Longing to Belong:

Judith Wrights Poetics of Place

Jenny Kohn

It has often been noted that Judith Wright struggled with two opposing
ideas: her love of the land on which she was raised, and her knowledge
that her familys ownership of that land was preceded by the dispossession
of indigenous Australians. The presence of dualities in general is strong
throughout all of Wrights work from her early The Twins to Patterns,
the last of the ghazals. This duality in particular, however, is such a preoccupation in her work that, in some ways, it superimposed itself on Wrights
life, or rather the way Wrights life has been represented. So, we have, on
the one hand, Wright the celebrator of all things Australian. This Wright is
the writer of South of My Days and Bullocky, the poet who was instrumental in forging the Australian poetic conception. This is the poet who is,
in the words of Jennifer Strauss, an Australian poetic institution. 1 On the
other hand, we have Wright the activist, the campaigner. This is the Wright
we see in poems like Niggers Leap, New England, and later, more overtly
political poems like Two Dreamtimes. 2
These two seemingly distinct aspects of Wright and her work are not
reality but a myth: a misrepresentation offered to us by critics. I will argue
that a fresh reading of several of Wrights best known and, possibly, best
loved poems illustrates the way these apparently separate strands intertwine. This myth which reduces Wrights feelings about the landscape into
COLLOQUY text theory critique 12 (2006). Monash University.
www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue12/kohn.pdf

Longing to Belong

two separate and simple positions is reductive, and does not allow for the
complexity of Wrights feelings about the landscape. I will argue that a
knowledge of, and disquiet about, not only the specific history of the landscape on which she grew up, but also the process of history in general, influences the way Wright conceptualised and wrote about the landscape.
That Wright was passionate about the natural landscape cannot be
disputed not only the land, but the creatures who inhabited it. One needs
only to look to a poem like Birds to know that though Wright recognised
the cruelty and harshness of nature, she nevertheless longed for the clear
and simple existence of the birds, preferred it over being torn and beleaguered by her own people. Born in the shadow of the Great War, and
reaching maturity during the heights of another terrible war, Wright could
not escape a knowledge of the cruelty of humanity, and it is perhaps no
wonder that the simple, unselfconscious cruelty of the animal world
seemed appealing in contrast. The longing to be simple to myself as the
bird is to the bird is expressed in the poem as a longing for atemporality: If
I could leave their battleground for the forest of the bird / I could melt the
past, the present and the future in one / and find the words that lie behind
all these languages (86).
It is not only in Birds that longing to belong in the natural landscape
is bound up with temporality. Wright suffered from that peculiarly modern
ailment which I will term temporal anxiety: an anxiousness directed at the
passage of time, the processes of history, and also modernity itself. Temporal anxiety is personified in Walter Benjamins angel of history. His face
turned towards the past, he watches the catastrophe that is the unfolding of
historical events. He would like to make whole what has been smashed,
but the storm of progress propels him forward, and he is unable to make
good the past. 3 To this, Wright adds a particularly Australian flavour. Australian historical anxiety is more than simply guilt about a brutal past,
though this is almost always involved; at issue is the legitimacy of the past
itself. An understanding often unconscious, or not stated of the unjustness of the colonial past manifests itself in an uneasiness about the historical process and history itself, and a longing for stable origins and historical
legitimacy.
In colonial societies such as ours where the possession of land rests
on the dispossession of prior occupants, historical anxiety and the desire
for historical origins involves a desire for origins in the spatial sense, a
longing to come to terms with the landscape, to render it wholly owned and
possessed. The desire for a legitimate past, to be vindicated rather than
condemned by history, is also a yearning to take imaginative as well as actual possession of the land, to become, as it were, native, and so to redress

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feelings of dislocation, or, as Canadian writer Margaret Atwood puts it, the
feeling of being alien, of being shut out, and the overwhelming wish to be
let in. 4 There has been a trend in Australian writing to attempt to forge a
sense of belonging through literature, and specifically through poetry, a
trend to which Wright certainly contributed. Through writing about the landscape, the poet takes possession of it, and becomes native to it. In a country such as Australia, to lay claim to nativeness necessarily involves a certain degree of appropriation.
Wright was certainly aware that this was a potential consequence of a
desire to be at one with the Australian landscape. She reveals her complex
understanding of this issue in a poem written for Kath Walker, Two Dreamtimes (315-8). It is a poem that has been criticised often: for romanticising
Aboriginality and white guilt, 5 or for being too political and not poetical
enough. I will return to this poem in due course, for it is in fact a wonderfully
complex poem, a poem that exhibits a great deal of faith in the power of
poetry and its potential to create meaning in, and improve, an imperfect
world. In Two Dreamtimes Wright works through the issue of appropriation: she begins in asserting a shared sense of loss that the white
speaker and her black friend are sisters in grief. However, Wright ultimately
moves to a position in which she realises that the loss of one cannot be
compared to the loss of another. Wright might long to absorb the landscape
and be at home in it, to write, no longer as transplanted Europeans, nor as
rootless men who reject the past and put their hopes only in the future, but
as men with a present to be lived in and a past to nourish, as she once
wrote; 6 however she cannot escape the knowledge that her desire to fully
possess the land would implicitly involve the displacement of her shadowsister and her people.
This acknowledgement of the dark side of a desire to possess beloved
landscape informs much of the poetry that has typically been characterised
as dark. Niggers Leap, New England (15) is one such poem. Niggers
Leap is based on a favourite family camping spot frequented by Wright as
a child. Lookout Point was, to young Judith, magical but had a darkness
in it. Darkie Point, cliffs just north of the camping grounds, had been the
site of massacres of Aborigines, forced off the cliff by whites as punishment
for stealing cattle. The problem of loving a land with a dark past was thus
an obsession of Wrights from an early age: those two strands the love of
the land we have invaded, and the guilt of the invasion have become part
of me. It is a haunted country, she wrote. 7 There is a strong sense of that
hauntedness in Niggers Leap. The poem begins with a description of the
encroachment of the night that is also a plea for darkness, for the night to
swallow the landscape: Swallow the spine of range; be dark, O lonely air. /

Longing to Belong

Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull / that screamed falling in flesh
from the lipped cliff. The image of the cold quilt is an uneasy one, and not
simply because the quilt functions as a shroud for the corpses. The quilt,
which should represent warmth and comfort, is made strange by coldness;
what should be reassuring is the opposite, and thus the image lends to the
darkly terrifying first stanza a feeling of the uncanny the anxiety that results when something familiar becomes alien because it has been repressed. 8 The image of the night dominates this poem. The desire for
nightfall indicates what Strauss calls the imperative of repression. It is so
strong in the poem that the traditionally feared capacity of time to devour
becomes something desired. 9 Not only are the events of the past and the
resulting guilt repressed, but so are Aborigines themselves. Thus, they
(ourselves writ strange) become uncanny. 10
Niggers Leap is not essentially a poem about historical events, but
rather a poem about the colonial state of mind. If the drawing in of night
represents repression of the landscape, the past, and Aboriginality the
final stanza can be interpreted as the effects of repression. Night floods us
suddenly as history / that has sunk many islands in its good time. Significantly, both night and history return to flood us, as what is repressed returns to assail the consciousness. This moment, the confronting and often
violent return of the past, is frequently repeated throughout Wrights poetry.
In Bora Ring (8), the absence of an Aboriginal presence on the land is
symbolised by the ring of the title a ceremonial ring that has literally left
its mark on the landscape, on the grass that stands up to mark its place.
Faced with this indication of both absence and continued presence, the
presumably white rider is confronted by a sightless shadow, an unsaid
word. In her excellent biography of Wright, Veronica Brady writes that
Wrights life was always filled with unseen presences the land, as well
as memories of Aboriginal people and their culture that remain with her
as a kind of melancholy longing for a vanished space, a grief for a lost
country, a lost paradise, an image of some past she will never be able to
recover and from which she is and always will be shut out. 11 In poems like
Niggers Leap and Bora Ring, these unseen or absent presences, which
are written on the landscape itself, make the landscape strange. They are
compelling reminders of the hauntedness that, for Wright, was an acknowledgement that the land her family owned could never, at least morally, be
wholly possessed.
Shirley Walker typifies the view that there is a clear duality between
the historical point of view that comes across in the pessimistic poems, of
which Niggers Leap is one, and poems such as South of My Days and
Bullocky. These poems, she argues, recover and revalue colonial history,

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elevate it to an almost religious level by the use of biblical allusion, and

place it in the long history of human effort. 12 The effect of this, according to
Walker, is to bridge the generations, establish traditions and culture heroes in a raw new land, and altogether alleviate that sense of spatial and
temporal exile. 13 This is not a singular reading of these poems. Interpretations such as this were frequent enough that, as Strauss points out, Wright
became distressed by those who took her poems as a simple valorising of
the pastoral past, given her own hardening view of it as a process of invasion. 14 In my view, an ambivalence about history that prevents an easy relationship with the land is present in these well-known, so called celebratory poems inasmuch as it is present in poems such as Niggers Leap.
A.D. Hope thought that Bullocky (17) was Wrights best poem, and
believed it to be a representation of the success of Australian poets in coming to terms with the land. 15 Walker claims that the poem shows compassion for the bullocky, and celebrates his heroic virtues, his readiness to suffer for his vision, in which past, present, and future are fused into a mythic
continuum of suffering and sacrifice which are necessary for the progress
of the race. 16 Yet there is an uneasiness throughout, which undermines
the bullockys vision and the sense of celebration. The passage of time is
threatening, here as in so many of Wrights poems: it makes the bullocky
go mad. The word Wright uses to indicate this widdershins can mean
simply in the wrong direction, or it can mean anticlockwise, in the opposite
direction to the sun. Taken in the second sense, the word locates the bullocky, and by implication the enterprise of which he is a part, at odds with
the workings of nature. The second stanza is quite often taken literally; critics assert, as did W.N. Scott in another context, that the landscape is inhabited. 17 The landscape does become inhabited, in a sense; the solitary
tracks become populous before his eyes, / and fiends and angels used
his road. However, it is not a landscape meaningfully or productively populated; in fact, the landscape is populous only in the deluded eyes of the
bullocky. The bullocky is a truth-teller only in the sense that his dreams are
apocalyptic: his is a world that is coming to an end. To Walker, the bullocky is a visionary; 18 but in my view, the sense of unease throughout the
poem demands an ironic reading.
In the poem, night creeps up on the bullocky, 19 and he hears the
sweet, uneasy sound of centuries of cattlebells. John Salter accurately
points out that the cattlebells he is hearing cannot be Australian, for cattle
have not existed in Australia for centuries. 20 This is another moment of
the uncanny: in the sound of centuries of cattlebells, the past is recurring,
but it is the British past transposed onto the Australian landscape it is at
once familiar and strange, sweet and uneasy. The uncanniness in this

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poem has great significance for Australian history, which is made clear in
the two final stanzas. The land is being used for a different purpose and the
world of the bullocky is no more. That the vineyards cover all the slopes
(my emphasis) suggests progress and productivity, yet there still remains a
deep connection to the past. The vine, as it will grow close upon the
bones of the bullocky and grasp them in its rooted hand, is literally holding
on to history. The present inherits the bullockys anxieties; his fate is
doomed to be theirs. Bullocky thus makes clear that the productivity of the
new age is based on a past that was not entirely moral and unproblematic
rather a history in which Salters European consciousness imposed itself on the Australian landscape and the indigenous people. New endeavours cannot escape the ghosts of the past.
Like Bullocky, South of My Days (20-1) has been read as a nationalistic poem, and like Bullocky it contains a palpable sense of threat. It is
evident in the loving yet almost violent description of the land; though beautiful and even beloved, it is inhospitable. Wrights language matches the
harshness of the landscape: bony slopes wincing under the winter, the
clean, lean, hungry country, the creek which is leaf-silenced, / willowchoked. The landscape is embodied and alive, hungry country that
threatens to consume and devour, a not uncommon fear throughout Australian literature. 21 The coldness and darkness of the black-frost night is
Wrights stock indication of uneasiness. Inside, the drawing in of the walls,
the cracking of the roof, and the hissing kettle create an eerie atmosphere.
Like the bullocky, old Dan attempts to populate the landscape in order to
protect himself against the sense of unease represented by the cold and
the winter. However, Dans attempts to populate and possess the landscape through stories is as unsuccessful as the bullockys prayers, for no
one is listening. The stories are slippery and do not stick, but slide and
vanish, and Dan shuffles the years like a pack of conjurers cards, which
strengthens the sense that the stories are no more than illusion: the elements intrude and the reality of the winter imposes itself. The stories that
still go walking in the final stanza are plainly not the stories of old Dan to
which no one is listening. They are the stories of the Aboriginal Australians, that, as in Bora Ring, are inscribed in the landscape, and arise to
haunt the colonisers.
One cannot examine the way Wright deals poetically with the legacy of
the past without mentioning At Cooloolah (140-1), published in The Two
Fires in 1955, about a decade after the earlier poems to which I have already referred. In this poem, the haunted landscape again serves to remind
us that our possession of the land is tenuous at best. The vitalistic blue
crane fishing in Cooloolahs twilight / has fished there longer than our cen-

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turies, and is thus majestic, a symbol of the eternity of nature. In contrast,

the speaker is a stranger, and uneasy in nature because rejected
unloved by it. The dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah
are not the source of fear; rather, they know what is ignored in peril, that
the land is spirit, and is thus itself the source of threat, as the invaders feet
will tangle in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears. The ghost which
beckons the grandfather, the black accoutred warrior armed for fighting, /
who sank into bare plain, as now into time past, is part of the landscape
(bare plain) as well as history (time past). It is clear from this that the
dislocation the speaker feels in the landscape has at least as much to do
with history. Like the grandfather, the speaker is confronted by a spectre
from the landscape the spear thrust from the water yet the speakers
heart is accused by its own fear. Interestingly, in the end, though the
speaker is uneasy about past murders, feels out of place in the land and
challenged by history, the source of the speakers anxiousness is not Aborigines, nor the land, nor even history: the speakers fear comes from
within. 22
It is characteristic of Wrights complex understanding of the issues
that, while she raises many questions in poems such as At Cooloolah,
she rarely attempts to offer any solutions. Two Dreamtimes is unusual in
this respect. It is arguably an optimistic poem, despite Strauss argument
that nothing is resolved in the poem, that it finishes in sad perplexity. 23 To
an extent, this is true. The poet attempts to make amends, but it is uncertain whether or not this is accomplished: The knifes between us. I turn it
round, / the handle to your side, / the weapon made from your countrys
bones. / I have no right to take it. The knife, made from the past as much
as from the landscape, is not the poets to give as a free gift, as Strauss
notes, and with this rupture in the ceremonial giving and taking the
poem ends inconclusively. 24 The ending of the poem is inconclusive, certainly (But both of us die as our dreamtime dies. / I dont know what to give
you / for your gay stories, your sad eyes, / but that, and a poem, sister.)
yet not entirely without hope. Wright exhibits a profound faith in poetry
here, as the poem can be offered in recompense for the lost sacred. It is
clear that poetry cannot make good the past, nor restore the speaker or her
friend to the land; but it can do something towards restoring a lost sense of
meaning.
For much of her poetic career, Wright believed she could effect a restoration of meaning, to the land as well as to the past, through the moral
authority of poetry. Ultimately, however, this belief failed her. She ceased to
believe that meaning could be restored, and that transplanted Europeans
could gain access to an Australian sacred through poetry. Shirley Walker

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published her Flame and Shadow in 1991, and ended it by stating that
there could be no real conclusion to the study, for there is as yet no conclusion to Wrights work. 25 This carries a sense of irony Wright would have
appreciated, as Phantom Dwelling, published in 1985, was in fact to be
Wrights last poetic endeavour: she made a deliberate, conscious decision
to stop writing poetry.
It was not only the failure of Wrights belief in the possibility of restoring meaning to the land that caused Wright to cease writing poetry. It was
also a loss of faith in poetry itself, a faith which she had struggled to maintain throughout her poetic career. The Unnecessary Angel (291-2) is an
articulation of Wrights wavering faith in poetry. To Strauss, the poem is
part of a trio along with Australia 1970 and Eurydice in Hades of
early warning signs of Wrights decision to remain poetically silent. 26 The
poem begins seeming like an affirmation Yes, we can still sing / who
reach this barren shore but it is a poem about the limits of art, a poem
that mourns the truth that Law surpasses Art. The ending of the poem is
powerful, and does strike a note of premonition: Yet we still can sing, / this
proviso made: / Do not take for truth / any word we said. // Let the song be
bare / that was richly dressed. / Sing with one reserve: / Silence might be
best. Walker argues that the poem concedes mans inability to capture
reality yet affirms both the continuity of art and the persistence of the artist; 27 but the outlook of the poem is not as positive as her reading renders
it. The two final lines suggest that while the artist may continue to sing,
she sings with the knowledge of her songs futility; that the small chords
are fruitless in the face of the overriding power of Law; and that, as Wright
observes in Going On Talking, the poet with a private vision and a conscience will be unappreciated by the society for which she writes. 28 In a
sense, The Unnecessary Angel is a more poetic and, I think, sadder
expression of the bitterly sarcastic Advice to a Young Poet (269-70) in
which Wright gives advice on what a poet must do (Theres a carefully
neutral tone / you must obey; / there are certain things you must learn /
never to say.), and ends sarcastically questioning, What sunk already?
These poems may exude a bitter hopelessness about poetry, however, to
express this within a poetic framework suggests that some hope in poetry
remains.
Later poems return to a position in which faith in poetry is more explicitly possible as, for instance, Two Dreamtimes but unfortunately
Wright was not ultimately able to maintain this belief. The Unnecessary
Angel marks a shift in Wrights poetic form that the poet Chris WallaceCrabbe characterises as a move away from the grandeur of language to
sparser poetry. Wallace-Crabbe argues that underlying this shift was

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Wrights belief that language and a worldwide nuclear threat could

scarcely exist side by side. 29 This reveals a sense of Wrights loss of faith
in poetic language, but does not quite take it far enough. In Because I Was
Invited, Wright maintains that the role of the contemporary poet is different
from that in the past, and that society is often inimical to the values or
knowledge of the poet. His hope must then lie, she writes, not in society,
but rather in humanity, and in the human possibilities that society is often
organised to include. 30 This is the catch; for it is precisely this hope and
faith in humanity which failed Wright, so that in an interview in 1993 she
said, The fact of the matter is that the world is in such a bloody awful
state that I cannot find words for it. The whole situation that weve got ourselves into is too immense, too insane as it were, for verse to encompass
I simply feel incapable of dealing poetically with what is happening
now. 31
The inconclusive end to Wrights poetic career leaves us with a series
of unresolved questions and issues that Wright attempted to deal with in
her poetry, and later, when she came to believe it was no longer a suitable
vehicle, in prose. That Wright failed to find answers to these questions
does not, I think, signal her own personal failure, but a failure that implicates us all. The uneasiness of her poetry is an uneasiness which (as she
has a character say in her semi-fictional, semi-historical family narrative,
Generations of Men) could remain forever at the root of this country. 32
Wright never achieved her desire to acknowledge, and to an extent make
amends for, the brutality of the past, to remove the burden of the past from
the shoulders not only of the colonised, but also of the invaders themselves. The disgust in humanity that lead Wright to quit writing poetry was,
somewhat paradoxically, the result of her love for humanity and her love for
her country. This love was perhaps only made stronger and deeper because she acknowledged its flaws. It is therefore unfortunate that Wright is
best known for those poems which lend themselves to a congratulatory
reading, which have been used to celebrate an Australia Wright did not
want to be celebrated. As Strauss notes, Wright grew to detest Bullocky
because it became intolerable that the poems expressing this view [settlement as invasion] should be neglected while this one poem became canonical because it could be taken as an endorsement. 33 This is indeed unfortunate, not only because it does not do justice to Wrights somewhat unconventional and extraordinary life and talent, but also because it detracts
from the opportunity we have to learn something from what Wright
achieved, and, perhaps even more importantly, from what she failed to
achieve. Reading her poems alert to the sense of haunting they contain
gives us an opportunity to examine the answering feelings of unease that

Longing to Belong

arise in us to examine, as the speaker is forced to in At Cooloolah, the

fear in our own hearts. Only then can the poems which have been called
negative or too political have their full effect. For in them, Wright is constantly striving not only for a connection with the land, but a better, more
moral world, and the chance that we will someday, in Wrights own words,
know ourselves no longer exiles, but at home here in a proper sense of the
term. 34
Monash University
jennykohn@iprimus.com.au

NOTES
1

Jennifer Strauss, Judith Wright (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 20

Judith Wright, Collected Poems (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1999). All citations
of Wrights poems are from this edition and will appear in parenthesis throughout
the text.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 257-8

Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

(London: Virago, 2004), p. 72

Gig Ryan, Uncertain Possession: The Politics and Poetry of Judith Wright, Overland, 154 (1999), p. 29

Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University

Press, 1996), p. xxii

Judith Wright, Born Of the Conquerors (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991),
p. 30

It is of course impossible to discuss the uncanny without reference to Sigmund

Freuds famous essay of that name. The German term he uses, das Unheimliche,
is what is frightening, arouses dread and horror, what is unfamiliar. Das Heimliche,
is therefore what is familiar; but it is also an ambiguous term and can be used to
mean its own opposite. The important point about the uncanny is that the two concepts which are supposedly opposites actually converge. Anxiety is not caused by
what is purely unfamiliar, but by the familiar that has become estranged. (Sigmund
Freud, The Uncanny, New Literary History, 7:3 (1976), pp. 619-645)

Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 64

10

Interestingly, in an earlier version of the poem, the line reads ourselves writ small
(in Judith Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (Watsons Bay: Imprint,
1990), p. 8). The change emphasises the alterity and strangeness of the others,
who are also in some way ourselves, thus highlighting the sense of uncanniness.

11

Veronica Brady, South of My Days (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998), p. 73

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12

Shirley Walker, Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wrights Poetry (St Lucia:
University of Queensland Press, 1991), p. 19

13

Walker, Flame and Shadow, pp. 25-6

14

Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 57

15

A .D. Hope, Judith Wright (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 11

16

Walker, Flame and Shadow, p. 20

17

W.N. Scott., Focus On Judith Wright (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press,
1967), pp. 24-5

18

Walker, Flame and Shadow, p. 21

19

C.f. the encroachment of night in Niggers Leap.

20

John Salter, Re-Reading Judith Wright, New Literatures Review, 18 (1989), pp.
49-50

21

Particularly in popular nineteenth-century ghost stories, or the Gothic realism of

Barbara Baynton.

22

C.f. Wright, Australia 1970, Collected Poems, p. 287. The final line reads: we
are ruined by the thing we kill.

23

Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 69

24

Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 69

25

Walker, Flame and Shadow, p. 205

26

Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 23

27

Shirley Walker, The Poetry of Judith Wright: A Search For Unity (Australia: Edward Arnold, 1980), p. 148

28

Wright, Going On Talking, p. 3

29

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Poetry and Modernism, in eds. Bruce Bennett & Jennifer
Strauss, Oxford Literary History of Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 227

30

Judith Wright, Because I Was Invited (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975),
pp. 42-3

31

Richard Glover, World Without Words, Good Weekend: The Age Magazine, (26
June 1993), p. 36 in Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 23

32

Judith Wright, The Generations of Men (Sydney: Imprint, 1999), p. 183

33

Strauss, Judith Wright, p. 58

34

Wright, Preoccupations, p. xxii