, 1770–2000, ed. Glenn Hooper [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005], 141–157). 81 The response of rage and laughter to Roger Fry’s mounting of the first ‘postimpressionist’ exhibition of 1910 (‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’) at the Grafton Galleries in London (which was followed by a second exhibition of ‘post-impressionist’ painters in 1912) is a good example as is the outrage and censorship that greeted works by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence in the early decades of the twentieth century. 82 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 121. 83 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 123–4. 84 Patrick Buckridge, ‘Clearing a Space for Australian Literature 1940–1965’, in The Oxford Literary History of Australia, ed. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 173. 85 Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998), 102. 86 Judith Wright, entry in Patrick White a Tribute, compiled by Clayton Joyce (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991), 14. 87 Quoted in David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 310. 88 Brady, South of My Days, 220. 89 Chris Wallace-Crabbe, ‘Poetry and Modernism’, Oxford Literary History of Australia, 227. 90 Dennis Haskell, ‘Poetry Since 1965’, Oxford Literary History of Australia, 283. 91 Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009), 13. 92 Carr, ‘France’, Growing Pains, 226.

6 Jack McKinney: The Equal Heart and Mind 1 The phrase is drawn from Judith Wright’s poem, ‘A Dedication’ – to Jack McKinney [Five Senses], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 184.

Notes

221

2 Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, ed. Patricia Clarke (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 157. 3 Judith Wright, ‘Remembering an Aunt’ [The Other Half], Collected Poems, 234–5. 4 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 162. 5 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 163–5. 6 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (London: Penguin, 2004), 48. 7 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 167. 8 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 167. 9 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 210. 10 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 209. 11 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ [1939–40], in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 86. 12 Virginia Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, Moments of Being, 169. 13 Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, Moments of Being, 174. 14 Letter, Judith to Jack, Tuesday night [December 1945], The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters Between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004), 129. 15 Wright, ‘A Dedication’ – to Jack McKinney [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 184. 16 Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 213. 17 Letter from Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murray, May–June (?) 1913, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. I, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 125–6. 18 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 188. 19 Meredith McKinney, commentary to the selected letters of her parents, ‘Memoir of Jack and Judith’ in The Equal Heart and Mind, 9. 20 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 188. 21 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 13. 22 Judith Wright, ‘Waiting’, Meanjin Papers II.3 (Spring 1943): 17. 23 Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, Collected Poems, 92. 24 Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ [Four Quartets], Collected Poems, 221. 25 J.P. McKinney, ‘The Poet and the Intellectual Environment’, Meanjin Papers II.3 (Spring 1943): 46. 26 Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ [Four Quartets], Collected Poems, 189–195. 27 Archibald MacLeish’s ‘The End of the World’ was published in 1926 in Streets in the Moon. Poem included in Collected Poems 1917–1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 23. The Poetry Foundation notes: ‘MacLeish viewed World War I as the ending of an old world and the beginning of a new one that was sensed rather than understood. His early poetry was his attempt to understand this new world.’ https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/archibald-macleish

222 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

Notes

McKinney, ‘Poet and the Intellectual’, 48. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’, Collected Poems, 39–41. McKinney, ‘Poet and the Intellectual’, 48. C.B.C. [Clem Christesen], ‘Foreword’ to Meanjin Papers I.1 (Christmas 1940), n.p. Matthew Arnold, ‘Sweetness and Light’, in Culture & Anarchy [1869/1875] (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 51 and 70. New Contributors section, ‘J.P. McKinney’, Meanjin Papers 1.12 (Christmas 1942): 39. J.P. McKinney, ‘Approach to the Universal Mystery’, Meanjin Papers 1.12 (Christmas 1942): 36–37. J.P. McKinney, Crucible (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1935), 38–9. Chapter One of Veronica Brady’s biography of Wright begins: ‘Judith Wright was born under the shadow of war on 31st May 1915, just a few weeks after the landing at Gallipoli’ (1), a landing that McKinney would narrowly avoid. (For Brady’s discussion of McKinney’s war service see pp. 112–115, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright [Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998].) J.P. McKinney, The Challenge of Reason (Brisbane: Mountain Press, 1951). J.P. McKinney, The Structure of Modern Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971). Letter, Judith to Jack, Tuesday night [December 1945], Equal Heart and Mind, 129; Letter Jack to Judith, Thursday night [December 1945], Equal Heart and Mind, 131. Meredith McKinney, ‘You and I are queer and sinful fish’, commentary to The Equal Heart and Mind, 20. Letter, Judith to Jack, Wednesday 18 [April 1945], Equal Heart and Mind, 26. Letter, Jack to Judith, Monday 23 April [1945], Equal Heart and Mind, 27. Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Moments of Being, 126. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 243. Letter, Jack to Judith, Monday 23 April [1945], Equal Heart and Mind, 27. The article under discussion in these letters was titled ‘Towards the Future’. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ was published in Poems: 1909–1925 (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1925). See W.B. Yeats ‘The Second Coming’ (1920, included in Michael Robartes and The Dancer, 1921) and A Vision (1925). McKinney, ‘Poet and the Intellectual’, 47. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 211. Wright recalls: ‘Since Jack was working on gaining an insight into quantum physics – that physics which underlay the bomb itself – and since the term “quantum” meant as small a packet of energy as was just enough, in the Latin derivation, he named the cottage Quantum.’ (Half a Lifetime, 233.) Wright, Half a Lifetime, 233. Wright, ‘In Praise of Marriages’ [Two Fires], Collected Poems, 152. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 209.

Notes

223

54 Wright, Half a Lifetime, 256. 55 Meredith McKinney, ‘Today I lose and find you’, commentary to Equal Heart and Mind, 152. 56 Wright, ‘Habitat’ [Alive], Collected Poems, 297. 57 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 43. 58 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 45. 59 Letter Wright to Alec Hope, 1 September 1954, in With Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 88. 60 Letter dated 21 June 1962. Held in ‘Judith Wright’ manuscript collection, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 5781, Box 78: ‘Letters to Kathleen McArthur 1960–69’. 61 Bryony Cosgrove, ed., Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright 1950–2000 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2007), 165. The letter is dated 18 November 1965. 62 Barbara Blackman donated Charles Blackman’s portrait of the McKinney family, titled The Family, to the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in May 2000. 63 Barbara Blackman, ‘All in the Family’, Portrait (magazine of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia) No. 8 (June–August 2003), 1 (https://www.portrait.gov.au/ magazines/8/all-in-the-family). 64 Blackman, ‘All in the Family’, 1. In her ‘autobiographical reflections’, Barbara Blackman explains ‘Both lifted me sky high and thereafter Jack-n-Judith became lifetime friends and sky heroes for me, in the Aboriginal sense.’ (Blackman, Glass after Glass [Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1997], 110.) 65 Blackman, Glass after Glass, 111. 66 Blackman, ‘All in the Family’, 2. 67 Barbara Blackman, Glass after Glass, n.p. 68 Sarah Engledow, ‘Big Bouquet of Blackmans’, Portrait No. 43 (June–August 2012), 2. [https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/43/big-bouquet-of-blackmans] Stromboli is a volcanic island off the north coast of Sicily. 69 Quoted by Engledow, ‘Big Bouquet of Blackmans’, 3. 70 Wright, ‘At Cedar Creek’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 379–81. 71 See Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’ [1920]: ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. ([Michael Robartes and the Dancer] The Poems [London: J.M. Dent, 1994], 235. 72 Quoted by Engledow, ‘Big Bouquet of Blackmans’, 5. 73 Wright, ‘A Dedication’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 184. 74 Originally ‘A Dedication’ was set at the beginning of the selections of poetry that comprise the volume Five Senses (1963) which includes a final section of

224

75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Notes

unpublished poems that appear under the title ‘The Forest’ (the first poem of which is ‘The Forest’ and the second is ‘Five Senses’). As far as we are aware this set of poems was never published separately. When Collected Poems (1994) was published (which in fact is still only selected poems), the poems that appear from the volume Five Senses are only those that were published under the title of ‘The Forest’ (with a changed order of the first few poems). Wright, ‘The Forest’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 185. Wright, ‘The Forest’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 186. Amy Lowell, ‘A Decade’ in Pictures of a Floating World (1919), published in Selected Poems, ed. Honor Moore (American Poets Project, The Library of America, 2004), 69. Wright, ‘The Forest’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 186. Wright, ‘Reading Thomas Traherne’, [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 206. Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167. Meredith McKinney, ‘Memoir of Jack and Judith’, Equal Heart and Mind, 11. Wright, ‘The Slope’ [Alive], Collected Poems, 336–7. Wright, ‘The Slope’ [Alive], Collected Poems, 337. Wright, ‘Love Song in Absence’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 261–2. Wright, ‘The Vision (for J.P. McKinney)’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 263. Wright, ‘Love Song in Absence’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 262. Meredith McKinney, ‘Memoir of Jack and Judith’, Equal Heart and Mind, 9.

7 Darkness 1 Georgina Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright (Crawley: University of Western Australia, 2016), 96. 2 Judith Wright, Transcript of Interview with Heather Rusden, National Library of Australia Oral History Project, Cassette 2: Side 1. 3 Susan Sheridan, Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011), 33. 4 Shirley Walker, Flame and Shadow (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991), 2. 5 See Meredith McKinney’s commentary, ‘Years of Comparative Quietude’, in With Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 58–60. 6 Letter Wright to Barbara Blackman, March 1959, in Bryony Cosgrove, ed., Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright 1950–2000 (Melbourne: Meigunyah Press, 2007), 60. 7 Letter Wright to Kathleen McArthur, 24 July 1960, Love & Fury, 120.

Notes 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33

225

Letter Wright to Jack Blight, 15 August 1964, Love & Fury, 160. Letter Wright to Nettie Palmer, 6 January 1963, Love & Fury, 149. Letter Wright to Jack Blight, 30 January 1967, Love & Fury, 177. Letter Wright to Barbara and Charles Blackman, 10 December 1966, Portrait of a Friendship, 177. Judith Wright, ‘The Vision’ [Shadow], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 262–4. J.C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 122. See also Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 710–11. Wright, Half a Lifetime, 285–6. Wright, ‘Eurydice in Hades’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 264–5. Jennifer Strauss, Judith Wright (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35. Wright, ‘Reading Thomas Traherne’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 206–7. Wright, ‘This Time Alone’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 260–261. Wright, ‘Shadow’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 292–3. Marie Louise von Franz, ‘The Process of Individuation’, in Man and his Symbols, ed. C.G. Jung (London: Aldus Books, 1964), 175. Philip Mead, ‘Veronica Brady’s Biography of Judith Wright’, Australian Literary Studies 9.2 (October 1999): 166. A.D. Hope, Judith Wright (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), 6. Letter Wright to Jack Blight, 30 January 1967, Love & Fury, 176. Letter Wright to Jack Blight, 27 August 1968, Love & Fury, 189–191. Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography [1979] (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1982), 100. Daily Colonist, 19 October 1913, 16. Quoted in Tippett, Emily Carr, 117. Ruth Appelhoff, The Expressionist Landscape: North American Modernist Painting, 1920–1947 (Birmingham, Alabama: Birmingham Museum of Art, University of Washington Press, 1988), 41. Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver/Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 5. Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987), 134–5. Newcombe was a highly competent amateur botanist, zoologist, paleontologist and collector for museums, with an international reputation in anthropology. Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts [1944] (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1967), 6. Blanchard, Life of Emily Carr, 139. Carr, House of All Sorts, 84. Emily Carr, ‘Rejected’, in Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 232.

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Notes

34 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 207. 35 Doris Shadbolt, ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr (Vancouver/ Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1993), 8. 36 Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 227. 37 Quoted in Susan, Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries. The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings (Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), 83. 38 Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, M.E.: A Portrayal Of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1969), 109. Emily’s letter is dated December 1937. 39 Carr, House of All Sorts, 3. 40 Carr, House of All Sorts, 7. 41 Blanchard, Life of Emily Carr, 142. 42 Tippett, Emily Carr, 121. 43 Carr, House of All Sorts, 31. 44 Philip Amsden, ‘Memories of Emily Carr’, Canadian Forum XXVII.323: 206–7. 45 Amsden, ‘Memories’, 206. 46 Amsden, ‘Memories’, 206. 47 Carr, House of All Sorts, 111. 48 Emily Carr, journal entry, 2 February 1936, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 222. 49 Tippett, Emily Carr, 118. 50 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 278. 51 Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 231. 52 Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 232. 53 Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr [1979] (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999), 153. 54 See Applehoff, Expressionist Landscape, 43. 55 Appelhoff, Expressionist Landscape, 43. 56 Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 282. 57 See ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 234. The Group of Seven included Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley. 58 Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 38. 59 F.B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan, 1926), 32. 60 Carr, 18 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 8. 61 Hembroff-Schleicher, M.E., 71. 62 From a letter to Eric Brown, Director of the Canadian National Gallery, dated 1928, quoted in Doris Shadbolt, Emily Carr (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990), 50.

Notes 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

227

Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 28. Carr, 4 November 1930, Hundreds and Thousands, 21. Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 238. Gerta Moray, ‘Introduction: An Unvarnished Emily Carr’, in Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2006), 4. Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 137. Emily Carr, Klee Wyck, (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1951), 62. This work is listed by the Vancouver Art Gallery as Untitled/Forest Interior, black, grey and white, 42.3.56. Emily Carr, Old and New Forest, c. 1931–2, oil on canvas 111.8 × 69.5cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, 42.3.23. Emily Carr, Grey, 1931–2, oil on canvas 106.7 × 68.9cm, private collection. Reproduced Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 103. Emily Carr, ‘The Something Plus in a Work of Art’, Fresh Seeing: Two Addresses by Emily Carr (Toronto & Vancouver: Clarke & Irwin, 1972), 37. Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 143. Susan Crean, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2001), 210. Moray, Unsettling Encounters, 277. Carr, 15 May 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 120. Carr, 12 April 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 110. Carr, ‘Green’, Growing Pains, 261. Wright, ‘Australia’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 288.

8 Lawren Harris: Where the Soul Penetrates 1 The phrase is drawn from Emily Carr’s journal entry for 17 November 1933, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 78. 2 Carr, 5 December 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 11. 3 Carr, 14, 15 and 16 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 5, 8 and 6. 4 Letter from Carr to Ira Dilworth, 28 December 1941, in Linda M. Morra, ed., Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 84. 5 Letter Carr to Nan Cheney, 9 December 1938, in Doreen Walker, ed., Dear Nan: Letters of Emily Carr Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990), 141. 6 Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987), 228. 7 Carr, 17 November 1927, Hundreds & Thousands, 7.

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Notes

8 F.B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan, 1926), 188–9. 9 Carr, 13 December 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 17. 10 Emily Carr, ‘Lawren Harris’, Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 252. 11 Carr, 13 December 1927, Hundreds and Thousands, 17. 12 See Virginia Woolf ’s record of ‘Old Bloomsbury’ in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 164–5 and 169. 13 Carr, 17 November 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 78. 14 Carr, ‘Lawren Harris’, Growing Pains, 257. 15 Carr, ‘Lawren Harris’, Growing Pains, 254. 16 Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 238. 17 Carr, ‘Lawren Harris’, Growing Pains, 254. 18 Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 238. 19 ‘Emily Carr, A Young Tree, 1931, oil on canvas, 106.7 × 68.6cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.18). 20 Carr, 12 November 1931, Hundreds and Thousands, 30. 21 Carr, 23 July 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 45. 22 Carr, 23 July 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 45. 23 Carr, 16 September 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 61. 24 Carr, 28 December 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 89. 25 Journal entry, 29 January 1934, in Susan Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), 62. 26 Journal entry of 10 March 1934, Opposite Contraries, 66. 27 Carr, 16 Februrary 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 97. 28 Journal entry, 13 July 1934, Opposite Contraries, 80. 29 Blanchard, Life of Emily Carr, 252. 30 Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography [1979] (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada, 1982), 212. 31 Letter Carr to Nan Cheney, 13 February 1941 in Walker, Dear Nan, 295. 32 Crean, Opposite Contraries, 21. 33 Journal entry, 29 May 1935, Opposite Contraries, 106–7. 34 Letter Carr to Ira Dilworth, 24 November 1942, Corresponding Influence, 176–7. 35 Carr, ‘Stone and Heart’, in This and That, the Last Stories of Emily Carr, ed. Ann-Lee Switzer (Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary: Touchwood Editions, 2007), 113. 36 Carr, ‘Love and Poetry’, Growing Pains, 80. 37 Carr, 26 November 1930, Hundreds and Thousands, 22. 38 Carr, ‘The Orange Lily’, in The Book of Small (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1942), 56. 39 Carr, ‘White Currants’, Book of Small, 53.

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229

40 Carr, ‘White Currants’, Book of Small, 54. 41 Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, M.E.: A Portrayal of Emily Carr (Toronto/Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1969), 18. 42 See Red Cedar in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 152 and the untitled charcoal drawing, 109. 43 See Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 111. 44 Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 152. 45 Carr, 9 October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 65. 46 Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, 152. 47 Shadbolt, Art of Emily Carr, 140. See also Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, 148. 48 Quoted in Howard Hibbard, Bernini (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 137. 49 Simon Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art (London: BBC Books, 2006), 114. 50 Schama, Power of Art, 79–80. 51 See Schama, Power of Art, 117. 52 Letter Carr to Dilworth, 10 October 1942, Corresponding Influence, 111.

9 Shadow Sisters: Kath and Sophie 1 Emily Carr, ‘Lawren Harris’, Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1946), 255. 2 Wright, ‘Two Dreamtimes’ [Alive], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 315–18. 3 See for example the preface to Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays by Judith Wright (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991) where Wright notes of the bora ring to be found on ‘the Bora Paddock’ ‘not far from my grandmother’s home’: ‘I am told the ring area has now been ploughed; and a very old carved tree near the woolshed on Wallamumbi where I was brought up has disappeared too. They were some of the last signs of an occupation stretching many thousands of years into the past, but they were not thought worth preserving.’ (xi.) 4 Wright, ‘Bora Ring’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 8. 5 Wright, ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ [Moving Image], Collected Poems, 15. 6 Wright, ‘Old House’ [The Gateway], Collected Poems, 81–2. 7 Later published in The Nature of Love (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). 8 Wright, The Generations of Men (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1959). 9 Wright, ‘Preface’, Born of the Conquerors, xi. 10 Wright, The Cry for the Dead (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981). 11 Wright, Generations of Men, 2. 12 Wright, Cry for the Dead, 11.

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Notes

13 This is a theme taken up in a much later poem sequence ‘For a Pastoral Family’ in which the first stanza of the poem ‘To my Generation’ reads: A certain consensus of echo, a sanctioning sound, supported our childhood lives. We stepped on sure and conceded ground. A whole society extended a comforting cover of legality. The really deplorable deeds had happened out of our sight, allowing us innocence. We were not born, or there was silence kept.

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

[Phantom Dwelling] Collected Poems, 407. Margaret Preston, The Expulsion (1952), gouache print, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Wright, ‘Preface’, Born of the Conquerors, xi. Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008), 72. Kath Walker, We Are Going (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964). Wright, ‘The Poetry: An Appreciation’, in Oodgeroo, ed. Kathy Cochrane (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 169 and 171. Wright revises this view with the following variation on events taken from her essay ‘Moongalba’: ‘Looking for a way of expressing her feeling and the things she knew, she began writing verse. I met her in 1964, when her first book of poems, We Are Going, had just been brought out by a Brisbane publisher. I had acted as publisher’s reader and had told the publisher, Brian Clouston, that the book must be published – these were good poems. As the first such book by an Aboriginal it had a runaway success, but in fact its “curiosity value” had little to do with that. The book struck a chord with many people.’ (3–4.) ‘Moongalba’ is published in Born of the Conquerors, 3–9. Wright, ‘The Poetry’, Oodgeroo, 173. Kath Walker, Foreword to The Dawn Is At Hand (1966), quoted by Wright in ‘The Poetry’, Oodgeroo, 173. Wright, ‘The Poetry’, Oodgeroo, 183. Cochrane, Oodgeroo, 96. Given from one friend to another, ‘Sister Poet’ was finally published posthumously in Cochrane’s biography (97). See Wright, Half a Lifetime (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 285. ‘At Cooloolah’ was published in The Two Fires (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1955). It is included in full in Half a Lifetime (293–4) and can also be found in the Collected Poems (140). Wright, Half a Lifetime, 296. Rooney, Literary Activists, 72. The ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’ was delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 13 February 2008.

Notes

231

28 Of their relationship, in particular as represented in the two poems ‘Two Dreamtimes’ and ‘Sister Poet’, Rooney remarks: ‘Read together, the poems enact a rite of reconciliation that would not be performed, at a national level, for almost four decades, a national rite that, when it came would still be hedged by qualifications and conditions.’ (Literary Activists, p. 73.) 29 Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon travelled from Ottawa to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal from June 2006 to January 2008. The accompanying catalogue of the same title is published by Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver) in association with the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2006), edited by M. Thom, Charles C. Hill & Johanne Lamoureux. 30 Shirley Bear and Susan Crean, ‘The Presentation of Self in Emily Carr’s Writings’, Emily Carr: New Perspectives, 67. 31 Susan Crean, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2001), 432. 32 Maria Tippett, ‘Still controversial, sixty years on: an Emily Carr biographer examines a new cross-Canada exhibition and its accompanying book of essays’, review of Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), Literary Review of Canada 15.2 (March 2007), 7. 33 Emily Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’ [1913], reproduced in Susan Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003), 177. 34 Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’, Opposite Contraries, 203. 35 Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’, Opposite Contraries, 203, 193, 197. 36 The explanation of totems and totem poles in this lecture was drawn extensively from the writings of Charles Hill-Tout, an ethnographer who was president of the Vancouver Museum at the time, and quotations from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Canadian Savage Folk (1896) by John Maclean (noted by Gerta Moray in Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr [Vancouver/ Toronto/Seattle: UBC Press and University of Washington Press, 2006] and Susan Crean in Opposite Contraries). 37 Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’, Opposite Contraries, 197. 38 Emily Carr, ‘Cumshewa’, in Klee Wyck [1941] (Toronto/Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1951/1962), 23. 39 Carr, ‘Cumshewa’, Klee Wyck, 24. 40 Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 38. 41 Emily Carr, Journal entry, 14 November 1927, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 5. 42 Carr, 5 February 1931, Hundreds and Thousands, 27. 43 Wright, ‘At Cooloolah’ [The Two Fires], Collected Poems, 140. 44 Carr, ‘Cumshewa’, Klee Wyck, 24.

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45 In the first story of Klee Wyck, ‘Uculelet’, Carr writes: ‘It must have hurt the Indians dreadfully to have the things they had always believed trampled on and torn from their hugging. Down deep we all hug something. The forest hugs its silence. The sea and the air hug the spilled cries of sea-birds.’ (9.) 46 Carr, ‘Lecture on Totems’, Opposite Contraries, 184. 47 See discussion of ‘the lost Klee Wyck’ in Kathryn Bridge’s introduction to the 2003 edition of Klee Wyck (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre), 1–15. 48 Carr, ‘Autobiography’, reproduced in Crean, Opposite Contraries, 204. 49 Emily Carr, ‘Vancouver’, Growing Pains, 211. 50 Carr, 14 October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 66. 51 ‘I felt so young and empty standing there’ she recalls (‘Ucluelet’, Klee Wyck, 4). 52 Carr, ‘Ucluelet’, Klee Wyck, 4. 53 Carr, ‘Alternative’, Growing Pains, 263. 54 Carr, ‘Alternative’, Growing Pains, 266. 55 Carr, ‘Alternative’, Growing Pains, 266. 56 In an early version of the story ‘Sophie’, published in Crean, Opposite Contraries, 163. 57 Carr, ‘Alternative’, Growing Pains, 266. 58 Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver/Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 83. 59 See Crean, Opposite Contraries, 162–6. 60 Carr, ‘Sophie’, Opposite Contraries, 164–5. 61 Crean, Opposite Contraries, 11. 62 Carr, ‘Rejected’, Growing Pains, 230. 63 Extract from unpublished journal entries in Crean, Opposite Contraries, 83. 64 In the version of ‘Sophie’ published in Klee Wyck, Carr observes, ‘Sophie’s English was good enough, but when Frank, her husband, was there she became dumb as a plate. “Why won’t you talk before Frank, Sophie?” “Frank he learn school English. Me, no. Frank laugh my English words.” When we were alone she chattered to me like a sparrow.’ (28.) 65 Carr, ‘Sophie’, Opposite Contraries, 163–4. 66 Bear and Crean, ‘The Presentation of Self in Emily Carr’s Writings’, New Perspectives, 68. 67 In the ‘Lecture on Totems’ Carr remarks that ‘The basketry of the Indians is a very fine art.’ (Crean, Opposite Contraries, 191.) 68 This chapter is based on an article published in the Southern Hemisphere Review (Japan) 27 (2012), 4–19.

10 Late Love, Late Style 1 Emily Carr, ‘Last Will and Testament’ in Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr & Ira Dilworth, ed. Linda Morra (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

Notes

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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2006), 301–2. We have removed Morra’s editorial ‘corrections’ so as to retain the original flavour of Carr’s unorthodox style (hence some oddity of spacing and absent punctuation). On Sunday Morning, 22 November [1942] Carr addresses her letter to ‘Dear Eye’ for the first time and remarks, ‘Don’t you think that’s a sort of an appropriate name for a trustor and Guardian? Leaves out the “wrath” part of you and leaves in the seeing (not that I have seen your wrath).’ (Corresponding Influence, 172.) Ira Dilworth, b.1894, d.1962; Herbert Cole (‘Nugget’) Coombs, b.1906, d.1997. Morra, Corresponding Influence, 3. See Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). Carr, journal entry 23 July 1933, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 43–4. Carr, September 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 192–3. Carr, 16 September 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 58. A phrase Carr uses in a journal entry dated 14 October 1933, Hundreds and Thousands, 66. Carr, 5 March 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 322. Carr, 5 March 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 322. Carr, 6 March 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 324. Morra, ‘Introduction’, Corresponding Influence, 3. Ira Dilworth, ‘Foreword to the 1951 Educational Edition’ in Klee Wyck (Toronto/ Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1951/1962), vii. Dilworth, 1951 Foreword, Klee Wyck, xi. Dilworth, 1951 Foreword, Klee Wyck, ix. Morra, Corresponding Influence, 301–2. Letter Dilworth to Carr, 25 May 1941, Corresponding Influence, 34. Emily Carr, ‘Alternative’, Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 269. BC Radio History, ‘Ira Dilworth’, https://bcradiohistory.com/Biographies/ IraDilworth.htm Letter Carr to Dilworth, 18 January 1942, Corresponding Influence, 101. Letter Dilworth to Carr, Boxing Day 1941, Corresponding Influence, 79–80. Letter Dilworth to Carr, 14 November 1942, Corresponding Influence, 169. Letter Carr to Dilworth, ca. 23 February 1943, Corresponding Influence, 200. Letter Carr to Dilworth, ca. 16 January 1943, Corresponding Influence, 193. ‘Small’ refers both to her persona and the recently published book of that title. Carr, 6 April 1934, Hundreds and Thousands, 108–9. Carr, 29 September 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 199–201.

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29 Carr, 28 December 1940, Hundreds and Thousands, 329. 30 See paintings of the mid-1930s like the untitled paintings of Wiffen Spit near Sooke (c. 1935–36) and Clover Point from Dallas Road beach (c. 1934–36) and Strait of Juan De Fuca (c.1936). 31 See paintings like Forsaken (1937), A Skidegate Pole (1941–2) and Laughing Bear (1941). 32 Dilworth quotes T.S. Eliot in a letter to Carr, Boxing Day 1941, Corresponding Influence, 79. 33 Dilworth to Carr, 2 October 1943, Corresponding Influence, 233. 34 Said, On Late Style, 6. 35 Said, Late Style, xiii. 36 Emily Carr, Cedar; 1942, oil on canvas 111.8 × 68.6cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.28). Emily Carr, Quiet, 1942, oil on canvas 111.76 × 68.58. Private collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), no. 175, p. 188. 37 Wright, ‘Moving South’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 386. 38 Carr, 29 September 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 200. 39 Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 182. 40 Letter Carr to Dilworth, ca. 4 August 1942, Corresponding Influence, 148. 41 Carr, ‘Last Will and Testament’, Corresponding Influence, 301. 42 Letter Carr to Dilworth, ca. September 1943, Corresponding Influence, 229. 43 Judith Wright, ‘A Dedication’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 184. 44 Letter Wright to Coombs (New Plymouth, NZ) 26 May [1977]. ‘H.C. Coombs’, National Library of Australia [NLA], Ms 802, Box 49. 45 Wright, ‘Half Dream’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 347. 46 Wright, ‘Love Song in Absence’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 261. 47 Wright, ‘The Vision’ [Shadow], Collected Poems, 263–4. 48 See Fiona Capp, My Blood’s Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 162–3. 49 Fiona Capp, ‘In the Garden. Judith Wright and Nugget Coombs’, The Monthly, June 2009, 42. 50 Capp, My Blood’s Country, 164 and H.C. Coombs, Aboriginal Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv. 51 Letter Wright to Coombs, 18 June 1992, ‘H.C. Coombs’, NLA, Ms 802, Box 49, Folder 379. 52 Letter Wright to Coombs, 29 May 1975, ‘H.C. Coombs’, NLA, Ms 802, Box 49. 53 Judith Wright, Transcript of Interview with Judith Wright [and Heather Rusden] National Library of Australia Oral History Project, TRC 2202, Cassette 12, Side 1. 54 Wright, ‘After the Visitors’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 378.

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55 Wright in interview with Heather Rusden, Transcript, Cassette 12: Side 1. 56 This constant apology for the poem suggests a discomfort that might have more to do with the presence of Coombs in the poem and in her private life, but not yet public knowledge, than an estimate of the poem’s literary worth. 57 Elizabeth Barrett Browning [1856] Aurora Leigh, Second Book, Lines 454–9 (London: Penguin, 1995), 45. 58 Capp, My Blood’s Country, 164. 59 Letter Wright to Nugget Coombs, 19 September 1974, NLA, Ms 802, Box 49, Folder 378: Judith Wright letters to H C Coombs 1972–82. 60 Letter Coombs to Wright, 1995, Papers of Judith Wright, NLA, Ms 5781, Box 72. 61 Wright, ‘At Cedar Creek’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 379–381. 62 Letter Judith Wright to Jack Blight, 1 August 1984, Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 385. 63 Judith Wright, ‘Foreword’, Because I was Invited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vii. 64 Wright, ‘Foreword’, Because I was Invited, xi. 65 Wright, ‘Moving South’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 387. 66 Some of the material on Phantom Dwelling in this chapter was published by Collett in ‘Phantom Dwelling: A Discussion of Judith Wright’s Late Style’, Journal of Australian Studies 37.2 (2013): 243–250. 67 Wright toured New Zealand in 1976 as the first recipient of a Senior Anzac Fellowship. 68 Judith Wright, ‘Four Poems from New Zealand’, IV: ‘The Beach at Hokitika’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 396. 69 Wright, ‘Late Meeting’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 399. 70 See ‘Lichen, Moss, Fungus’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 417. 71 Wright, ‘Brevity’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 413. 72 The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694) is the (partial) record of Bashō’s third major journey. He left Edo (old Tokyo) in the spring of 1689, to spend more than two and a half years on the road. In his introduction to the travel sketches, Nobuyuki Yuasa explains that the route taken by Bashō was through largely wild territory for he avoided the familiar Tōkaidō route generally taken by travellers, and that he sold his house in Edo prior to his departure, which according to Yuasa meant that he did not expect to return. The journey then could be understood as a journey towards death – a journey from autumn into winter – and a journey into eternity. Bashō did in fact return to Edo, in the winter of 1691, but the journey recorded in haibun covers the first six months, concluding with his arrival in Ōgaki in the autumn of 1689. The Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling is somewhat different in style,

236

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86

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but records a six-month period in the latter part of 1690, before Bashō returned to Edo. It is primarily a piece of poetic prose that concludes with haiku: the piece is described by Burton Watson as ‘an elaborate headnote to the haiku with which it concludes.’ (Burton Watson, ‘Introduction’ to Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling by Matsuo Bashō, Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life, trans. Burton Watson [Boston: Shambhala, 2002], 87.) Judith Wright, ‘Poetry and its Critics’, in Going on Talking (Springwood: Butterfly Books, 1992), 35. Letter Wright to Stephen Murray-Smith, 1 June 1986, Love & Fury, 411. Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (London: Penguin, 1966), 138. Bashō, Narrow Road, 141. This recalls the alternative translation – ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep Interior’. Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009), 28. Bashō, Narrow Road, 123. Haiga is a form of Japanese painting that is based on the aesthetics of haikai; haiga are in fact often painted by haiku poets to accompany a poem. Shiro Inoue was a follower of Buson in both poetry and painting, but he also created a new form of haiga that emphasized extreme simplicity. Wright, ‘Rockface’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 420. Wright, ‘Memory’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 423. Wright, ‘Memory’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 423. Wright, ‘Dust’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 424. Wright, ‘Dust’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 424. It is easy to surmise that Wright’s evident interest in Japanese poetry was stimulated relatively late in her poetic career by her daughter Meredith’s involvement in Japanese literature, culture and life. It could be however, that Meredith’s own academic and personal interest in Japan was stimulated by her mother who comments in a letter to Tom Errey (in reply to his observations about Phantom Dwelling): ‘As to haiku, I’m of course lucky in having a daughter deeply immersed in Japanese poetry and translations thereof, so that I got fascinated by the Japanese aesthetics early – indeed, my university days provided me with a course in them, in the shape of wonderful old Professor Sadler and his history of Japan – quite the most civilizing course at Sydney Univ. in my time and thankfully remembered by me and others.’ (Letter to Tom Errey, 3rd February 1987, Love & Fury, 421.) This is a revealing statement – one that whilst acknowledging the influence of her daughter’s scholarly study of Japanese poetry, suggests that this was the stimulus for the re-awakening of an old enthusiasm rather than the birth of a new one. (Arthur Lindsay Sadler [1882–1970] was Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of

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Sydney from 1922–48 during which time he published many books on Japanese Art and Culture.) 87 Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, ‘Introduction’ to Hafiz of Shiraz: Thirty Poems (London: John Murray, 1952), 9. As well as Avery and Heath-Stubbs’ introduction, we have drawn upon a wide range of literature on the history of the ghazal. These sources include Agha Shahid Ali’s introduction to Ravishing DisUnities; Angelika Neuwirth and Thomas Bauer’s introduction to Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre; Peter Manuel’s Historical Survey of the Urdu Gazal-Song in India; Rasheda Parveen’s ‘Agah Shahid Ali’s English Ghazals and the Transformational Politics of Literary Subversion’. See Works Cited for full references. 88 Hafiz, LXXIV, Thirty Poems, 33. 89 Avery and Heath-Stubbs suggest this might be a recognition of original authorship by the singer reciting the poem (10). 90 Wright, ‘Dust’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 424. 91 Wright, ‘Winter’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 425. 92 T.S. Eliot [1917], ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 15. 93 T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ (V), in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 222. 94 Wright in interview with Heather Rusden, Transcript, Cassette 6: Side 1. 95 As ‘perfected’ by Hafiz, a ghazal is made up of between five and fifteen couplets (or beyts), sometimes more, but it is much shorter than the quasida. The two lines of each couplet are of identical scansion, and both lines of the first couplet rhyme or operate as a refrain, the same word or phrase being used. This rhyme or word/phrase is then repeated throughout the poem in the second line or hemistich of each couplet. The poet refers to him/herself by name in the final couplet. 96 Wright, ‘Winter’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 425. 97 Avery and Heath-Stubbs observe that: ‘The tendency of Sufism is pantheistic. Each human soul is a particle of the divine Absolute, and the mystic aims at a complete union with the Divine. This union is attained in the knowledge that he is himself that ultimate Reality which he seeks. But the individual self is completely annihilated in this higher Self, like the moth drawn to the candle-flame.’ (5.) 98 Wright, ‘At Cooloolah’ [The Two Fires], Collected Poems, 140. 99 Wright, ‘Connections’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 422. 100 Wright, ‘Summer’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 421. See Philip Mead’s discussion of Wright’s ‘networked language’ in Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008). 101 Wright, ‘Winter’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 425. 102 Carr, 19 April 1937, Hundreds and Thousands, 287–8.

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Conclusion 1 ‘For M.R., in Return’ was published in Poetry Australia 50: 34–5 in 1974. It was included in Fourth Quarter with the modified title ‘For M.R.’ in 1976. See Collected Poems: 1942–85 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994), 381. Wright first met Martin Robertson, a poet and Oxford Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art, in England in 1968. They corresponded on an almost monthly basis for the next twenty-five years, including a poem with every letter. 2 The allusion is to W.B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, Essays and Introductions [1961] (London: Macmillan, 1980), 522. 3 Yeats, ‘General Introduction’, 519–21. 4 Wright, ‘For M.R.’ [Fourth Quarter], Collected Poems, 381. 5 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’ [1925], in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 91. (Emphasis added.) 6 Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, Collected Poems, 92. 7 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937] (London: Virago, 1986), 9. 8 Emily Carr, ‘Wild Geese’, in Growing Pains: An Autobiography [1946] (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971), 280. 9 Carr, ‘Wild Geese’, Growing Pains, 280. 10 Carr, ‘Wild Geese’, Growing Pains, 281. 11 Emily Carr, journal entry for 26 March 1934, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1966), 104. 12 ‘[W]ays of seeing’ is an oblique reference to ‘fresh seeing’, a phrase Carr used in her first public lecture on art, given in 1930 to the Victoria branch of the Women’s Canadian Club, and published under that title in 1972. (See Emily Carr, Fresh Seeing: Two Addresses by Emily Carr [Toronto & Vancouver: Clarke & Irwin, 1972].) 13 Suzanne MacNeille, ‘Footsteps: Vancouver Island, Through an Artist’s Eyes’, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/travel/vancouver-victoria-emily-carr. html 14 Carr, 12 June 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 185. 15 Carr, 15 June 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 186. 16 Carr, 15 June 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 187. 17 Carr, 15 June 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 186. 18 Carr, 4 July 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 188. 19 William Wordsworth famously speaks of the poetic need to ‘recollect emotion in tranquillity’ in the Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads: ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ (‘Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads [1800]’ in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965], 460.)

Notes 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29

239

Carr, 19 September 1935, Hundreds and Thousands, 197. Wright, ‘Five Senses’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 186. Wright, ‘Five Senses’ [Five Senses], Collected Poems, 187. Although Wright would live for another fifteen years after the volume’s publication in 1985, this would be her last volume of new poetry. Reflecting on her poetic silence in interview with Heather Rusden in 1987/88, Wright states that prose, is ‘the natural vehicle of argument and reaches more people, and what I had to say was urgent’. (Quoted by Veronica Brady in South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright [Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998], 447.) A few years later, in 1993, when Richard Glover asked why she gave up writing poetry, Wright responded with more vehemence: ‘The fact of the matter is that the world is in such a bloody awful state that I cannot find words for it. The whole situation we’ve got ourselves into is too immense, too insane as it were, for verse to encompass. I simply feel incapable of dealing poetically with what is happening now.’ (‘World Without Words’, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 26 June 1993, 36.) Wright, ‘Words, Roses, Stars’ (for John Bèchervaise, answering a Christmas poem) [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 411. Wright, ‘Dust’ [Phantom Dwelling], Collected Poems, 424. T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, V, Collected Poems, 221. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, V, Collected Poems, 222 [‘We shall not cease from exploration’ is the first line of the last stanza of the poem and the collection.] The lines are taken from the first ‘chapter’ of Virginia’s Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own where she famously describes the interruption of thought (the little fish of an idea she is following with such excitement) by the Beadle of an Oxbridge college who admonishes her to keep off the grass: ‘he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the [male] Fellows and Scholars are allowed here . . . The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars . . . was that in protection of their turf . . . they had sent my little fish into hiding.’ (A Room of One’s Own [1928] [London: Penguin, 2004], 6.) Carr, 22 October 1936, Hundreds and Thousands, 264.

Epilogue 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (London: Penguin, 2004), 92–3. 2 Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 95–7. 3 ‘[W]hat a woman might do’ is a phrase that echoes Elizabeth’s consideration of professions available to women post-Second World War in Virginia’s Woolf ’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway: ‘she might be a doctor. She might be a farmer.’ Elizabeth, is Mrs Dalloway’s daughter – a young modern British woman of the early twentieth century

240

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5 6 7 8 9

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for whom so many more possibilities are available than for her mother; but considering them still ‘seemed so silly’, ‘it was much better to say nothing about it.’ (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 149–150. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 67. Thank you to Susan Sheridan for introducing us to DuPlessis’s Blue Studios. Susan Sheridan, ‘Generations Lost and Found: Reading Women Writers Together’, Australian Literary Studies 24.3–4 (Oct–Nov 2009), 46. Ann Vickery, Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Salt, 2007), 5. DuPlessis, Blue Studios, 65. Sheridan, ‘Generations Lost and Found’, 39. Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ [1931], in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 206.

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Warner, Marina. ‘Signs of the Fifth Element’ in The Tree of Life. New Images of An Ancient Symbol, ed. Roger Malbert. London: South Bank Centre, 1989: 6–47. Watson, Burton. ‘Introduction’ to Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling by Matsuo Bashō in Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life. Trans. Burton Watson. Boston: Shambhala, 2002: 87–88. Williams, John F. Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Woodall, Joanna. ‘ “Every Painter Paints Himself ”: Self-Portraiture and Creativity’ in Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, ed. Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall. Sydney : National Portrait Gallery, London and Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005: 17–39. Woolf, Virginia. ‘The Art of Biography’ in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961: 161–9. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vols I, II & III, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press/Penguin Books, 1979. Woolf, Virginia. ‘The Humane Art’ [written 1940] in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961: 54–8. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Hogarth Press, 1978. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. [1925] London: Penguin Books, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Professions for Women’ [1931] in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961: 201–207. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. [1928] London: Penguin, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. [1927] London: Vintage, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. [1915] London: Penguin, 1992. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Wright, Judith. Because I was Invited. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975. Wright, Judith. Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays by Judith Wright. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991. Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942–85. Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1994. Wright, Judith. The Coral Battleground. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson (Australia), 1977. Wright, Judith. The Cry for the Dead. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981. Wright, Judith. Five Senses. Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1963. Wright, Judith. The Generations of Men. [1959] Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1964. Wright, Judith. Going On Talking. Springwood: Butterfly, 1992. Wright, Judith. Half a Lifetime, ed. Patricia Clarke. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999. Wright, Judith. The Moving Image. Melbourne: Meanjin Press, 1946. Wright, Judith. The Nature of Love. [1966] Sydney : Imprint Books, 1997. Wright, Judith. Phantom Dwelling. Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1985. Wright, Judith. ‘The Poetry: An Appreciation’ in Oodgeroo, ed. Kathy Cochrane. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994: 163–183.

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Wright, Judith. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965. Wright, Judith. ‘Transcending Womanliness’ in Poetry and Gender, ed. David Brooks and Brenda Walker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989: 70–71. Wright, Judith. ‘Waiting’. Meanjin Papers II .3 (Spring 1943), 17. Wright, Judith. We Call for a Treaty. Sydney : Collins/Fontana, 1985. Yeats, W.B. Essays and Introductions [1961]. London: Macmillan, 1980. Yeats, W.B. Michael Robartes and The Dancer [1921] in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright. London: J.M. Dent, 1994: 223–238. Yeats, W.B. The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright London: J.M. Dent, 1994. Yeats, W.B. A Vision [1925] in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. (Vol XIII ) ed. Catherine Pall and Margaret Mills Harper. New York: Scribner, 2008.

Paintings by Emily Carr (discussed and included) Abstract Tree Forms. 1931–32, oil on paper, 61.1 × 91.1cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.54). Alice Carr. 1909, watercolour 44.5 × 34.6cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver & Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 25. Among the Firs. c. 1931, oil on canvas. Collection of Glenbow, Calgary, Canada (56.2.2). A Skidegate Pole. 1941–2, oil on canvas 86.4 × 76.2cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.37). A Young Tree. 1931, oil on canvas 106.7 × 68.6cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.18). Big Raven. 1931, oil on canvas, 87.0 × 114.0cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.11). Cedar. 1942, oil on canvas 111.8 × 68.6cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.28). Cedar Sanctuary. 1942, oil on paper, 91.5 × 61.0cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.71). Clara Russ. 1928, watercolour, 28.1 × 26cm. ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, British Columbia Archives PR2378, Item PDP00630. Cumshewa. 1912, watercolour over graphite on wove paper, mounted on cardboard, 52 × 75.5cm. National Gallery of Canada. Forsaken. 1937, oil on canvas 117.5 × 75.6cm. Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr Trust (42.3.12). Grey. 1931–2, oil on canvas 106.7 × 68.9cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver & Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 103.

Works Cited

251

Guyasdom’s D’Sonoqua. c. 1938, oil on canvas, 100.3 × 65.4cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2705). Gift from the Albert H. Robson Memorial Subscription Fund, 1942. Indian House Interior with Totems. 1912–13, oil on canvas, 89.6 × 130.6 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr Trust (42.3.8). Lagoon at Albert Head. c. 1940, oil on paper, 51.5 × 72.5cm. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The Thomas Gardiner Keir Bequest (1944.005.003). Laughing Bear. 1941, oil on paper 76.6 × 55.3cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 170. The Little Pine. 1931, oil on canvas, 112.0 × 68.8cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.14). Old and New Forest. c. 1931–2, oil on canvas 111.8 × 69.5cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr Trust (42.3.23). Portrait of Sophie Frank. 1914, watercolour on paper, 23.7 × 18.7cm. Collection of Jane Williams, image courtesy of Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Reproduced from Emily Carr. New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon. curator eds. Charles Hill, Johanne Lemoureux and Ian Thom (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), fig. 25, p. 65, cat no. 199. Quiet. 1942, oil on canvas 111.76 × 68.58cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 188. Red Cedar. c. 1931–3, oil on canvas 111 × 68.6cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gift of Mrs J.P. Fell (54.7). The Rum Un and the Oddity. c. 1905, ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, British Columbia Archives, PR2378, Item PDPO9009. Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky. 1935, oil on canvas, 112 × 68.9cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.15). Self-portrait. 1938–9, oil on wove paper, mounted on plywood, 85.5 × 57.7cm. National Gallery of Canada. Self-portrait. c. 1899, watercolour, sizes unknown. Private Collection. Reproduced in Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver/Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 28. Sombreness Sunlit. ca. 1937. Royal British Columbia Museum (BC Archives PDP00633). The date of this painting is unclear, 1937 being an approximate year, although it has also been dated 1938–40. Strait of Juan De Fuca. c. 1936, oil on paper 56.2 × 87cm. The Edmonton Art Gallery. Strangled by Growth. 1931, oil on canvas, 64 × 48.6cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust. (42.3.42). Sunshine and Tumult. 1939. Art Gallery of Hamilton. Bequest of H.S. Southam, 1966. Totem Mother, Ktwancoo. 1928, oil on canvas, 109.5 × 69.0cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.20).

252

Works Cited

Tree Trunk. 1931, oil on canvas, 129.1 × 56.3cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr Trust (42.3.2). Untitled (Clover Point from Dallas Road Beach). c. 1934–6, oil on paper 55.88 × 87.6cm. Private Collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 177. Untitled (Forest Interior, black, grey and white). c. 1930, oil on paper, 88.2 × 60.0cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust (42.3.56). Untitled (Self-portrait). 1924–25, oil on paperboard, 39.4 × 44.9cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr Trust (42.3.50). Untitled (Wiffen Spit near Sooke). c. 1935–6, oil on paper 57.2 × 86.36cm. Private Collection. Reproduced in Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 165. William Russ. 1928, watercolour, 31.1 × 26cm. ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’, BC Archives PR2378, Item PDP00595.

Photographs and additional paintings discussed or referenced Blackman, Charles. The Family. c. 1955, oil on board (frame 104.5 × 142cm, support 91 × 122cm). National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Morley, S.F. Emily Carr and her caravan ‘The Elephant’, 1934. Image D-03844 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives. Mortimer-Lamb, Harold. Emily Carr in Her Studio with One of Her Paintings Behind Her. 1939, negative, 6.8 × 6.0cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft. VAG 2014.55.1 a–b. Preston, Margaret. The Expulsion. 1952, gouache print. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Unknown Street Photographer. ‘Judith Wright’. Sydney, 1938. Courtesy of Meredith McKinney.

Canadian archival material ‘Emily Carr Art Collection’. British Columbia Archives. PR2378. ‘Emily Carr Papers’ in ‘Emily Carr Fonds’. British Columbia Archives. PR1263, MS-2181.

Australian archival material ‘H.C. Coombs’. National Library of Australia. Ms 802. ‘Judith Wright Papers’. National Library of Australia. Ms 5781.

Works Cited

253

Rusden, Heather. Interview with Judith Wright. National Library Oral History Project. 345263; ORAL TRC 2599; ORAL TRC 2599 (transcript).

Recent editions of Emily Carr’s writings The Book of Small. [1942] Madeira Park, BC : Douglas & McIntyre, 2004 (with introduction by Sarah Ellis). Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr. [1946] Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005 (with introduction by Robin Laurence). The Heart of the Peacock. [1953] Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005 (with introduction by Rosemary Neering). The House of All Sorts. [1944] Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004 (with introduction by Susan Musgrave). Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr. [1966] Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006 (with introduction by Gerta Moray). Klee Wyck. [1941] Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003 (with introduction by Kathryn Bridge).

254

Index Page numbers for illustrations are in italics. Page numbers including ‘n.’ indicate a note. Aboriginal people, 143–50, 154–5, 172 Aboriginal Treaty Committee, 146 and colonization, 2–3, 33, 39–40, 87 Koori, 146, 149 land rights, 143, 145, 146 Murri, 149 poetry, 147–8 rights activism, 87, 146, 149–50, 175 Wadja, 145–6 See also Oodgeroo Noonuccal abstraction, 127, 139 activism, 151–2 for Aboriginal rights, 87, 146, 149–50 anti-war, 57–8 environmental, 130, 148, 202 n.4 adolescence, 45–6, 61–4, 69–70, 71–3 affect, 2, 16–17, 36, 105–6 grief, 118 guilt, 71, 84, 85, 155–6, 182–3 ageing, 163–4 agency, 186–7 alcoholism, 158–9 ambition, 67, 70, 71–3 America. See United States of America (USA) Amsden, Philip, 124 Angry Penguins (journal), 95 anthropology, 92 anthropomorphism, 26 Appelhof, Ruth, 68 appropriation, 156 Arabian Nights, The, 71–2 Arnold, Matthew, 103 Arnott, Georgina, 76, 115 art and affect, 16–17 Australian, 16 and community, 8–9, 11–13 Fauvism, 91, 92

and gender, 4–8 haiga paintings, 179, 236 n.80 Indoor/Outdoor, 65, 68 and justice, 146–7, 149–50 landscape, 65, 86–7, 93–4, 131–4 life classes, 67–8 Modernism, 91–2, 93–4 movement in, 25–6 religious, 140–1 sexuality in, 136–41 still life, 68 truth of, 24, 26, 106, 170, 191 value of, 105–6 as work, 66–7 and writing, 16–17 See also Carr, Emily, artworks; First Nations people, art of artists detachment of, 58 education of, 62–5 Seattle Fine Arts Society, 125, 127 self-portraits of, 20–2 Victoria Island Arts and Crafts Society, 125 See also Group of Seven artists, women, 4–8, 187–8 and motherhood, 58, 65–6 outsider status of, 24, 43–4, 59–60, 62–4, 72–3, 159 representations of, 21–2 Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, 6 Australia, 8, 38, 130 Aboriginal people, 143–50, 154–5, 172 (See also Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker)) Aboriginal Treaty Committee, 146 and colonization, 2–3, 32–3, 39–40, 87

255

256

Index

Koori, 146, 149 land rights, 143, 145, 146 Murri, 149 poetry, 147–8 rights activism, 87, 146, 149–50, 175 Wadja, 145–6 Aboriginal Treaty Committee, 146 Braidwood, 162 Brisbane, 93, 98, 108–9, 116 Cedar Creek, 109–10 Dalwood, 145, 146 environmental damage, 2, 22–3 landscape, 40, 41, 42–3 and Modernism, 93–5 natural world of, 36 New England, 40, 43, 82–3 New South Wales, 9 poetry of, 94–6 Queensland, 9, 42–3, 62, 82, 106, 197 Sydney, 76–7, 78, 86, 197 Tambourine Mountain, 62, 106, 107–8, 109–10 University of Sydney, 76–7 visual art of, 16 Wadja Plain, 145–6 Wallamumbi (Wollumumbi), 38, 46–7, 97–8, 146, 229 n.3 autobiography, 27–8, 29–44 and childhood, 31–2 and family, 31, 32–4, 39–42, 44 and honesty, 31 indigenous people in, 39–40 and memory, 29–30 and mothers/motherhood, 33–4 outsider status in, 39–44 and place, 35–8, 42–3 and space, 33–5 visual, 24–6, 169 Barbeau, Marius, 126 Barjai (writers’ group), 108–9, 219 n.71 Bashō, Matsuo, 178, 180, 235 n.72 Bear, Shirley, 150, 160 beauty aesthetic, 34, 67–8 feminine, 18 of First Nations art, 52–3 of the natural world, 26, 37, 41, 42, 46–7, 119

loss of, 154, 179 and truth, 10, 102, 190 Benko, Nancy, 16 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, Ecstasy of St Theresa, 140–1 Bertaux, Leon, 6 bigness, 67, 156–7, 162–3, 167 birds, 89–90, 153–6, 190–1 birth, 47–8, 50–1 Blackman, Barbara, 16, 108–9, 117, 223 n.62 Blackman, Charles, 117 The Family, 108, 223 n.62 Blanchard, Paula, 123, 136 Blight, John, 116 bodies, 67–9 Bosch, Lodewyck, 139 botany, 35–7 Brady, Veronica, South of My Days, 30 Britain. See United Kingdom Brown, Eric, 19, 126, 157 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 174, 213 n.19 Buckley, Vincent, 5, 59 Bulletin, The (journal), 1, 201 n.2 Buson, Yosa, 179 California School of Design (San Francisco), 63–5 Canada, 8, 32 Albert Head, 188–9 British Columbia, 41, 121–2, 152 Canadian National Gallery, 126 Cumshewa, 152–3 and England, 37–8 Gitanyow/Kitwancool, 52, 89 Gwa’yasdams/Guyasdoms, 53–4 Hiitats’uu/Ucluelet, 87 landscape, 42 natural world of, 35–6 Ottawa, 126 Queen Charlotte Islands, 152 Toronto, 126 Tsaxis/Fort Rupert, 54 Ucluelet, 157 Ustlawn/North Vancouver, 87–8 Vancouver, 86, 93 Vancouver Art Gallery, 150 Vancouver Island, 62, 87, 157, 188–9 Victoria, 41, 122–3

Index Victoria Island Arts and Crafts Society, 125 See also First Nations people Capp, Fiona, 172–3 caricatures, 20 Carr, Alice, 18, 31, 63, 88 Carr, Emily, 12, 162 activism, 151–2 adolescence, 45–6, 61–2 ambition, 67, 71–3 art as vocation, 65–8 awards, 125 bigness, 67, 156–7, 162–3, 167 career, 67, 71–3, 86 childhood, 31–2, 33, 34–5 and colonization, 152–3, 155–6, 159–60 critical response to, 121 difference, 62–3 disease/illness, 163–4, 166–7 education, 41–2, 62–5 ‘the Elephant’ (caravan), 162–3, 187–8 family, 18, 31, 32–3, 44, 45–6, 48 and First Nations people, 39–40, 87–93, 127, 143, 211 n.49 influence of, 3–4, 124–5, 150–60 in France, 91–2, 96 friendships, 125–6, 131–3, 135–6, 167–8 with Ira Dilworth, 164–7 with Sophie Frank, 143, 157–60 with Lawren Harris, 131–41 and gender, 43–4 guilt, 85 homes, 122–4, 162–3 as landlady, 122–4, 127–8 later life, 161–71 ‘Lecture on Totems’, 151–2 marriage, refusal of, 66 midlife, 121–30 money, 123, 124, 127–8 mother, 45–6, 48 ‘mother countries’, 80–1 and motherhood, 48–9, 57 and national identity, 37–9, 86 outsider status, 39–44, 89, 159 and place, 34–6, 42–3 and plants, 36–7 portraits of, 17

257

and power, 23–4 reputation of, 3–4, 96, 150–1 sexuality, 66, 68–70, 136–9 ‘Small’ persona, 20, 24–5, 31–2, 164, 166–7 spirituality, 135, 140, 168, 189–90 travel, 79–80, 87–93, 96, 126–7 Carr, Emily, works art abstraction, 127, 139 Abstract Tree Forms, 139–40, 141 Alice Carr, 1909, 18 Among the Firs, 186 Big Raven, 153–4, 155 caricatures, 20 Cedar Sanctuary, 169–70 Clara Russ, 19–20 Cumshewa, 152, 153, 155 drawings, 139 First Nations subjects, 19–20, 52–4, 88–93, 152–4 Grey, 129 Guyasdom’s D’Sonoqua, 54 Indian House Interior with Totems, 89, 152 Lagoon at Albert Head, 188–9 later life, 168–71 The Little Pine, 34, 37, 169 Mrs. Douse, Chieftainess of Kitwancool, 19, 52 Old and New Forest, 128–9 portraits, 18–20 pottery, 124–5 ‘The Rum Un and the Oddity’, 20 Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 24–6, 188 Self-portrait (1924), 21–2 Self-portrait (1938), 23–4 self-portraits, 20–2, 23–6 sketches, 19 ‘Small (Self Portrait)’, 20 Sombreness Sunlit, 10 Sophie Frank, 19, 158, 161 Strangled by Growth, 55–6 Sunshine and Tumult, 10–12 Totem Mother, Kitwancool, 52–3 ‘Tree Trunk’, 68–9 Tree Trunk, 141, 169 untitled (1931–2), 128

258 William Russ, 19–20 A Young Tree, 133–4, 135 exhibitions, 93, 121–2, 125–6, 139 Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, 150, 151, 231 n.29 writing, 164–6, 207 n.10 Alaska Journal, 88 art, stimulus to, 16–17 autobiographical, 5–6, 27–8, 31–5, 44 The Book of Small, 24, 28, 31–2, 35–6, 39–40, 165–6 ‘The Cow Yard’, 31, 35, 41 ‘Cumshewa’, 152–3 ‘Difference Between Nude and Naked’, 67–8 Emily Carr and her Dogs, 124 Growing Pains, 24, 27, 31, 44, 132, 165, 187 The Heart of a Peacock, 31, 88 The House of All Sorts, 123–4 ‘How Lizzie Was Shamed Right Through’, 31 Hundreds and Thousands, 5–6, 131–2 journals, 5–6, 16 ‘Kitwancool’, 89 Klee Wyck, 4, 16, 19, 36, 53, 152–3, 157, 158, 164, 166, 232 n.45 ‘A Little Town and a Little Girl’, 32 ‘Martyn’, 66 ‘Mrs. Tucket’, 65–6 ‘The Orange Lily’, 138 ‘Sisters Coming – Sisters Going’, 64 ‘Sophie’, 158, 232 n.64 ‘Sunday’, 35 ‘Ucluelet’, 157, 232 n.45 ‘White Currants’, 138–9 Wild Flowers, 36–7 ‘Wild Geese’, 187 Carr, Emily Saunders, 33, 34, 45 Carr, Richard, 33, 34, 213 n.12 cats, 72–3 Cheney, Nan, 17, 19, 26, 131, 136 childhood, 30, 31–5, 39–40, 57, 65–6, 207 n.10 Christesen, Clem, 95, 100, 101, 102–3 Clarke, Patricia, 30, 149

Index class, social, 32–3, 38–9, 57 clothes, 77–8 Clouston, Brian, 147 Cochrane, Kathy, 148 colonization, 38, 154–5 apologies for, 149–50 and childhood, 32 complicity in, 40 effacement of, 152–3, 155–6, 159–60 and Indigenous people, 2–3, 33, 39–40, 87, 143–6 injustice of, 175 and modernity, 1, 194 ‘mother countries’, 8–9, 37–8, 79, 80–1 and subjectivity, 30, 32, 39–40, 43–4, 81 white settlers, 1, 81–2, 154–6 witness to, 149–50, 157, 160 colour, 91 conventions, social, 41 Coombs, Herbert Cole (‘Nugget’), 161, 171, 172–4, 181–2 Crean, Susan, 129, 150, 159, 160 Cristesen, Nina, 100 Crosby, Marcia, 19–20, 211 n.49 culture, 103, 110, 152–3 Daily Colonist (newspaper), 121, 139 dance, 34 Dater, Judy, Self-portrait with Parents, 18 death, 80, 83–5, 163 of indigenous culture, 152–3 of Jack McKinney, 116–20 and motherhood, 45–6, 47–8, 56–7 and natural cycle, 27, 50–1 and trees, 48 detachment, 58 difference, 32–3, 39–40, 62–3, 76–7, 82 See also outsider status Dilworth, Ira, 4, 24, 31, 141, 161, 164–7 disease/illness, 45, 101–2, 103–4, 116–17, 163–4, 166–7 disobedience, 40–1 distance, artistic, 58 divorce, 99–100, 107, 135–6 Dobson, Rosemary, 49 dogs, 124, 136–7 domesticity, 22–3, 35, 72–3, 75, 97, 100–1 Douse, Mrs (Chieftainess of Gitanyow/ Kitwancool), 19, 52

Index dreams, 136–7 D’Sonoqua (mythological figure). See Dzunuk’wa DuPlessis, Rachel, 194–5 Dzunuk’wa (mythological figure), 52, 53–4, 55 Eakin, Paul John, 28 Eden, Garden of, 40–1, 46–7, 145–6 education, 76–7 of artists, 62–5 of women, 73, 195, 197, 198–9 Eliot, T. S., 101–2, 183 ‘Burnt Norton’, 102 Four Quartets, 101–2, 168, 172, 181 ‘Gerontion’, 102 ‘The Hollow Men’, 101, 102, 105, 186 ‘Little Gidding’, 102, 168, 172, 181 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 101 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 12, 180–1 Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (exhibition), 150, 231 n.29 emotion, 2, 16–17, 36, 105–6 grief, 118 guilt, 71, 84, 85, 155–6, 182–3 England. See United Kingdom Engledow, Sarah, 109–10 Englishness, 5, 35–6, 37–8, 78–80, 82–3 environmental activism, 130, 148, 202 n.4 environmental damage, 2, 22–3 Ern Malley hoax, 95 eroticism, 136–41, 166 Eurydice, 118 exuberance, 34 Fall (Biblical), 22–3, 40–1, 46–7, 145–6 family, 45–6 and autobiography, 31, 32–4, 39–42, 44 of Emily Carr, 18, 31, 32–3, 44 of Judith Wright, 17–18, 32–3 representations of, 17–18, 108, 109–10, 223 n.62 See also adolescence; childhood; mothers fathers/fatherhood, 33, 43 Fauvism, 91, 92

259

feeling, 2, 16–17, 36, 105–6 grief, 118 guilt, 71, 84, 85, 155–6, 182–3 felicity, 111–12 femininity in art, 6–7 and beauty, 18 lack of, 24, 59, 70–1 of the natural world, 50, 51–2, 54 and smallness, 24–5 of trees, 34, 169–70, 186 in writing, 5 feminism, 4–5, 75–6, 193–5, 198–9 feminist reception, 194–5 fertility, 48, 50–1, 83 First Nations people, 39–40, 52, 127, 143 art, 89–91, 124–8 beauty of, 52–3 carvings, 87–8, 129, 152–3 influence of, 3–4, 124–5, 150–60 promotion of, 3–4, 151–2 thunderbirds, 89–90 totem poles, 52–3, 55–6, 87–91, 128, 151–3, 211 n.51 Douse, Mrs (Chieftainess of Gitanyow/ Kitwancool), 19, 52 Frank, Sophie, 19, 57, 87–8, 143, 157–60, 161, 232 n.64 Haida, 19, 88, 152–3 mythology, 89–90 representations of, 19–20, 52–4, 88–93, 121–2, 152–4 Russ, Clara and William, 19–20 Squamish, 19, 87 Tlingit, 88 First World War, 103–4 flowers, 109–11, 185 foreignness, 82 France, 91–2, 96 Frank, Sophie, 19, 57, 87–8, 143, 157–60, 161, 232 n.64 Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career, 34, 71, 76 freedom, 61–2, 66–7, 72–3, 76, 77, 98–9 funerals, 80 gardens, 35–6, 110 gender and art, 4–8 and artistic production, 65

260

Index

and artistic vocation, 22 boundaries, 43, 59–60 equality, 100–1 hierarchies of, 33 and marriage, 61 roles, 41, 43–4, 63, 71–4, 81, 99–100 See also femininity Gentileschi, Artemisia, 22 Gibb, Harry Phelan, 59–60, 91, 219 n.66 God, 168–9, 189 Green, Dorothy, 17 grief, 118 Group of Seven (artists’ group), 5–6, 52, 59, 131, 167–8, 201 n.3 work by, 69, 126–7 guilt, 71, 84, 85, 155–6, 182–3 Hafiz (Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muhammad), 179, 180, 183, 237 n.95 Hanson-Lowe, J., 103 Harris, Bess Larkin Housser, 135–7 Harris, Lawren, 6, 17, 126–7, 131–41 Above Lake Superior, 132 Harris, Max, 5, 95 Heidelberg School, 1, 201 n.2 Hembroff-Schleicher, Edythe, 17, 26, 49, 123, 127, 139 hierarchies of gender, 33 social, 32–3 Hodgkins, Frances, 96 home, 41–2, 106, 107–8, 122–4, 161–3 Hope, A. D., 43, 95, 107, 120–1 Housser, Bess Larkin, 135–7 Housser, F. B. (Fred), 132, 135–7 Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 186–7 identity, national, 37–8, 59–60, 78–80, 86, 185–6 illegitimacy, 197 illness. See disease/illness imagery, 123 anaesthesia, 101–2 birds, 89–90, 153–6, 190–1 circularity, 185–6 disease/illness, 101–2 flowers, 110–11, 185 metaphor, 75, 166

personification, 26 shadows, 118–20, 146, 148–9, 186 sleep, 101–2 sun, 118–20 trees, 128–9, 131–4 immanence, 25 immortality, 27 independence, 63–5, 73–4 financial, 70, 77–8 indigenous people, 2–4, 39–40, 202 n.4 as guardians of natural world, 154–5 land rights, 39–40, 43, 143, 145, 146 mythology, 52–4 power of, 155 representations of, 19–20, 52 See also Aboriginal people; First Nations people individualism, 11–13 inheritance, 74, 107 inhibition, 67–8 Inside/Outside duality, 35, 36, 41–2, 47, 63 and gender roles, 71–3 and opportunities for women, 75 insiders/outsiders, 32–3, 39–44 See also outsider status irony, 30, 71, 72, 180 Ishtar (goddess), 50–1 Jackson, A. Y., 131, 153 Japan, 178, 235 n.72, 236 n.86 journeys, 79–81, 87–93, 96, 117, 126–7 Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 30, 43–4 Jung, C. G., 120 justice, 146–7, 149–50 Keats, John, 65, 183, 214 n.29 Kipling, Rudyard, ‘Cat that Walked by Himself ’, 72–3 künstlerroman, 30, 31 Lamoureux, Johanne, 55–6 land ownership, 34–5, 74 indigenous rights to, 39–40, 43, 143, 145, 146 landscape, 42–3, 96 art, 65, 86–7, 93–4, 131–4 Australian, 40, 41, 42–3 Canadian, 42

Index Lawson, James, 63, 64, 213 n.13 Légrange, Leon, 6 life, cycle of, 47–8 life classes, 67–8 life writing. See autobiography Lismer, Arthur, 131 love, 9–10, 57, 84, 160 sexual, 104–5, 110–12 love poetry, 181–3 Lowell, Amy, ‘A Decade’, 111 lyricism, 164–5 MacArthur, Kathleen, 36 MacLeish, Archibald, 101–2, 105, 222 n.27 Macnair, Peter, 88 Mansfield, Katherine, 94, 100 marginalization, 40–4, 49, 59–60 See also outsider status marriage, 99–100 common-law, 106–7 divorce, 99–100, 107, 135–6 and gender, 61 refusal of, 66, 70 work, opposed to, 66 materiality, 26–7, 189–90 Maynard, Max, 6–7 McArthur, Kathleen, 108 McAuley, James, 22, 95 McKague, Yvonne, 136 McKinney, Jack, 9, 49, 62, 93, 98–113, 171–2 death, 110, 116–18 domesticity of, 100–1 and modernity, 104–5 portrait of, 109–10 women, attitudes to, 99 in Wright’s poetry, 110–13 writing, 101–6 The Challenge of Reason, 104 Crucible, 103–4 ‘The Poet and the Intellectual Environment’, 101–2, 105–6 The Structure of Modern Thought, 104 McKinney, Meredith, 30, 104, 112 birth, 49–50, 106 and Coombs, H. C. (‘Nugget’), 172, 173 and Japanese culture, 178, 236 n.86 portrait of, 109–10

261

McLeod, Glen, 91 Mead, Philip, 120 Meanjin Papers (journal), 93, 98, 101–4, 105–6 memoir. See autobiography memory and autobiography, 29–30 and selfhood, 31–2 men domesticity, 100–1 fathers/fatherhood, 33, 43 Meskimmon, Marsha, 18, 24, 28 metaphor, 75, 166 Middleton Murray, John, 100 mimesis, 16 missionaries, 156, 157 Modernism, 1, 16, 77, 91–2, 93–6, 101–2 modernity, 96, 104–5 colonial, 1, 194 money, 70, 77–8, 115, 123, 124, 127–8 inheritance, 74, 107 poverty, 158–9, 195 Montaigne, Michel de, 15 morality, 67–8, 102–3 Moray, Gerta, 59, 129 and The Book of Small, 39 on Carr’s paintings, 19, 49, 127, 158 Morley, S. F., 162 Morra, Linda, 164 Mortimer-Lamb, Harold, 11 ‘mother countries’, 8–9, 37–8, 79, 80–1 Mother Earth, 50, 51–2 motherhood, 45–60, 99–100 and autobiography, 33–4 and creative process, 49, 50–2 and death, 45–6, 47–8, 56–7 desire for, 46–8 and nation, 55–6 and the natural world, 46–7, 50–2, 54–5 and power, 52 as symbol, 43 mothers, 18, 33–4, 45–8, 195–9 as artists, 58, 65–6 First Nations people as, 57 representations of, 50–1, 52–3 movement, in artworks, 25–6 music, 33, 35, 197–8 mythology, 52–4, 89–90, 95–6, 118

262 nakedness, 67–8 narrative, 19, 71–3 national identity, 37–8, 59–60, 78–80, 86, 185–6 nationalism, 96 natural world, 34–6, 54–6, 110, 187–8 Australian, 36 beauty of, 26, 37, 41, 42, 46–7, 119 Canadian, 35–6 cycles of, 27, 50–1 as feminine, 50, 51–2, 54 fragility of, 154, 179 indigenous people as guardians of, 154–5 and mothers/motherhood, 46–7, 50, 51–2 return to, 152–3 violence of, 55–6 Newcombe, Charles, 121–2, 225 n.29 New Zealand, 176–7, 195 nudity, 67–8 Nugget. See Coombs, H. C. nurture, 54–5 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 68, 214 n.44 Olley, Margaret, 17 Olsson, John, 19 Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), 143–4, 145–9, 160 ‘Sister Poet’, 148–9, 230 n.22, 231 n.28 We Are Going, 147–8, 230 n.18 Orpheus, 118 others/otherness, 32–3, 39–40, 76–7, 82 See also gender; race outsider status, 39–44, 49, 89, 182–3 of women artists, 24, 43–5, 59–60, 62–4, 72–3, 159 Paddon, William Mayo, 66, 85, 137 Palmer, Nettie, 116 paradise, loss of, 22–3, 40–1, 46–7, 145–6 patriarchy familial, 33, 35, 45 and inheritance, 74 patriotism, 96 Patterson, Viola and Ambrose, 125 Pearson, Carol, 49 personification, 26 place, 35–8

Index home, 41–2, 106, 107–8, 122–4, 161–3 ‘mother countries’, 8–9, 37–8, 79, 80–1 See also Australia; Canada; landscape plants, 35–7, 138–9 flowers, 109–11, 185 gardens, 35–6, 110 native, 82 See also trees poetry Aboriginal, 147–8 Australian, 94–6, 147–8 form of, 176–83 ghazal, 176, 179–83, 237 n.95 haiku, 176, 178, 236 n.80 love, 181–3 lyricism, 164–5 Modernist, 77, 94–5, 101–2 and painting, 15–16 processes of, 190–1 quasida, 180 Romantic, 164–5 See also imagery; Wright, Judith, poems Poetry Review (journal), 116 portraits and autobiography, 30 of Carr, Emily, 17 of indigenous people, 19–20, 52 poems as, 17–18 of Wright, Judith, 108, 109–10 See also self-portraits poverty, 158–9, 195 power desire for, 71–2 of indigenous people, 155 maternal, 52 of nature, 51, 55–6 patriarchal, 33, 35, 45 of women, 23–4, 52–3, 54–7 Preston, Margaret, 94 The Expulsion, 146 privilege, 7, 38–9, 115, 155 prophets/prophecy, 5, 22, 27, 102–3, 106, 150 prostitution, 158–9 Province (newspaper), 121 prudishness, 67–8 race, 32–3, 150–1 See also indigenous people

Index racism, 146, 150, 151–2, 160 realism, 16 reception, feminist, 194–5 religion, 135, 156 in art, 140–1 Fall (Biblical), 22–3, 40–1, 46–7, 145–6 God, 168–9, 189 goddesses, 50–1 indigenous, 52–4 missionaries, 156, 157 spirituality, 117, 131–4, 140, 168 Theosophy, 92, 132, 135, 136 Robertson, Martin, 185, 238 n.1 role models, 73–4 Rooney, Brigid, 96, 147, 178 Rusden, Heather, 76, 174, 181 Russ, Clara and William, 19–20 Said, Edward, 81, 169 Sanctuary (radio programme), 164–5 San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honour, 125 Schama, Simon, 140–1 Seattle Fine Arts Society, 125, 127 Second World War, 83–5, 97–8 self-consciousness, 37 selfhood, 12–13, 28, 31–2, 119–20, 182–3 and colonization, 39–40, 81 and irony, 30 self-portraits, 11–12, 15–28 as autobiography, 27–8 of Emily Carr, 20–2, 23–6, 27–8 of Judith Wright, 22–3, 26–8 non-representational, 24–7 through portraits, 19 and truth, 28 visual, 15, 19, 20–6, 27–8 written, 15, 19, 22–3, 26–8 sensuality, 138–9 servants, 32–3, 35 sexism, 4–8, 74 familial, 33, 35, 45 sexuality, 66, 68–70, 77, 112, 119, 136–41 sex work, 158–9 Shadbolt, Doris, 24, 64, 140, 153, 169 shadows, 118–20, 146, 148–9, 186 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11, 165 Sheridan, Susan, 194, 199 Shiro, Murano, 179

263

Sibley, Andrew, 17 singing, 33, 35 singularity, 72–3 smallness, 20, 24–5, 31–2, 162–3, 164, 166–7 Smith, Angela, 39–40 Smith, Grace Cossington, 94 space, 33–5 gardens, 35–6, 110 See also natural world; place spirituality, 26–7, 117, 131–4, 140, 168, 189–90 Stew, Ian, 88 Stewart, Harold, 95 still life, 68 storytelling, 71–3 Strauss, Jennifer, 118 subjectivity, 30, 32, 39–40, 81 talk/talking, 98–9, 132–3 Talmadge, Algernon, 130 tameness, 80–1 Theosophy, 92, 132, 135, 136 thunderbirds, 89–90 Tippett, Maria, 66, 86, 126, 150–1 Tobey, Mark, 125, 127, 128 totem poles, 52–3, 55–6, 87–91, 128, 151–3, 211 n.51 Traherne, Thomas, 10, 111–12, 118–19, 203 n.38 travel, 79–81, 87–93, 96, 117, 126–7 trees as autobiographical figures, 24–7 darkness, symbolic of, 128–9 and death, 48 English, 80–1, 82–3 femininity of, 34, 169–70, 186 native, 86 representations of, 37, 139–40, 168 spirituality, symbolic of, 131–4 truth, 51, 64, 111–13, 172, 187–8, 191 of artistic vision, 24, 26, 106, 170, 191 autobiographical, 28, 29 and beauty, 10, 102, 190 and witness, 146, 160 Udall, Sharyn, 24, 139–40 Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, 6

264 United Kingdom, 8–9 Edinburgh, 194–5 Epping Forest, 80–1 Westminster School of Art, London, 68, 79 United States of America (USA) Alaska, 87–8 California School of Design (San Francisco), 63–5 San Francisco, 63–5 San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honour, 125 Seattle Fine Arts Society, 125, 127 Sitka, 87–8 Vancouver Art Gallery, 150 Vickery, Ann, 194 violence, 55–6, 124 Walcott, Derek, 9 Walker, Kath. See Oodgeroo Noonuccal Walker, Shirley, 116 war, 57–8, 83–5, 86, 97–8, 103–4 White, Patrick, The Tree of Man, 95 Whitely, John, 19, 130 whiteness, 155–6 white settlers, 1, 81–2, 154–6 Whitman, Walt, 132 women agency of, 186–7 collaboration of, 194–5 education of, 73, 195, 197, 198–9 friendship of, 167–8, 193–4 girls, 34–5, 45–6, 61–4, 69–70, 71–3 monumental representations of, 54–7 never-married, 66, 74, 97 opportunities, lack of, 74, 75 power of, 23–4, 52–3, 54–7 regulation of, 34–5 representations of, 68–9 role models, 73–4 roles of, 41, 43–4, 63, 71–4, 81, 99–100 single, 66, 74, 97 unwomanliness, 24 work of, 195, 197 women artists, 4–8, 187–8 and motherhood, 58, 65–6 outsider status of, 24, 43–4, 59–60, 62–4, 72–3, 159

Index representations of, 21–2 Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, 6 Woolf, Virginia, 8–9, 12, 46, 98–9, 105, 199 To the Lighthouse, 7 and Mansfield, Katherine, 94 A Room of One’s Own, 7, 70–1, 73, 107, 193 ‘A Sketch of the Past’, 29–30 The Voyage Out, 61 Wordsworth, William, 65, 165, 189, 214 n.28, 239 n.19 work art as, 66–7 marriage, opposed to, 66 sex, 158–9 of women, 195, 197 World War I, 103–4 World War II, 83–5, 97–8 Wright, Albert, 82 Wright, Arundel, 17 Wright, Edith, 18 Wright, Ethel, 18, 33, 45, 46 Wright, Judith, 1, 30, 32, 40–1, 78 and Aboriginal people, 2–3, 39–40, 143–50 activism, 172, 173, 175–6 for Aboriginal rights, 87, 146, 149–50 anti-war, 57–8 environmental, 130, 148, 202 n.4 adolescence, 45–6, 61–2, 69–70, 71–3 ambition, 70 and autobiography, 30 awards, 2, 17 campaigns of, 2–3, 23 career, 97–8, 115–16, 120–1 childhood, 31, 32–3 critical response to, 116 difference, 76–7 education, 76–7 and Ern Malley hoax, 95 family, 17–18, 32–3, 45–8 friendships, 108–9, 145–9, 185, 231 n.28 and gender, 43–4 guilt, 71 homes, 93, 106, 107–8, 161–2 later life, 120–1, 171–83

Index and marriage, 70, 99–100 midlife, 115–20 and Modernism, 95–6 and modernity, 104–5 money, 74, 77–8, 107, 115 mother, 18, 45–8 ‘mother countries’, 80–1 and motherhood, 49–51, 99–100 and national identity, 37–8, 86 outsider status, 39–44, 182–3 and place, 36, 42–3 and plants, 36 portraits of, 108, 109–10 and portraiture, 17–18 as prophet, 2, 5, 22, 27, 106 relationships with H. C. (‘Nugget’) Coombs, 161, 171, 172–4, 181–2 with Jack McKinney, 98–100, 104–5, 106–7, 110–13, 116–20, 171–2 reputation of, 1–2, 96 self-portraits, 22–3, 26–8 short stories, 145 travel, 79–81, 93 and visual art, 16–17 Wright, Judith, works books Alive, 112 Because I was Invited, 176 Born of the Conquerors, 145 Collected Poems, 2, 110–11, 224 n.74 The Cry for the Dead, 32, 87, 145–6 Five Senses, 110, 118–19, 224 n.74, 239 n.23 Fourth Quarter, 9–10, 110, 169, 171, 174, 176 The Generations of Men, 32, 145, 146 Half a Lifetime, 17–18, 27–8, 30, 32, 71–2, 76, 149 The Moving Image, 75, 84–5, 96, 106, 108, 116 The Other Half, 69–70 Phantom Dwelling, 176–83, 190 Poetry, 1948, 4, 60 Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, 38 Shadow, 112, 117, 119–20, 130, 171–2

265 We Call for a Treaty, 87 Woman to Man, 2, 5, 96, 106, 116 essays, 229 n.3 ‘The Granite Rocks of New England’, 40, 209 n.58 poems ‘After the Visitors’, 174, 235 n.56 ‘Australia’, 130 ‘Bachelor Uncle’, 17–18 ‘The beach at Hokitika’, 176–7 ‘Bora Ring’, 87, 144 ‘Brevity’, 177–8 ‘Bullocky’, 84 ‘At Cedar Creek’, 110, 175–6 ‘Child and Wattle-tree’, 37, 208 n.12 ‘Company of Lovers’, 84–5 ‘Connections’, 183 ‘At Cooloolah’, 149, 154, 182, 230 n.22 ‘Country Town’, 75 ‘Cyclone and Aftermath’, 55 ‘A Dedication’/’The Forest’, 110–11, 224 n.74 ‘Dust’, 180 ‘Eurydice in Hades’, 118 ‘Five Senses’, 190 form of, 176–83 ‘Four Poems from New Zealand, 176–7 ghazal, 179–83 ‘Habitat’, 106 haiku, 176, 178 ‘Half Dream’, 171 ‘Ishtar’, 50–1 ‘Late Meeting’, 177 ‘Love Song in Absence’, 112–13, 171–2 ‘The Marks’, 31 ‘Moving South’, 169, 176 ‘For M.R., in Return’, 185–6, 238 n.1 ‘Naked Girl and Mirror’, 69 ‘For New England’, 82–3, 84 ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England, 87, 144 ‘Notes at Edge’, 177–8, 179 ‘Old House’, 144–5 as portraits, 17–18 ‘In Praise of Marriages’, 106–7 ‘Rainforest’, 177

266

Index ‘Remembering an Aunt’, 17–18, 74, 76, 97 ‘Request to a Year’, 58 ‘Shadow’, 119–20 ‘The Shadow of Fire’, 179 ‘The Slope’, 112 ‘Smalltown Dance’, 74, 75–6 ‘South of My Days’, 84 ‘This Time Alone’, 119, 120 ‘The Trains’, 84 ‘Turning Fifty’, 22–3 ‘Two Dreamtimes’, 143–4, 146–7, 231 n.28 ‘Two Songs for the World’s End’, 57–8 ‘Unpacking Books’, 9–10 ‘The Vision’, 117, 118, 172, 180, 183

‘Waiting’, 101–2 ‘Waiting Ward’, 56–7 ‘The Watcher’, 54 ‘The Wattle-Tree’, 26–7 ‘Wedding Photograph, 1913’, 18, 47–8 ‘Winter’, 180, 182, 183 ‘Woman to Man’, 22 ‘Words, Roses, Stars’, 190 Wright, May, 46, 70, 73–4, 82, 145–6 Wright, Phillip, 33, 107 Wright, Weeta, 17, 74 writing/writers, 74, 108–9, 219 n.71 See also Carr, Emily, writing; poetry; Wright, Judith Yeats, W. B., 26, 51, 105, 185

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Figure 1 Emily Carr, Sunshine and Tumult, 1939.

Figure 3 Emily Carr, Untitled (Self-portrait), 1924–25.

Figure 4 Emily Carr, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935.

Figure 5 Emily Carr, The Little Pine, 1931.

Figure 6 Emily Carr, Totem Mother, Kitwancool, 1928.

Figure 7 Emily Carr, Tree Trunk, 1931.

Figure 9 Emily Carr, Indian House Interior with Totems, 1912–13.

Figure 10 Charles Blackman, The Family, c.1955.

Figure 11 Emily Carr, Untitled (Forest Interior, black, grey and white), c.1930.

Figure 12 Emily Carr, Abstract Tree Forms, 1931–32.

Figure 13 Emily Carr, Cumshewa, 1912.

Figure 14 Emily Carr, Big Raven, 1931.

Figure 15 Emily Carr, Portrait of Sophie Frank, c.1908.

Figure 17 Emily Carr, Cedar Sanctuary, 1942.

Figure 18 Emily Carr, Among the Firs, c.1931.

Figure 19 Emily Carr, Lagoon at Albert Head, c1940.