ABSTRACT
Judith Wright was Australia's greatest environmental poet as well as the thinker who most clearly linked ecological concerns to the dispossession of the Indigenous people. Judith Wright was born in 1915 and, aside from her undergraduate years, spent her first quarter-century of life in the region of her origins, even helping her father run the station once wartime conscription meant that most of the extant workers were called off to battle. In the 1950s, Wright's poetry moved from being landscape poetry to environmental poetry. Wright was aware of the fecundity and diversity of the Australian landscape from having spent her formative years variously in Armidale, Sydney, Brisbane, and the Queensland mountains. Wright was always remarkable in her ability to write empathetically about very different landscapes: even the few poems she composed about New Zealand, based on a brief visit there, are singularly evocative and responsive to a very different terrain.
