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.

Increasingly, Wright was becoming active; within the sphere of indigenous affairs, but especially too about the environment. By 1970 she was at the forefront on conservation: The Coral Battleground, her early defence of the Great Barrier Reef, was also a critique of the Australian Conservation Foundation. And in 1962 she had been a founding member of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland.

Judith Wright’s early letters to Coombs were about those things; and they composed the moral ground of their friendship. As president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland she wrote to him as chair of the Australian Council for the Arts on 1 February 1972. There she raised the question of the future of National Park areas in Arnhem Land, making reference to the employment of local Aborigines as rangers and guides, and the threats she perceived of environmental pollution from the newly discovered uranium deposits in Arnhem Land. By the mid 1970s, her semi-official letters to him began to change: the tone and the language of their beginnings and their endings altered. In her letter to him on 29 May 1975 Wright’s official typed words ended in a different kind of language—and in her handwriting. ‘Meanwhile too, my love, I think of you.’ Yet the hope of meeting more often is surrounded by sadness: ‘but that is one of the conditions we can’t help. “O western wind, when will thou blow”. To free us both.’ Not until long after they were both gone.

Jack McKinney, the love of the first half of Judith Wright’s life, had died in the mid 1960s. In the years that followed her grieving she found the soul-mate of her second life. In life and in death she had written poems for Jack McKinney such as ‘Love Song in Absence’: ‘I sighed for a world left desolate without you, / all certainty, passion and peace withdrawn’. As she wrote, she had begun to die in his absence. Yet time—for her the moving image of eternity—revealed the beginnings of a second great love. She was fifty-seven years old then. ‘It’s a fine thing we have, and thank you for it. Always—J,’ she wrote to Coombs in 1975. And in October: ‘My dear dear love, I would join you in your address to whatever gods may be—from my point of view of course. My arms around you,’ her message ends.

*

In a letter to her biographer, Veronica Brady, on 17 January 1996, Wright, in slightly angry mood, gives a sense of what Coombs was to her. On this occasion she happens to be explaining why she left Queensland: ‘to work further on the issues that really were important, not to further personal ends’. In doing so she gives a sense of what her life was about: not primarily about poetry, or about being a woman poet, but about ‘working on changing the world’. That’s why she’d taken up with Jack McKinney, she says in this reflection to Brady thirty years after he was gone. Read Nugget. The power of thought, of feeling, of action tied them together too.

Coombs was a man mild in manner; yet, like Wright, born of fire. Two persons with the courage to be moved by a burning sense of wrong-doing—towards indigenous people, against war, nuclear armament, destruction of the reef—even the whole planet. ‘Fearlessly Coombs’, Michael Dodson, this year’s Australian of the Year and former Social Justice Commissioner, wrote of him justly in 1996. As early as 1969 Coombs wrote strong words to then federal minister for Aboriginal Affairs Bill Wentworth about the government’s ‘display of real antagonism’ towards the Yolngu people over their land case.

Nugget Coombs had what Patrick Dodson, father of reconciliation, calls ‘the listening heart’, a man with love, compassion and respect for the indigenous people he worked with and who became his friends. Freshly dug yams would appear on his desk in Darwin, a gift from one of the local mob. No-one else had yams placed on their desks!

*

In 2006, Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney published Judith Wright’s selected letters covering a period of seventy-five years from 1925. This very substantial book begins with Wright’s letter to Cinderella, editor of Children’s Pages at the Sydney Mail. She was ten years old.

Judith Wright not only became a poet of renown. Among many other things she was also a great writer of letters, even as many as a dozen a day, often substantial both in their substance and in their length. The hundreds of her letters included in this book of 600 pages are but a selection of the total. A full collection of the correspondence between Judith and Jack McKinney was published in 2004—The Equal Heart and Mind—and many more letters remain unpublished.

As the editors of the 2006 volume say, her letters ‘with her dear friend of later years, Nugget Coombs, remain almost entirely unrepresented in this volume’. The reasons for their absence are intimated by Wright herself in a letter to friend and fellow poet Martin Robertson in England on 8 June 1980. There she confesses to ‘a sort of double senile love’ with a man ‘committed to a rather tragic marriage’, which the two had had to keep ‘more or less secret’. As she explains, their late romance had brought them both ‘a great deal of happiness’ and they had ‘seen much of each other’. This letter, which also appears in Selected Letters, is like a lone admission.

Secret love does not readily remain secret. Two such well-known public figures might find solitude difficult even in outback Australia. In 1978 the two of them hired a car in Alice Springs (‘in his usual impractical but cheering fashion’, Coombs chose a bright red Moke). They took off for Hermannsburg on a 4000-kilometre drive, camping among the spinifex ‘in sand all marked with little braided tracks of marsupial mice and birds’, Wright wrote to her daughter, Meredith: ‘We arrived deep in red dust … but were recognisable enough to start a lot of speculation.’ Whatever the talk their arrival occasioned, that letter found its way into Wright’s Selected Letters in 2006.

When I met them both at James Cook University in August 1981 they had worked together and seen much of each other. Since the late 1970s when Wright had left Queensland, they were nearby—she in Mongarlowe on the hundred-acre property she called ‘Edge’ near Braidwood, he in Canberra.

Stewart Harris records how the Aboriginal Treaty Committee had come to life in their hands in 1979. Early that year Wright had said to Harris: ‘We’ve got to do something … I’ll see Nugget.’ So, jumping into her little car she drove to Canberra. Soon after, the Treaty Committee was formed with Coombs as chairman.

The 1981 conference at James Cook University was a treaty affair. They and the Treaty committee were looking for a test case on land rights and the Torres Strait Islanders present had high hopes for the chances of Eddie Koiki Mabo and his people. It was a ‘meeting of minds’, as Mabo lawyer Greg McIntyre said at that time.

A year earlier, anthropologist Bill Stanner had said of Coombs: ‘He is wonderfully fit, admirably adept still, and has a shine I have lost.’ In those first moments face to face, their eyes shone. At a small impromptu meeting, necessarily secret, attended by Coombs, Koiki Mabo, Flo Kennedy, Reverend Dave Passi and myself, we took some first steps. In an air of quiet excitement a story we all felt passionate about was beginning.[1]

Wright wanted to know more about why the Meriam had so strong a case. She invited me to Canberra to mull over the Townsville discussions. In the quietness of her flat, new friendships began in an atmosphere of secrecy. They lasted right through into a time when Coombs and Wright, separated by long distances, communed mainly through the written word.

A decade later, on 21 May 1992, with the High Court judgment on Mabo imminent, Coombs wrote happily: ‘Judith, my love, I had a pleasant call from Nonie, with inter alia affectionate wishes from Flo [Kennedy] … suggesting a re-union of the Townsville conspiracy group when the judgment is finally down … My dear love, C.’ Sadly, by the time a reunion did take place in Townsville, neither Coombs nor Wright were alive.

In those years, even still in May 1993, both of them felt pleased with what Mabo had achieved. The following day, with rain dripping on the Stable roof, where she now lived in Braidwood, Wright wrote:

I like the new flurry of NT land givebacks … Who would have thought things would have got so far, when we started in 1978? Yes, … relatively speaking I do think it’s been a very successful couple of years … My dear love—your J.

Over a period of twenty years Coombs and Wright ‘had seen much of each other’, and happily, as she said in 1980. Yet, by their last decade several circumstances meant that the written word came to play an increasingly major part in their lives. Secrecy there had always been. As time went on, Coombs’ severe respiratory troubles demanded that he spend half the year in a warm climate, and the North Australia Research Unit of the ANU in Darwin became his home away from home: ‘Nugget’s Place’, his colleagues named his on-site residence. Wright’s deafness worsened and around April 1992 her world became silent. The chance of listening to each other’s voice even on the telephone had faded. Letters took on a new significance, soon becoming something of a lifeline for them both.

While many of Wright’s letters to Coombs from May 1975 onwards into the 1980s and 1990s are present in the National Library, his letters to her are limited to the years 1992 to 1995, his late years. Perhaps remembering the surveillance of writers in the 1950s, she wrote to him on 13 August 1993 how she had burnt his ‘letters instantly on receipt’. In April she had told him how she had ‘notified the National Library that I am shedding a lot more papers in their direction’. However, as she wrote on 11 May, she’d found some letters ‘in the top shelf of the broom cupboard at the back’ and given them to the library staff. In the same letter, she pleads with him to refrain from commenting on present events: ‘please don’t put your nose into a log known to be frequented by Serpents’.

The letters that survive—probably only a fraction of the total—carry a sense of continual renewal, of a sharing of everyday events and observations of the world. He told her at one point they were a record of those times, the world, of nature, of people. And through those years, both continued to battle courageously ‘on the world’s behalf’, as the editors of the 2006 Selected Letters say.

The substance of their correspondence is not only a record of their thoughts, their efforts towards changing the world, or parts of it. Their letters were ways of being together even if not under the stars among the spinifex of central Australia, or ‘Edge’, or watching the red afterglow of the sun setting over the sea in Darwin. Each of them added comments on the current AFL match of the week (often a handwritten addition to Wright’s typed letters). The letters were a way of being together at a distance, separated in place; as they watched, brought together in time.

Wright’s letters to Coombs span a period of twenty years from 1975 to 1995.[2] Their two-way correspondence now on public record is limited to the first half of their last decade. Their replies to each other’s letters during 1993 give a sense of their hopes, their feelings about the world, their commitments, the troubles of increasing frailty—and an enduring love.

‘My dear love,’ he wrote from Darwin on 5 May 1993 of his mixed feelings about the world and himself. Of a ‘depressed state’ that beset him at that moment: of his ‘inability to write … I wake up at 2 am and brood over the state of the world’. However, he goes on, ‘I finished the part of the Chapter on the origins of CDEP … last night the rising moon was covered with a blue haze—believe it or not. Tomorrow I declare open the NARU plantation of indigenous therapeutic plants in the presence of the Larrakia elders … I feel pleased about it.’

‘Blue moons must be a tropical phenomenon,’ she replied on 11 May. Referring to the NARU pharmacopoeia plantation, she voices her fears for the planet: ‘One shouldn’t get attached to places; they are under such pressure now that few will survive … even geology is threatened, let alone plants and animals … Your J’.

Her letter of 23 May strikes a very different note: ‘My dear love, my nice bloke, be well and I’m glad you are okaying at least some of the work you are doing …’ And of the therapeutic plants patch at NARU she writes: ‘Wish I could inspect the new plantation and see Vai [Stanton, Larrakia senior elder] …’

Within the rounds of their everyday lives, their correspondence was mutually supportive. Constantly, the thread of relief at the other’s wellness or achievement found its way into their written words. Wright’s visit to ‘Edge’, her much loved place at Mongarlowe, ‘makes your distance from me more bearable’, he had written to her now at Braidwood on 6 May 1993.

On 3 July what he’d had in mind that day ‘was to celebrate the joy of being in love and loving with you. Judith my love my love Judith Coombs’. Actually, his letter that day is filled with many varied activities and serious reflections. It begins, ‘My well beloved Judith’, thanking her for her comments on his Australian Business Monthly article, which he’d incorporated into the text. It covers comment on the Aboriginal Peace Plan; a public statement from a senior lawyer on his perceived threat to the outcome of the Mabo judgment that Coombs suggests she sign; feedback on her interview for Good Weekend. He encourages her to reconsider her opposition to the Nobel award now being recommended by her fellow writers (‘it will introduce your poetry to hosts who have not had the opportunity to experience it’). He speaks there too of ‘sitting on the cliff’ at sunset with friends from NARU ‘watching the after glow rise’ over the sea; and later feeling ‘a little envious’ of his friends that evening reading her ‘poems aloud to one another’. A book on civic traditions in Italy linked Coombs’ ideas on ‘bottom up federalism’, as he called it and ‘mutual support institutions’ upon which Aboriginal society depended—the theme of the book he was writing (Aboriginal Autonomy, 1994).

While the course being taken following the High Court’s Mabo judgment had shown signs of promise, by 3 July 1993 he had become disturbed by the change in the political climate. Each of them feared that the message of Mabo might be lost. By September his fears were mounting further. ‘My dear love’, he began on 22nd of that month, ‘the whole Mabo business seems to be heading for disaster.’ With two colleagues at NARU he had asked Prime Minister Keating to ‘tour Aboriginal Australia and feel the rising level of hostility’. And with an ache in his heart for the indigenous people, whom he cared about so dearly, he concludes: ‘I ache to have my arms around you … My dearest love, C.’

As was his wont, he even spared feeling for a losing team: ‘A great event by Essendon although my heart went out to Adelaide … after a magical first half’, his postscript ran.

*

In 1985 Wright, now seventy years old, wrote her last book of poetry, Phantom Dwelling. In much the same period she was writing The Cry for the Dead (1981) and We Call for a Treaty (1985). Thirty years earlier she had written ‘The Flame Tree’, and in the 1970s ‘The Flame-Tree Blooms’. Was the tree sending up a new spike, its inner unity strengthened? Many of her last poems are ghazals, a couplet form of Persian poetry. Among them is ‘Pressures’, a poem she wrote for Coombs:

Winter gales, spring gales, summer—under such pressures the contours of things crouch, their angles alter. … Blood slows, thickens, silts—yet when I saw you once again, what a joy set this pulse jumping.

Might one now read her late poems afresh? Wright chose fire not snow as the motif of her life; and the themes of winter darkness pushed aside by the pulse of life pervade her last poems. ‘We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness’, she wrote in ‘Patterns’. And in the winter of old age she rekindles her life: ‘Let’s pile more wood on the fire and drink red wine.’

In the last years of Coombs’ life, Wright continued to send him her weekly fax letters, although he could no longer reply. She says so in her late correspondence (although few of these appear among the letters now unveiled). Certainly in her own later years—she died on 25 June 2000—a unity between herself and the landscape is balanced by a symmetry and cohesion in the woven threads of her self, her being. A unity of self, a union with the natural world, with the very best of humankind—a single passion that reached for the stars and followed the ‘little braided tracks’ of creatures born of the earth. In death, each of them flew back to the earth, his ashes scattered over the Yolngu people’s land he loved and among the plants of the ANU. At his funeral service at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney on 14 November 1997, many of his friends felt some of his wishes were being granted. Bach at the beginning, the Yolngu dancers in the middle, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ at the end. There had been other farewells to him—some with red wine, with candles lit, with song.

Today, a decade on, their voices go on speaking to us of the mystery of all life, and in their later years, of strength even in frailty. Wright’s understanding speaks not only to the loves of her days. It speaks to us all, especially today. Relationship, she said, is what matters: body to earth, heart to mind and the integrity of things created or imagined. Now we may know something of what there is to know, some words may pass down their lives in a new farewell to them both from all their friends—and perhaps also to a love without an ending.

Notes
1.See Nonie Sharp, ‘Learning to Listen’, Meanjin, no. 3, 2007, pp. 105–9. Back to article

2.Letters, Coombs papers MS 802 and 5781, National Library of Australia. Wright’s letters to Coombs cover the period 1975 to 1995, and these are located mainly in MS 802 (folders 375–382). His letters to her are concentrated in MS 5781 (folders 514–523), covering the period 1993 to 1995. The number of their letters now available in the National Library is less than 200; these are not always in chronological order. Since records of replies to each other’s letters are quite few, I have chosen examples of these from their 1993 correspondence. Back to article

— Nonie Sharp