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For the Well-Beloved: Judith Wright and Nugget Coombs

June 22

The love between Judith Wright and H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs is one kept in letters. For 25 years, two of Australia’s most prominent and intelligent public figures wrote to each other about everything, from their thoughts on the weekly AFL scores to their hopes and worries for Mabo and their campaign to change the way Australia viewed the issue of Indigenous rights.

By the time they met in the early 1970s, Wright was in her late fifties and Coombs in his sixties. Both were well established in their respective careers – she was a respected poet, advocate and conservationist, and he an equally lauded economist, former head of the Reserve Bank, advisor and public servant. Though Wright was widowed and Coombs separated from his wife, he did not want to put his family through a divorce and so their relationship was kept an open secret.

Their letters span across much of Australia – from Wright at home in Queensland and, later, her bush retreat near Braidwood, to Nugget while he travelled between Canberra and Darwin for work and his health. Their correspondence was kept private for many years but was recently released to the public through the National Library of Australia. In the June edition of Meanjin, Nonie Sharp writes on the beautiful and poetic relationship between them, which in no small part was also tied to the battle for Aboriginal land rights. Their story has also been covered more recently by Fiona Capp in The Monthly and the Sydney Morning Herald. Canberra readers can also keep an eye out for an interview with Sharp in the Paranoma section of the Canberra Times on Sat June 27.

The essay ‘For the Well-Beloved’ is extracted below. You can read the full version on our editions page.



It was the early 1970s. A growing concern for the fate of indigenous people, for the environment, brought H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs and Judith Wright close together. Very close, as it happens, around 1972. ‘Would you like to meet him?’ Wright asked her daughter early that year. Letters begin to flow between Wright in Calanthe, Queensland and Nugget Coombs in Canberra or wherever he was. Some of their correspondence that stretched into the mid 1990s survives today; and their personal letters to each other have become publicly available only since 1 January this year. On 2 January, the ‘Closed’ stickers were peeling off as I opened the folders at the National Library. ‘Seems like the right moment,’ I said aloud.

Their feelings for one another framed their personal letters: ‘My darling woman, My well beloved Judith; My dearest one, My dearest bloke’; ‘Just in case you have forgotten—I love you dearly, Coombs’.

Coombs was a respected public figure—economist, public servant, adviser to governments, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Australian of the Year for 1971. Judith Wright was a respected poet, early conservationist, already becoming a public advocate and fighter for indigenous people’s rights. By the late 1960s she had begun to travel a long road. She had grown up in a landed family in New England, ‘thinking the land was mine for life’; and in 1955 she had written the poem ‘At Cooloolah’: ‘but I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people’:

I know that we are justified only by love, but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none.

Coombs, a national hero, as some saw him, remained ‘a human, simple, unaffected person—No titles’. Gough Whitlam’s description of him on 28 November 1972 rings true, despite attempts to snatch him ‘to the upper atmosphere’, as Wright wrote to him on 18 January that year.

Judith Wright’s poem ‘The Slope’, written in 1973, evokes her mood at that time. It is a poem of transition born out of pain. With head between her hands she conjures up a sense of despair for a planet dying at men’s hands. And then comes hope:

I call you up, true men who lived and died; my dead beloved, my guides, my living friends. I say your names, I sing you to my side.

Coombs was first among those sung to her side—even though, and sadly, for each and both—not all of the time. Yet he was always present, even if invisibly to the wider world.

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