Collected Poems

The prescribed selection from Judith Wright's Collected Poems is six poems: "Bora Ring", "South of My Days", "Woman to Man", "At Cooloola", "Bullocky" and "Nigger's Leap, New England". Written by one of Australia's most important poets, the selection is set for HSC English EAL/D Module B: Close Study of Text.

The prescribed selection from Judith Wright's Collected Poems works through six poems: "Bora Ring", "South of My Days", "Woman to Man", "At Cooloola", "Bullocky" and "Nigger's Leap, New England". "Bora Ring" is an elegy for a vanished Aboriginal ceremonial ground, building a presence out of what is missing and ending on a white rider's unnamed dread. "South of My Days" is a meditation on the New England tableland as the poet's "blood's country", most of its length given to the remembered yarns of the old stockman Dan before the poet gently ends the spell: "Wake, old man, this is winter, and the yarns are over."

"Woman to Man" is a love poem and a poem of conception, its confident anaphora broken on the last line by a bare plea. "At Cooloola" sets a settler conscience against a blue crane that "has fished there longer than our centuries". "Bullocky" grants a pioneer bullock-driver the grandeur of Moses and lets his private myth harden into national legend, while "Nigger's Leap, New England" - the title uses the ugly historical name of a cliff where Aboriginal people were driven to their deaths - confronts the frontier massacre the settler myth buried. The selection is one argument with itself: two poems celebrating the settler past, two grieving what the settler displaced, and two widening the frame to creation and deep time. Meaning in this poetry is made across the collection, not only within any single text.

Wright's belonging is physical and inherited, but never innocent. The tableland is fixed in hard adjectives - "clean, lean, hungry country" - three blunt monosyllables that refuse easy praise, and claimed as "part of my blood's country", though "blood" quietly carries the frontier's other meaning too. Old Dan's yarns are loved and doubted in the same breath: "he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards", memory as performance rather than record.

Against the settler's warmth stands the poetry of absence. "Bora Ring" opens on subtraction - "The song is gone; the dance / is secret with the dancers in the earth" - every verb of loss softened, the violence never depicted, only its aftermath, until the last line traces the rider's unease to "the fear as old as Cain". What that poem lets the settler merely feel, "Nigger's Leap, New England" names: the "bone and skull / that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff" refuses abstraction, and the reasoning that follows - "Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers, / and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?" - turns shared humanity into indictment: "O all men are one man at last."

"At Cooloola" makes antithesis a moral instrument. The speaker names herself by her people's crime - "I'm a stranger, come of a conquering people" - and the poem will not release her from the guilt that phrase admits.

"Bullocky" shows myth-making in real time, one man's apocalyptic dream hardening into a nation's founding story - yet its quietest line, "plough strikes bone beneath the grass", leaves the bone deliberately unidentified, planting the doubt the elegies elsewhere name. And "Woman to Man" proves the method on entirely different ground: the accumulating "This is the maker and the made" exists so the final line can break it - "Oh hold me, for I am afraid." - creation rendered as awe and terror at once.