PENTECOST 2006 SPECIAL EDITION
ISSUE 7 - ISSN 1448 - 6326
WE ARE TURNED INTO A GREAT TREE:
Judith Wright’s strange word about trees
GREG SMITH
Abstract
Poetic images retain the flesh and aroma of experience; memorable images dramatise movements to identity, empowerment and the righting of wrongs. Judith Wright uses metaphors of the bud, flame tree growth, compass heart, ageless crimson rose, rising sap, implacable heart, and “lovers who share one mind” to express human and cosmic yearning for fufillment or salvation. In her poems we hear the great mystery of life in the dynamic interdependence of waterfall, tree ferns and mountain gum. Judith Wright’s metaphysical connections grow from these observations upon the lives of various trees. Her ethical imperatives, her celebrations of patient waiting and her admiration of nature’s abundance and beauty in these poems continue to ignite theological reflections for us today.
Judith Wright’s environmental credentials were excellent. Many of us feel powerless about the trees’ destruction as we opine that whole trees disappear into the photocopier but we do not wear the passion she had about what that actually means for our own precarious environment. Her focus on the majesty, life-sap and symbolism of the individual tree in several poems across her career is worth revisiting at this time of sustained drought. I write to emphasise that her celebration of the key symbolism of our native trees can evoke theological reflections for an eco-environmental ethic of substance.
Wright’s anthologies are sprinkled with celebrations of trees. We find poems on the camphor laurel, cedars, the wattle and the wattle-tree, the cucalypt, the flame-tree, the pepperina, the orange-tree, the scribbly-gum, and gum-trees among others. It ought to be noted that Wright’s use of the definite article in these poems’ titles both points to the particular genus and to the tree as an emotive symbol. To describe and empathesise with gums, cedars or flame-trees is powerful poetry but to reify them into objects of admiration or symbols of permanence was meant to remind her readers of the wealth and precariousness of our natural inheritance.
Judith Wright was passionately concerned about sand mining, land clearance and the trees’ destruction, for what is unique and distinguishing about Australia is to be found in her landscape. When she drew attention to trees, she was speaking comprehensively to Australians about their natural inheritance. I rather think that she saw the trees as natural corollaries to the many kinds of birds she wrote about, in their diversity, their resilient struggle for life in difficult circumstances and in their silent contribution to the ecosystem we all breathe.
These considerations do relate to us, for the Christian is open to mystery, perceiving the word the touches the heart, seeking the word that gathers and unites, and seeking to implement the vision of agape primarily expressed in the Incarnation. The Christian reader of poetry should have a reflective consciousness of mystery, and be open about all reality with her whole heart to words of truth, seeking words for joy, unity and coherence, within the interpretative community’s mission to seek God in all things and to bring forth the Kingdom of God.
We are turned into a great tree
The power and presence of a great tree is a force to be admired as a moment of valuable insight. Her thoughts in one significant moment of reverie liken humans to trees for being rooted and grounded in time and evolutionary continuity:
standing here in the night
we are turned to a great tree,
every leaf a star,
its roots eternity. (“Night”)
Recognising the flux and changeability of this life, Wright sees it as directed to fulfillment. To see the human race as growing into a great tree offers many resonances about the patterns, processes and purpose of life.
This metaphysical turn in her verse emerges readily enough to link the particular and concrete sensory perception with temporal and spatial contexts. Trees are significant parts of that mindscape for they endure the weather, erosion and drought and enjoy their given fixed places in the landscape. They give and receive what is given; they persist and endure; and pre-eminently are seen as faithful to the needs of human inhabitants.
That same focus on reconciling opposites and finding unity among paradoxes occurs in “The Orange-tree” [1] The definite article indicates the philosophic turn when the poet describes the nature or essential characteristic of this common tree. With its “green bough” and “roots in night”, it “stands upright / to shelter the bird with the beating heart.” This tree leaps out of cold and dark “to reconcile night and day.” It bears life to give life. In its native simplicity and the wonder of its growth and fruiting, the orange-tree is “a perfect single world of gold / [which] no storm can undo nor death deny” (9-10). She idealises the tree not sentimentally but in high admiration for its ability to transform the darkness of earth into resilient life, and the coldness of winter into fruit in its season. It roots, stands, shelters, leaps, reconciles, and feeds. This tree is not sufficient unto itself but intimately aims to enhance life in its assigned productive cycles. Its purpose is to live interacting with earth, bird, air and life in a world with its own distinctive contribution. It reconciles and unifies, silently, savingly and collaboratively.
That same conception about the unity of all things (some say a Buddhist strand in her later poems) appears well exemplified in “Rainforest.”[2] The frog in the rainforest is said to have a distinctive call which we cannot understand “unless we move into his dream / where all is one and one is all.” Understanding unity in diversity is an interpretative step from observing the details of the forest alive; this dream of the frog is a comprehension about the vitality and diversity of all life so concentrated in the eco-system of the living rainforest. Unfortunately, humans are too quick to analyse: “with our quick dividing eyes /measure, distinguish and are gone”; rather it would be preferable to enter into the dreaming of that place, to share the splendid intensity of its unique access not necessarily to its mysterious aesthetic nor its hidden biological interactions but to the undergirding continuity and natural directionality towards greater richness and abundance. From within the hidden storeys of its treelines, the rainforest offers opportunities to the poet to shift gear from description and analysis to empathy and commitment.
In another moment of reverie-insight, Wright remarks upon the paradoxes of interpreting different messages. She notes that when she passed along on a forest walk, she “heard the mountain, palm and fern / spoken in one strange word.” However, the message within the scribbly gum’s bark[3] was “the written track / of a life I could not read.” This suggests the paradoxical insight that wisdom may be more easily gleaned in accessing the harmony of nature’s wonders more than in unraveling the disrupted, fragmentary written words of human history. In the overwhelming enormity of the present moment, we can too often lack the perspective needed to read the track record of a life. Some sense of history is needed but the historians have limited their perspectives too narrowly to offer us what we really need.
I believe the poem suggests that what really matters is to be connected to the great wheel of life and that comes not in analyzing the multiplicity of history’s contradictory accounts but in hearing the simplicity of nature’s one word of explanation and invitation, however strange that may be to our unattuned ears. Nature’s word is an invitation to respond to life, to resist the forces of directionless cynicism and entropy and to seek to connect with all that is good and right and just. The poem reports she had experienced that dynamic grasp in the vectoring word to embrace life in the example of treed mountain, forest palm and cool-gully fern.
The same connectedness with the earth occurs again in the poem “Australia, 1970”. Here in one extraordinary release of passion, Wright creates “a masterpiece of polemic”[4] decrying the environmental foolishness (“conquerors and self-poisoners”) of contemporary sand-mining and land clearing policies. Her Jeremiad rings with despair about recklessness, thoughtlessness and irresponsibility:
Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk,
dangerous till the last breath’s gone, clawing and
striking. / . . /
Die like the soldier-ant
mindless and faithful to your million years.
Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind,
stay obstinate; stay blind.
/ . . ./
I praise the scouring drought, the flying dust,
the drying creek, the furious animal,
that they oppose us still;
that we are ruined by the thing we kill. (“Australia, 1970”[5])
Trees in the Australian Consciousness
In his 1998 Boyer Lecture, “The Making of Australian Consciousness,”[6] David Malouf notes Judith Wright’s success in building nationalistic evocations from the flora and fauna:
She points out that ‘except for the wattle . . . there is very little mention of trees, flowers and birds by name or by recognisable description in Australian verse during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.’ This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. Currawong and banksia carried no charge of emotion like 'nightingale' or 'rose'
So among others, Wright strove to reverse the view that Australian birds, animals and plants were inferior to the European ones. “The mid-nineteenth poet Adam Lindsay Gordon’s view of Australia as a land of ‘scentless blossoms’ and ‘songless birds’ prevailed.”[7]
In particular her poem, “The Wattle-tree”, is a celebrated attempt to focus Australian consciousness. Leading up to Federation, the wattle was nominated and justified as the national flower for being found in all colonies, because its bark was used in tanning hides and it offered a unique, bright beauty. Its prodigality and golden prosperity were symbolic for the spirit of the emerging nation. After a long process of experimentation and discovery, the Golden Wattle Acacia pycnantha became the national floral emblem in 1988. The story of the wattle has become the national narrative, so that it could be claimed, “The demise and recent recovery of Wattle Day celebrations provides evidence of the waves and styles of nationalism in the twentieth century.”[8] The use of the wattle at Australians’ funerals in the aftermath of the Bali bombings is another reassertion of the wattle’s national symbolism.
Just as our nation found its economic certainty in the gold rushes of the 1850s, the poet suggests it will find an apt symbol of a better, shared future in the beauty of its native aesthetic. “The Wattle-Tree” from The Two Fires (1955)[9] picks up the wattle’s power to unify. In just twenty-four lines and in four irregular verses, this poem uses the wattle tree to begin a meditation on growth, mortality and identity. Echoing medieval alchemy, the poet begins with a startling initial claim that the wattle-tree, like the universe as a whole, is composed of four elements, and combines four truths in one. In its growth and abundance, the tree voices “one great word of gold” (7). Thus wishing to learn that word, the poet exalts it, “For that word makes immortal what would wordless die”(11). As poet Judith Wright suggests that in the permanence of the word, even in its certain eternity, the wattle tree symbolizes eternal renewal, it “welds love and time into the seed.” Combining earth, water, air and light, the tree symbolizes abundant wisdom in its cascading gold.
The poem finishes with a personal reflection, saying that like the tree, in her song and in her voice as a poet, she “makes” her immortality. Having passed through the growth stages of bud to blossom, now finds she has a voice to speak her truths. Just as the tree in its renewal is true to its nature, “is forever tree,” so she hopes that in her vocation as a poet she can ultimately be true to herself, to speak the truth “into a million images of the Sun, my God.” Thus, just as the wattle-tree is child, the fruit of the Sun, the poet’s truth is fruit of, and images that greater truth, her God.
The tree mirrors the sun in several ways: in its participation in the universal work of continuing creation, it combines the truths of the four physical elements in one mysterious process of assimilation and growth. As well, its blossom’s prodigality reflects the sun’s superfluity, “the tree trembled with its flood”(19):
The brilliant yellow, fragrant flowers of Golden Wattle make it a popular garden plant. The [Golden Wattle’s] specific name pycnantha from the Greek 'pyknos', meaning 'dense', and 'anthos', meaning 'a flower', refers to the dense clusters of flowers. In spring large fluffy golden-yellow flower-heads with up to eighty minute sweetly scented flowers provide a vivid contrast with the foliage.[10]
Thus, golden wattle images or reflects the golden glory of its origin energy, the cascading light of the Sun. Again, Golden Wattle flowers have been used in perfume making. Its natural aroma though divinely subdued is instantly distinctive and appealing. In September, its distinctive perfume pervades the landscape, further welcoming the arrival of spring and identifying itself as spring's harbinger and emblem.
Furthermore, “Acacia pycnantha regenerates freely after fires, which usually kill the parent plants but stimulate the germination of seeds stored in the soil if rain follows soon after.”[11] This power of unaided and resilient regeneration images the greater forces of Renewal in the universe.
The poet successfully transfers these processes to describe her own poetic process of voicing the truth in her poetry, for in finding a voice in her mature years, she reflects she has followed the natural progression from experience to wisdom. The glory and beauty of the tree thus analogises her poetry’s work. It could be read that she views her very capacity to voice truth as being a work of the source of truth, her God. Just as a meditation on the laws and beauty of the physical creation is a path by which to read the mind of its Maker, so too God is imaged in some millionth degree in the aspirations of her poetry.
The tree also becomes an abiding image for the nation’s productivity. That comes with a warning in another poem. "Camphor Laurel"[12] sets up an opposition between the foolishness of the late-arriving humans and the simple but persistent life of the old camphor laurel tree.
Under the house the roots go deep,
down, down, while the sleepers sleep;
splitting the rock where the house is set,
cracking the paved and broken street,
Old Tim turns and old Sam groans,
"God be good to my breaking bones";
and in the slack of tireless night
the tree breathes honey and moonlight.
Despite its apparent passivity and unmoving silence, the life and scent of the tree critiques the gross and random evils of an uncaring society, which rejects the now-rendered obsolescent weak and the old with a rigid exclusivity. In fact, the tree gives off "honey and moonlight" just as it was meant to do. It is a symbol of permanence, sweetness and native honesty compared with man's short-term foolish, facile and unethical ways. Here again, Wright dramatises the tussle of man against Nature, for even the stationary tree has its logic against the foolish revelry and willful injustice of Australia’s environmental neglect. People of insight and Christian people seeking salvation may then learn these lessons from Nature to feel their spiritual roots growing deep, deeper into simplicity.
Redressing the wrongs of history is to encounter the traditions that vindicate them and this requires courage and inflicts pain. In “Eroded Hills,”[13] Wright suggests retrieving integrity lies in righting the wrongs of the past; that change will stand as better testament on the imperishability of ideas which transcends the rust of time:
When the last leaf and bird go
Let my thoughts stand like trees here. (lines 11 –12)
She urges replanting trees to repair the eroded hills, for they restore life in an act of reparation for her grandfather’s clearing his land for grazing. This poem seeks atonement, to be gained by replacing her grandfather’s now-seen-to-be-limited perspective, which results in the erosion of eroded hills, with the more enduring words of a poet arising from the very same blood and soil.
Besides tree-planting to redress the crime of the widespread tree clearing, one fortuitous by-product may well be the enduring wisdom and salvation imaged in her poetical words. Thus this poem becomes an affirmation of the poet’s self, and an affirmation of the self in future generations’ identification with her words, the tools of the poet’s trade.
Every poet would surely wish her words to have a high degree of permanency, one greater than at least one’s own life span. This is the artist’s transcendence and a kind of salvation in words, to believe that one’s artefact has a distinctively saving relevance, one more permanent than the author has in the body. Her apologia for her great-grandfather’s exploitative clearing of land and removal of its traditional owners thus becomes an image towards Aboriginal Reconciliation for contemporary insightful and Christian readers.
In the same vein, “Old House”[14] is a regret for lost opportunity and a call to repair the wrongs of the past with a more enlightened attitude. For the poet, “my great-great-grandfather heard them with one part of his mind” (line 20). He had the blinkered view, the limited invader’s and settler’s view in seeing the land as his sole possession as one of the dominators. Now as a member of that same New England family, the poet expresses her regret that the New England Aborigines’ rights were so trampled upon and their lives wasted. In making reparations for past injustices, she urges, Australians too can still obtain a salvation of sorts.
Within her pastoralist family, Judith Wright had a dream for Australia, that is, that Australians as a whole would identify with the pioneering spirit of the early pioneers and their love of the land so they would care for it in the present. Now that corporations had by and large taken over the man on the land, she finds her pastoralist dream is shattered. Both “Two Dreamtimes” and “For a Pastoralist Family”[15] reflect on the unjust treatment of Aboriginals by the early settlers and the Europeans' loss of any spiritual connectedness with the land.
Furthermore, “The Eucalypt and the National Character”[16] elaborates an ethic for our own restricting times. With petrol pump prices soaring and the scandal of waste all round us, her eucalypt tree is a model of sparseness, readiness, waiting and responsive. After aeons of evolutionary trial and error, the eucalypt “has learned to be flexible, spare, flesh close to the bone” (7). The eucalypt reflects the noblest qualities of our national pioneers, those unnamed dreamers who built the nation. Like this tree, they were supple, flexible, sparse and productive:
Ready for any catastrophe, every extreme,
she leaves herself plenty of margin. Nothing is stiff,
symmetrical, indispensable. Everything bends
whip-supple, pivoting, loose, with a minimal mass.
She can wait grimly for months to break into flower
or willingly bloom in a day when the weather is right.
These are surely, she infers, qualities for modern Australians – the need to heed the lessons of the land and of our brave pioneers. We should not grow soft on their gains but constantly resist indulgence and waste while waiting for their opportunity to bloom.
To end I go to the happy example of the flame tree that finally issues its first flowers in its eighteenth year. The poet and her husband had planted it carefully to flower in full view beyond the kitchen window. They had fed it, watered it, and waited patiently until surprised and delighted they beheld its silent ritual of putting off every leaf to stand up nakedly, drawing up every power from the earth and itself, and shooting up a pulse of totally red flowers that shock the poet’s sight. The gospel image of the cursed fig tree comes to mind here, for though the flame tree had flourished, it had never bloomed and so had not achieved its intended outcome. That eventual blooming was a sight to behold: “I lean on the sill to see it stand / just as we planned.” Their faith had been rewarded; the title, “The flame-tree blooms” says it all: their hopes were realised in the eventual flowering of that tree.
Conclusions
Judith Wright wishes that her thoughts could stand like trees (“Eroded Hills”). The golden wattle tree images the sun in its abundance, beauty and generosity. In its prodigality and golden prosperity, the wattle “welds love and time into the seed.” While men’s lives wax and wane, the bent camphor laurel “heavy in bloom . . .breathes honey and moonlight” giving and consolidating itself while “splitting the rock where the house is set.” The eucalypt reflects the most desirable traits of Australia’s national character in its suppleness, flexibility, sparseness and sprawling asymmetry for ”She commits no excesses.” The orange-tree reconciles light and dark, death and life leaping giving welcome shelter to birds and fruiting in due season. Finally after patiently waiting seventeen years, the flame tree blooms just as they had fed and planned it to do.
I have suggested that these various celebrations of the lives, worth and achievements of the silent trees is no mere nature lore but a profound reflection on our human condition and our necessary responses to it. The great mystery of life is felt and heard in the dynamic interdependence of waterfall, tree ferns and mountain gum. Judith Wright’s metaphysical connections grow from these observations upon the lives of various trees. Her ethical imperatives, her celebrations of patient waiting and her admiration of nature’s abundance and beauty in these poems should ignite theological reflections for us today. While we hardly marvel at a tree any more, when we clear the bush and denude the landscape and yet expect to continue breathing clean air, we ought to learn from the wisdom she found in Australia’s nature trees. We find that this wise word is strange only because we are not attuned to hear it and because we do not look to the trees for inspiration. In fact we are all being changed “into a great tree” where we may all flower in a shower of golden variety like the wattle.
Poems referred to:
“Camphor Laurel” Judith Wright: Collected Poems 1942-1985, 35
“Child and Wattle-tree” 31
“Eucalypt and the National Character” 362
“Flame-tree in a Quarry” 60
“Gum-trees Stripping” 133
“Old House” the pepperina, 81
“Rainforest” 412
“Scribbly-gum” 131
“The Cedars” 74 see also Half a Lifetime 263-4.
“The Flame-tree blooms” 287
“The Orange-tree” 87
“The Wattle-tree” 142
REFERENCES
Australian National Botanic Gardens site [On-line] available: http://www.anbg.gov.au/emblems/aust.emblem.html [accessed 2003 May 08].
Judith Wright Collected Poems 1942-1985 Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 2002.
Malouf, D. “The Making of Australian Consciousness” The Boyer Lectures, 1998. Lecture Two: A Complex Fate’, Broadcast on Sunday, November 22, at 5pm on ABC Radio National. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/98boyer2.htm. [December 2000].
Robin, L. Nationalising Nature: Wattle Days in Australia. [On-line] Available: http://cres.anu.edu.au/people/wattle-day.pdf [2003 May 8], page 4.
Robin, L. Arbor, Bird and Wattle Days: Nature and Nation in Settler Societies seminar flyer. [On-line] Available: http://histrsss.anu.edu.au/robinseminarextract.html [2003 May 8]. See also Libby Robin, “Wattle and the Nation,” Melbourne University Magazine 2003, 26-27.
Wright, J. Half a Lifetime edited by Patricia Clarke Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999.
Young, V. “David Rowbotham and Judith Wright: An American View” Parnassus: Poetry In Review, (Fall/Winter 1978, New York) [on-line] available:
http://www.qct.com.au/rowbotham/parnassus.html [2005 August 26].
