Transcript Judith Wright - coolstuffschool.com

Module C. Representation and Text: People and Landscapes
JUDITH WRIGHT
Collected Poems
In this elective, students…
• develop their understanding of
how the relationship between
various textual forms, media of production and language
choices influences and shapes meaning.
• Ideas
• Values
• Attitudes
PURPOSE
+
INTENDED
AUDIENCE
FORM
MEDIA
LFFs
• Beliefs
• Characters
• Events
• Bodies of
knowledge
Purpose of poetry?
• Poetry requires the reader to do the “work” and to take the
time and effort to fully engage with the words and the form
of the poem…
• To fully understand a poem… you need to:
1. read it several times
2. “de-code” each word and each rhetorical device (LFF)
3. “translate” the rhetorical device into contextually sound
literal meaning
Purpose of poetry?
• The purpose of poetry is to
express emotions, ideas,
values and beliefs
• Poetry is “painting with words” – and aims to evoke an
emotional reaction from the responder
• The purpose of poetry is not to
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Inform
Persuade
Instruct
Recount
Provide facts
MERIT AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
• Judith Wright is widely regarded as one of Australia’s greatest
poets.
• Her work is valued for its representation of the Australian
environment and relationships between humans and nature.
• Wright’s political activism focused on conservation and social
issues, primarily Aboriginal land rights.
• These impulses, and particularly her environmental concerns,
are reflected in many of her poems.
A little about Judith Wright?
• Born: May 31, 1915, Armidale
• Died: June 25, 2000, Canberra
• Judith Wright was a Queensland resident for over thirty years.
She was born in New England, in regional New South Wales,
and came to Brisbane as a young woman.
• In Brisbane she met and fell in love with philosopher Jack
McKinney, and in 1945 they bought a tiny cottage on Mount
Tamborine. They later moved to a nearby house which they
named “Calanthe”, after a white orchid which blooms on the
mountain at Christmas time. They shared twenty happy years
together on Tamborine, until Jack’s death in 1966.
• Her deep love of the Australian landscape, and her growing
distress at the devastation of that landscape by white
Australians, led her in the mid-sixties to help form the
Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, an early and
powerful conservation group.
• The battles to save such places as Cooloolah, Fraser
Island, and the Great Barrier Reef radicalised her, and after
Jack’s death she increasingly threw herself into active
environmental work, which continued until the last decade
of her life.
• In 1975 Judith moved south, to Braidwood in New South Wales,
and soon after she and Nugget Coombs helped form the
Aboriginal Treaty Committee, an organisation dedicated to
helping spread the word about the need for land rights and a
treaty among white Australians.
• Judith continued to fight both for the environment and for
Aboriginal land rights until her death in June 2000, at the age of
85.
• A week before her death she triumphantly attended the
Reconciliation March across the bridge in Canberra, full of hope
that the tide might at last be turning.
Prescribed poems:
• The poems selected for study in this elective are:
• ‘The Hawthorn Hedge’
• ‘Brothers and Sisters’
• ‘South of My Days’
• ‘For New England’
• ‘Flame-tree in a Quarry’
• ‘Train Journey’
• ‘Moving South’
Shining with Meaning: The Poetry of
Judith Wright
Listen to Judith Wright’s daughter (Meredith McKinney) talk about her
mother.
Listen to Ms McKinney discuss the prescribed poem “South Of My Days”
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2012/06/pca_20120623_1505.mp3
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/2012-06-23/4033626
• Listen to Professor Lyn McCredden from Deakin University
speak in detail about the poetry of Judith Wright featured in
the program and the Australian Senior School English
Syllabi
• Take notes 
• http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/audio/201206/PCA_Lyn_M
cCredden.mp3
Poetry In Australia – Judith Wright
(1963)
• http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/poetry-australia-judith-
wright/clip1/
• The really telling thing about the issues that Judith Wright
always considered paramount is that they’re the major
issues we still grapple with in Australia today.
• In terms of the environment, she was light years ahead in
warning that we were squandering our fragile heritage.
She was also one of the first to point out that in practising
genocide against the original owners of the land, the least
we could do was to offer land rights in compensation.