Judith Wright

Silence is the rock where I shall stand.
Oh, when I strike it with my hand
may the artesian waters spring
from that dark source I long to find. (Collected Poems, p 121)

Judith Wright (1915 – 2000), one of Australia’s most-loved poets, began to lose her hearing at age 22. Three years later she was diagnosed with otosclerosis, a condition in which the stapes (one of the three bones in the middle ear), hardens and can no longer vibrate and transmit sound. Despite being deaf for three-quarters of her life, and Wright’s acknowledgement that deafness has ‘really reached into all the interstices of my life, it’s been part of the conditions I live under’ (Rusden, p. 21), very little attention has been paid to the way her impairment influenced her writing.

If she had not been deaf, it is unlikely that Wright would have become a writer. She wanted to enlist in the armed forces during the Second World War but was turned down on account of her deafness. She was interested in anthropology but could not hear enough to do fieldwork. She found a role as a statistician at the University of Queensland, but it was a noisy and difficult environment to work in. When this job was threatened by returned servicemen, the path forward became clear, as she writes in Half a Lifetime:

It was now clear what my future was likely to be. I could no longer hope to earn a living by doing anything in the commercial or academic world. My deafness would increase and the hostility to women holding well-paid jobs would do also. I could perhaps hope to live by writing. (p. 240)

Wright’s deafness influenced the themes of her work. Critics have dwelled upon Wright’s awareness of the limits of language, particularly in terms of the capacity to represents the voices of all living things. However, they have not considered the role that deafness may have played in this theme. As Wright acknowledges in an interview with Heather Rusden, lipreading is a difficult art, and if a speaker turns their head away, the conversation is finished. She explains, ‘[y]ou’re trying to fit a sentence together, so that when somebody turns away … and you’re still trying to work out whether they said “mummy” or “puppy”’ (p. 36). It is not surprising that, for someone who knew how quickly meaning could break, and how hard it was to capture and listen to a voice, the limits of language is a prominent theme in Wright’s writing.

Wright’s attentiveness, particularly to other bodies and how they communicate, is revealed through her close observations of the natural world. Having lost one sense, she relied on her other senses, particularly sight, to navigate the world. In her interview with Rusden, she notes that deafness ‘certainly sharpened … my visual perception, the fact that I was using my eyes far more than most people’ (p. 14). She follows the flights of birds in poems such as ‘Parrots’ from her collection Birds (2003), describing ‘the lilt of flight that blurs their glories, / and warm our eyes upon the lories, / and the rainbow-parrots landing’. The poem is saturated with the birds’ colour and speed, revealing Wright’s close study of such birds in her world.

Deafness was Wright’s ‘dark source’, as she writes in her poem ‘Silence’. It was a condition which occasionally hindered her, but which also enabled her creativity and writing. Without Wright’s impairment, Australian readers would not be able to access this writer’s rich imagery and her sensitive rendering of the nonhuman world.