Kate Grenville has recently explained her historical novel The Secret River (2005) in similar terms. Her story draws on research into frontier violence and the history of the author’s own family on the Hawkesbury River, but Grenville chooses fiction because it ‘can tear through the screen of words and see what’s behind it’. ‘The voice of debate might stimulate the brain,’ acknowledges Grenville, ‘the dry voice of “facts” might make us comfortable, even relaxed. It takes the voice of fiction to get the feet walking in a new direction.’¹ She admires Thea Astley’s novel A Kindness Cup (1974) – a ‘cautionary fable’ inspired by an ‘actual incident’, as the author put it – where settler violence to Aborigines was pictured vividly. ‘Astley,’ says Grenville, ‘wrote with the oblique voice of fiction into that great silence.’

In the 1970s Judith Wright made a different decision. She decided that she needed history. Wright was arguably Australia’s best-known and most admired poet of the twentieth century. From the 1940s her writings quickly entered the national literary consciousness, and poems such as ‘Bullocky’ and ‘South of My Days’ became beloved for their encapsulation of Australian identity – yet Wright was also profoundly in tension with that identity, especially its pastoral expressions. Her early poetry was popular and critically acclaimed because of its distillation of white pioneer mythology, yet she was to become a critic of that inheritance. The Australian literary academic Philip Mead has argued that Wright contributed ‘as powerfully to the critique of national culture as she did to its construction’.² When her activism quickened in the 1960s, Wright’s poetry was judged to have suffered. One of the ways that her career has been characterised is that she sacrificed her writing for her politics. Her politics not only stole time from her writing, but it was also perceived to diminish the quality of what writing she could do. But I think there has been insufficient attention paid to the new kinds of writing she was doing.

In March last year, a festival was held in Braidwood to celebrate the legacy of Judith Wright. It was called ‘Two Fires’, the title of one of her poetry collections. The two fires, the two passions that burned within her, were art and activism, and much of the festival explored the tensions between them. I would argue that one way that Wright came to reconcile them was to choose a different kind of art – that of history. Poetry and politics came together to produce disciplined non-fiction. We can see that chemistry at work in the way her early ‘semi-novel’, The Generations of Men (1959), was later transformed into a history of the frontier, The Cry for the Dead (1981).

In the drought and war and deep cold of the winter of 1942, Judith Wright returned to work the land of New England with her father. One day they searched for an old track leading from the coast to the tableland and happened upon a sheer cliff called Darkie Point near Point Lookout, where they had often camped as a family. Her father told her that this had been the place where, in revenge for the killing of cattle, a whole group of Aboriginal men, women and children had been driven over the cliff. That story, as Wright recalled, ‘had sunk more deeply into my own life than he would perhaps have liked, and was to influence me forever’.³ Wright composed a poem about it, which she called ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’. In that poem she asked: ‘Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers / and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?’ She began at this time to write a novel based on her family history, but she abandoned it until, years later, she found a compelling historical document.

With hindsight, Judith would say that she wrote The Generations of Men because of her discovery of twenty-three surviving volumes of her grandfather’s diaries. The novel she had been trying to write was suddenly given substance and direction. Therefore, a remarkable historical manuscript lies at the heart of her book. Because of those crucial diaries, Albert Wright became the man at the centre of The Generations of Men. But one suspects that the title of the book is also a kind of trompe l’oeil. Judith Wright was the daughter of a pastoral dynasty. She was, as she put it herself on many occasions, ‘a fifth-generation descendant of pastoralists on both sides’ of her grand-parentage.⁴ All her ancestors, she claimed, ‘had much the same kind of background of fairish wealthy English family with too many sons’. Too many sons: thus Judith Wright’s family history was already being shaped by ‘the generations of men’. The younger sons had little prospect of land in England and had to leave home to get it. In Australia, they could dispossess another people, establish their own lineage and assume the management of a rather different kind of land. It is the ethical and environmental responsibilities of that new tenure that Judith Wright made her life mission to analyse.

In The Generations of Men, Judith writes of her grandmother’s grandfather, George Wyndham, as a radical escapee from 1820s England turned conservative by the experience of raw egalitarianism on the Australian frontier. George felt that something had gone awry with his plans, but could not put his finger on exactly what. It was not just his fellow Australian colonists who had made him retreat back into his Englishness; it was also the land itself and its original peoples: ‘the country, he could not trust it. It had something up its sleeve, he felt obscurely. “We should have left the place to the blacks!” his old friends would sometimes burst out, half-seriously, at news of droughts, bushrangers, speared cattle, rust in the wheat …’

The actual land would never come to Judith, as a woman in a pastoral dynasty. Perhaps this freed her to examine its ethical and spiritual legacy. Mary Durack, Margaret Kiddle, Elyne Mitchell, Mary Bennett, Alice Duncan-Kemp and Barbara York Main are further Australian examples of pastoral daughters who became famous pastoral chroniclers. Judith Wright was the beneficiary of one extraordinary financial legacy because of her gender. Her grandmother, May Wright, left money especially for her granddaughters. After her husband Albert’s death, May had managed the family property in New England for so long that she had money in her own right, and it was her bequest that enabled Judith to study at the University of Sydney and then to travel to Europe for a year. The Generations of Men was written, surely, in tribute to this remarkable woman, to whom Judith was so indebted. Indeed, May begins and ends the book and is its hero. In spite of its title – or more likely, in deliberate tension with it – The Generations of Men is actually about a woman: a woman on the masculinist, pastoralist frontier, the world and predicament into which Judith herself was born. Although this book seems at first to be the work of a dutiful daughter, it is suffused with a subtle feminism.

The book’s drama is twofold: there is the love story between May and Albert; and there is the battle with the land. May grew up in the Hunter Valley in relative poverty because her father, Arthur Mackenzie, had gambled on pastoral country on the Tropic of Capricorn, inland from Rockhampton in the 1860s. He had been lured by reports of good land to purchase a run, which he called May Downs after his daughter, but he was caught by the great Queensland slump of that decade and was bankrupted. As a child, May Mackenzie had shared her father’s excitement about this new frontier, but they were soon forced back to the Hunter Valley to eke out a living on the land of her grandfather, George Wyndham.

In 1871, aged sixteen, May Mackenzie met Albert Wright, almost fifteen years her senior, at the wedding of her friend and his sister, Mary Wright. Albert had returned to the Hunter Valley briefly for that wedding and the meeting that would change his life, but most of the preceding decade he had worked alone further out on the pastoral frontier. Albert’s father, Philip Wright, came to the Hunter Valley in 1840, and Albert left school at the age of fourteen to look after two of his father’s runs in the north-west of the colony. At the age of twenty, he took a job on a big station in western New South Wales, and some years later – in the late 1860s – became the manager of two stations inland from Rockhampton that had been repossessed in the Queensland slump. One of them, Albert’s main responsibility, was a property called Nulalbin. Its previous owner had died of fever and worry, and it was Albert’s job to assess the land and its assets for sale by an agent. He was there to close the books and abandon the land – to return it, as George Wyndham might have said, ‘to the blacks’. For the original owners were still there, and Albert worked closely with several Aboriginal stockmen and relied on their judgment and assistance. Even in retreat, the first wave of the white invasion required Aboriginal support.

Albert’s first view of this country in the Dawson Valley did not please him. It was dry, hard brigalow country, all bluish-greens and greys. The previous owner had tried sheep and failed. But it looked like a good season when Albert arrived in 1868, and because the cattle began to improve their sale was delayed. Albert began to nourish an idea. He had come to respect this country: he knew the run, he worked well with old Captain, the Aboriginal head stockman, and he had decided that it was good cattle country. Here, in the tropics and in the wake of the slump, he could afford this piece of land and there would be no other bidders.

Thus when Albert met May in 1871 and they courted one another for an intensive few days following his sister’s wedding, Albert stood before her not just as any land-owning suitor but as a man whose life was already entwined with the very Queensland frontier that had ruined May’s father, yet had also excited her as a child. Life with Albert beckoned, but so did life on the Queensland frontier. The Generations of Men tells these twin stories, then, these entwining strands of May and Albert’s relationship, and of their fight with the land. Albert and May together struggled to secure and maintain Nulalbin throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, in the face of economic uncertainty, drought, and a land that delighted and defied them. Aboriginal people both helped them and haunted them. They were the stockmen and the housemaids, but they were also profoundly alien. Through May’s eyes, these people appear unreliable and mysterious, more like animals than humans. May doubts that they have souls, she compares their noisy presence to a flying fox camp, she despises them for eating with the dogs, and she sees their seasonal migrations as being like those of birds.

Albert, like his father-in-law, had his own ill-fated northern venture in the late 1870s, taking a leap of financial faith in new country being opened up further north on the Atherton Tableland and in the Gulf Country. It was a bad gamble and sent him back into deep debt after the few hard-won gains at Nulalbin. By the mid-1880s, and following the death of their young son and an agonising drought, Albert and May retreated to cooler, greener country on the New England plateau in northern New South Wales, maintaining Nulalbin from a distance. In 1890, in his fiftieth year, Albert died of pneumonia during a trip north. The central tragedy of the book is thus Albert’s defeat in his battle with the land. May, ignoring advice, continued to manage their properties, both out of loyalty to Albert as well as belief in herself. She took over Albert’s work, and even his diary.

The last quarter of The Generations of Men is the story of how May secures financial and farming success on her New England property, Wongwibinda, even purchasing the neighbouring country, Wallamumbi, and imagining establishing a landed dynasty stretching from New South Wales into Queensland. There is a warm, wistful nostalgia in this evocation of a woman in the second half of her life, never forgetting her beloved, long-dead husband, and fighting to secure the future of her family through judicious management of land. The hardships of the frontier recede, a glow of triumph is allowed, and the book ends in 1929, the year of May’s death, as she looks back with quiet satisfaction on a solid century of her family’s presence in Australia.

In the twenty years following the publication of The Generations of Men, Judith Wright increasingly devoted her time and energy to public causes, especially on behalf of Aborigines and the environment. Judith had always been political, and many of her views were shaped by her intellectual collaboration with Jack McKinney, which began in Brisbane in 1943. She was disturbed by the arms race of the Cold War, but also by the materialism of the postwar years and by ‘the effects of the technological and industrial invasion of the land [she] loved’.⁵ In her own words, she became ‘part of a kind of resistance movement, called conservation’. Her poetry was part of her politics, and a ‘crisis of language’ was integral to her wider sense of global crisis.⁶ But in spite of the emotional and intellectual confluence between her art and her activism, they were indeed separate and mostly irreconcilable tasks. She was torn; she constantly regretted that her political commitments prevented her from writing more.⁷ The precious hours of the creative day leaked away. As someone who had habitually sought the margins, she was uncomfortable with publicity, yet she always relished challenging taboos. She wrote in 1982 to the historian A. L. Rowse that ‘being female I am not supposed to express my dislike and indeed trained not to do so from birth’.⁸ Well, now she could. Her ‘curiosity value’ as a renowned poet gave her a delicious freedom to say what she thought, and to be heard.

The adversarial context of her campaigning created a need for a different kind of writing, something that would go beyond metaphorical or poetic truth; she needed words that would be legally and historically defensible. She felt constrained by ‘the oblique voice of fiction’. I think this is a fascinating moment in the career of a great writer. Wright had to turn the powerful poem about ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ into a coolly researched and verifiable history of the frontier. In the years when she was finishing The Cry for the Dead (1981), the Aboriginal Treaty Committee was formed and Judith became a foundation member. This Committee, led by her close friend ‘Nugget’ Coombs, ‘called for a Treaty, within Australia, between Australians’. In words that sound like Judith’s, the Treaty Committee lamented that there was no ‘documentary recognition of the quality and courage of those who were conquered’. The Treaty would be concerned not only with land rights but also with political rights. Judith, while working for that committee, was writing a book that gave a secure scholarly foundation to its political campaign. Her alternative title for The Cry for the Dead was A Right to the Soil?

Let us see how Judith Wright sets about becoming an historian. Writing The Generations of Men had made her realise that none of her education had equipped her to understand the great pastoral migrations in which her forebears had taken part. Now, two or three decades later, she found a mountain of new material generated by the explosion in Australian history since the 1950s. She was especially interested in the new work on the frontier being done in the 1970s by Raymond Evans and Henry Reynolds. She read Reynolds’s book The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) in manuscript, and it was published in the same year as hers. Alongside this historical scholarship, she was reading texts in Aboriginal anthropology, both old and new. She also read Claude Lévi-Strauss as she tried to find ways to empathise with, describe and understand a different civilisation, looking for intelligent contrasts between hunter-gatherer societies and her own. Above all, she trawled the regional archives and newspapers. This was a scholarly enterprise, and the task she set herself was to master the literature that might enable her to strengthen and enrich her particular narrative. ‘My reading and research,’ she wrote, ‘took me into dark places, into which historians are only recently beginning to throw some light.’ She needed unique, grounded and localised truths that she could go out and do battle with. She needed to be able to show that this happened exactly here, precisely then.

In October 1977 Judith and her daughter, Meredith, hired a car to ensure their independence and set off for the Dawson ‘to check some final details’. Judith had been there before, with her husband in a hot January just after the war, when they had been ‘careless and moneyless’. By the time of this second trip, however, she was a public figure and she feared that none of the locals would talk to her because of her known views about history and the treatment of Aboriginal people. But the trip passed amicably: Judith reported that she ‘met a lot of the “old hands”, aristocratic and otherwise, but didn’t take any baits … I did my poodle-faking act very well and Meredith kept discreetly silent’. But she found the mood of the people unsympathetic: ‘Rural misery flourishes, as do complaints about unions and demands for the troops.’ And the landscape depressed her: ‘They have just about ruined that country,’ she wrote, ‘mostly sand underlain with clay, creeks deep in sand and only spear pumps get water … a real mess’, though she did see ‘some excellent regrowth’, especially on the black soils. The string of waterholes teeming with life had gone. Judith’s eye was searching for precise detail and understanding, and she wanted to know the lie of the land. She recorded the fall of the Dawson range on north and south, the colour of the clays (red, yellow, white), the creeks that were ‘all dry’ (Spring, Blackboy, Pearl, Lily), the ant and bird life. Meredith remembers how Judith kept on stopping the car, getting out and taking photographs. Meredith, who was seeing the country for the first time, would notice a wonderful tree, but her mother was out there photographing soil erosion.⁹

With her new eyes and purpose – with the change in her politics and art – Judith begins to embed the story of her grandparents in a broader cross-cultural and environmental narrative. Her main characters, no longer larger than life, shrink back to size and become figures in a landscape. This adjustment of focus allows other figures, hitherto very much in the background, even ghostly, to be rescued from our peripheral vision and to claim our central attention. There is an uncompromising directness about her prose; it is ‘thicker, darker, heavier’. As historian Michael Roe puts it, the sublimated sorrow of The Generations of Men has been turned into active pain and anger.¹⁰ Wright becomes an elegant slave to fact and context, rarely venturing beyond what she finds in the record, yet always enlarging the telling with interpretative insight and context. Albert and May are transformed from warmly imagined and partly fictionalised ancestors into slightly distanced and partially known historical people in a dynamic landscape. Their personal curiosities, concerns and consciences about Aboriginal society, which were portrayed in the earlier book, are now used to analyse these anxieties more broadly in settler society. The adjustment of focus from interior lives to the broader landscape of colonial experience better illuminates the shifting terrain between private and public in frontier culture. In relinquishing the semi-fictional form, some elements of her storytelling are lost: we miss the novelist’s confident access to thoughts and feelings. But other dimensions are gained: the story has greater gravity and a wider canvas, and uncertainty and silence become a part of the narrative.

As Inga Clendinnen has said of the writing of history: ‘Were this fiction, I would know that all things said and left unsaid, all disruptions, were intended to signify. But this is not fiction, and I cannot be sure.’¹¹ The moment Judith Wright chooses history, she enables herself to speculate about silences. Her grandfather’s diary becomes more than a mine for the novelist: it is transformed into a finished but incomplete artefact, a piece of evidence whose gaps must be tested. In the summer of 1868 and 1869 there was violent conflict over the possession of waterholes in south-eastern Queensland. Drought had deepened and, during a trip to Mackay, Albert heard of renewed conflict. He recorded tersely in his diary: ‘About sixty Blacks were shot at Grosvenor last week.’ In that month of January, Albert – who seldom missed filling in his diary entries, unless sickness prevented him – found himself condemned to silence for three whole weeks. There is an uncharacteristically long gap in his diary. ‘What happened during that time,’ wrote Judith, ‘and the reason for that silence, can only be guesswork.’

As the author’s lens draws back, the ghostly Aboriginal figures of her poems and and the alien creatures of her novel come into focus as a people. The dark shapes haunting the brigalow and the puzzling individuals helping May in the house and Albert on horseback become the Wadja, a people with culture and history, the long-term inhabitants of deeply known country who also defend it fiercely from invasion. As Graeme Davison has observed in a perceptive essay about family history, ‘The union of land and lineage that [Wright] celebrated in her own forebears’ history is now relocated to the Aborigines they dispossessed.’¹² Gone is the earlier view that Aborigines offered little resistance. The intruding whites also come into a different focus. Wright offers us a view of them through Aboriginal eyes: as a race with few women and almost no children, as a people defiant against the laws of sharing, building elaborate structures of wood and stone in which they shut themselves away, and constantly, ruthlessly, breaking the body of the land. The balance of the narrative shifts a little earlier to the 1860s, the decade of most conflict and tension on the south-east Queensland frontier. May Mackenzie does not appear in the book until page 178, two-thirds of the way through. Albert is unquestionably the main character, but he shares the stage with other white men trying to wrest a living from the land, and their preoccupying relationship is with the Aboriginal people. And the Wadja do not just fade away: as late as the 1870s Albert Wright recorded a gathering of about 500 Aborigines on the banks of the Dawson. On another occasion, May Wright wondered ‘why they did not kill us all, they were so many and we so few’.

Judith was frustrated that she could not tell more of the Aboriginal story. Her publisher, Frank Eyre, pointed out that she was unable to fulfil that promise. She replied: ‘If you had any idea of the quantity of notes, books, documents, archival documents, etc. I have consulted or of the size of my card index and the amount of material I have copied, you would be taken aback. Poor Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s struggles over Sir John Franklin had nothing on mine. I have had to educate or re-educate myself in not only history, but anthropology, ecology, geography, geology – you name it … May Hell admire me, as the bushrangers used to say, but I wished often I hadn’t taken it on at all!’¹³ In the absence of many surviving written documents about the Wadja, Wright turned to the document of the land as another way of evoking their lives. ‘My object of course,’ she writes to Eyre, ‘has been to tell the story of their country and what happened to it – which is essentially the story of the Aborigines’ own destruction.’ So the land must bear witness to its people. The Cry for the Dead is relatively uncelebrated as a pioneering environmental history, yet it was deeply attentive to the story of ecological change.

Wright’s book drew some early shots in the ‘history wars’. In August 1982 the book was reviewed in The Guardian, in England. The reviewer, Terry Coleman, a journalist on the staff of the paper and also a historian, was dismissive and disdainful of Wright’s work. ‘She is of the Bury-My-Heart-at-Wounded-Knee school of history,’ he wrote. In response to Wright’s work, Coleman sketched out an argument that has since become very familiar to us. Settlers – represented by benevolent kings and governors – offered kindnesses that were rejected or unappreciated. Aborigines initiated the violence; settlers responded only out of revenge; and British justice and the rule of law –  although fairly applied – was in vain. This was not an encounter of civilisations, Coleman insisted, but a collision between a cultured people and a primitive and unredeemable race.¹⁴

Keith Windschuttle, the latest exponent of that view, has argued that historians invented frontier violence in the post-1960s to serve the needs of their strengthening left-wing politics. Wright’s history was indeed a product of post-1960s politics. But Windschuttle and Coleman go further: they argue that historians made up frontier violence out of nothing; it was a fictitious artefact of the counterculture, even an academic conspiracy. The long, agonising history of the white conscience is inconvenient to this theory, so the conservative critique has no interest in, and no sensitivity to, the sinews of settler memory. Yet this is exactly what Judith Wright’s work is about, and it is why it has such enduring and haunting relevance, and why perhaps we need it more than ever today. She shows that the whites were as human as the blacks. Wright portrays a frontier caught, from its very beginnings, in a web of intrigue, curiosity, violence and anxiety, a grave psychological embrace; and she shows how the tensions between history and memory, and between public and private, are ingrained in Australian frontier experience. One of her correspondents, James Henry, whose father was born in 1881 not far from Nulalbin when Albert and May Wright were living there, wrote to Judith from London in 1983: 

The odd thing is, you know, that we always knew the theme in our bones, as only children can. Those legendary unspoken horrors, those sins cherished by successive generations, were essential to us; they added value to our conspiracy of silence, our annual dues at the bushman’s club. We suffered much from a simpleton’s concept of loyalty, lived our lives at very exalted levels of guilt and fear. Ours was, I suppose, an odd inheritance: the preservation, in silence, of truths suppressed by our elders and betters, the old pastoral nomads who, in their way, did have something to hide. We valued that legacy – rightly. Without it we might have seen ourselves for what we were. Dusty industrialists, masquerading as bushmen. Spending our lives gambling tooth and nail against the climate, the markets, the neighbours. There was –  it’s hard to say this, but it’s so –  more style to any one of the old hands who also helped to destroy the blacks, than there is to be found among their successors who, with demonstrable imbecility, destroy the land stolen on their behalf. There are, I gather, some honourable exceptions. I have not met them.

I read The Generations of Men and The Cry for the Dead once more, in that order, after I wrote to you. The two books, though separated by 30 years in execution, make a beautiful diptych, don’t they – a special form for conveying a sort of truth to people at a particular time, especially to those who fear it most. Like me and the bush people, still in thrall to our imaginary audience of fine old pioneers and other phantoms. As you see, you have revived my memories and put upon the past a set of values which I had despaired of ever being able to experience as my own, though I knew of their existence. I am profoundly grateful to you.

P.S. It looks to me, reading this rather incoherent letter, as if the belief systems I acquired as a boy are breaking up, or down as the case may be. There are many like me to whom this will occur when they catch up with the passionate ironies which form, like holograms, in the angle between your two books. I expect there’ll be the devil to pay, but there’s a rare elation I quite like in the air.¹⁵

Judith must have treasured this letter. Here, her reader recognises that the books are complementary, bound together like the two sides of a frontier, each exploring a different angle of truth. Henry’s letter also expresses some of her own ambivalence about an Australian pastoral inheritance, the pride as well as the unease. He keenly describes the mortal embrace that Judith Wright was trying to loosen. She must have hoped that he would prove right, that there would indeed be ‘the devil to pay’ in the wake of the book; but apart from Terry Coleman’s disdain, there was minimal disturbance. Judith regretted that the book ‘sank like a stone’, although she also felt a ‘grim pleasure’ that this reception confirmed the enduring workings of the silence she had studied.

And today, I think, we are keenly aware that ‘the rare elation’ that James Henry felt in the air has remained rare, and that some of the belief systems that propped up pastoral Australia are stubborn and enduring, even as the economic, social and ecological systems that supported it are crumbling.

The Cry for the Dead took its title from the Aboriginal chant in honour of the recently dead, generally uttered just before daybreak. As another reviewer, Axel Clark, observed, Wright’s book was a lament for all the dead – for the blacks first of all, but also for the living land and its other inhabitants, the birds, marsupials, even the marauding stock, and a lament, too, for the white people who dispossessed the blacks.¹⁶ Where are the white pioneering families now? This is the unexpected twist in the plot – it is a windfall of Wright’s decision to write a story that stays with the land. ‘We too have lost our dreaming,’ grieved Wright in her poem ‘Two Dreamtimes’, where she reflected on her ancestors’ eventual abandonment of pastoral lands in Queensland. The Cry for the Dead is first a lament for those original people whose lands her forebears, however sympathetic, usurped. But the book is also a story of the swift dispossession of her own ancestors, the loss of Wright’s stolen inheritance by ‘traders and stock-exchanges’. She mused that ‘what’s stolen once is stolen again’. Wright concluded The Cry for the Dead with the observation that: ‘None of the descendants of Albert and May Wright now own land on the plain or beyond it; and perhaps none of the Wadja, if any remain, have seen the country that once was theirs.’ The Generations of Men moves with Albert and May to new country and to a more hopeful family future, while The Cry for the Dead stays with the Dawson Valley as it is doubly dispossessed of its people. So a eulogy became a lament.

I began with novelists Pat Barker and Kate Grenville and with their embrace of fiction as a superior art for conveying truth, and I have offered a contrasting example of how another author consciously chose history to convey truth for political purpose. I think many of us have faced similar decisions – about the kind of truth we want to express, and about the kind of art we will need to do it. History is as much an art as fiction is, and it does not need to borrow fictional techniques to achieve that. In fact, history’s commitment to verifiable truth – to evidence that can be revisited – increases the writer’s artistic opportunities exponentially. We always have at least two stories to tell: what we think happened, and how we know what we think happened. But in the last decade, the conservative critique of frontier violence has presented a challenge to the historical scholar: it has mimicked the method without the morality; it has made a farce of footnotes; it has mistaken accuracy for truth; and it has sacrificed meaning for accountability – and countability. I think that, were she still alive, Judith Wright, in such a climate, might make a different decision to the one she made in the 1970s, and that, like Kate Grenville, she might well turn back to fiction to tell her truth.

This essay is a longer version of a talk given at The Civic Historian: A Conference for Graeme Davison, Melbourne, in June 2006.

Notes

1. Kate Grenville, ‘Comment’, The Monthly, October 2005, pp. 16–18.
2. Philip Mead, ‘Homelessness’, draft manuscript kindly made available by the author. See also his ‘Veronica Brady’s Biography of Judith Wright’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, October 1999, pp. 163–75.
3. Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, p. 165.
4. Judith Wright to Michael Symons, 23 February 1978, Folder 247, Box 33, Judith Wright Papers, MS 5781, National Library of Australia.
5. Judith Wright, ‘Patrick White and the Story of Australia’, in Going on Talking, Butterfly books, Springwood, 1992, p. 52.
6. Judith Wright McKinney, ‘The Writer and the Crisis’, Language: A Literary Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, April–May, 1952, pp. 4–6.
7. Tim Bonyhady, ‘Judith Wright Tribute: Art and Activism’, Ecopolitics, vol. 1, no. 1, December 2000.
8. Judith Wright to A.L. Rowse, 6 April 1982, Judith Wright Papers, NLA, Folder 228, Box 30.
9. Judith Wright to Leonard Webb, 5 October 1977, NLA MS 9752; Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 381–82.
10. Michael Roe, ‘The Other Side of the Frontier’, Island Magazine, no. 11, June 1982, pp. 2–4.
11. Inga Clendinnen, ‘Reading Mr Robinson’, in Morag Fraser (ed.) Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, pp. 58–78.
12. Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, p. 95.
13. Judith Wright to Frank Eyre, 6 May 1980, Judith Wright Papers, NLA, Box 9, Folder 71.
14. Terry Coleman, ‘Australian squatters and others’, The Guardian, 1 August 1982.
15. James Douglas Henry to Judith Wright, 7 March 1983, Judith Wright Papers, NLA, Box 30, Folder 228. See also James Douglas Henry to Judith Wright, 26 January 1983, Box 30, Folder 229.
16. Axel Clark, ‘Lest we forget them’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 January 1982.