Judith Wright

Judith Wright (1915–2000) was an Australian poet, environmentalist, and Aboriginal-rights advocate whose lyric meditations on the New England tableland and the Queensland rainforests are central to twentieth-century Australian literature. She published more than a dozen volumes of verse, helped found the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1962, and campaigned alongside Aboriginal leader Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) for land rights and treaty.

She was born Judith Arundell Wright on May 31, 1915, at Thalgarrah Station near Armidale, New South Wales, the eldest child of Phillip Arundell Wright, a wealthy pastoralist, and Ethel Bigg. Educated at home by her mother and then at the New England Girls' School, she read English at the University of Sydney from 1934 to 1936 and worked as a secretary in Sydney and at the University of Queensland.

Her reputation was made by her first collection, The Moving Image (1946), and consolidated by Woman to Man (1949), whose title poem startled readers with its frank treatment of conception and pregnancy.

From 1950 she lived with the philosopher Jack McKinney at Mount Tamborine in Queensland, raising their daughter Meredith and writing the histories The Generations of Men (1959) and The Cry for the Dead (1981) about her squatter forebears and the Aboriginal peoples they displaced. She moved near Braidwood, New South Wales, in 1975, and died in Canberra on June 25, 2000.

The name Judith comes from the Hebrew Yehudit, meaning woman of Judea, and is associated with the heroine of the deuterocanonical Book of Judith; she carried it as a quietly biblical given name through her long public life.