Two of the most notable of Australia's poets, Judith Wright and A D Hope, lived very different lives and wrote very different poetry. Yet both recently died in the nation's capital, Canberra, within a few weeks of each other. And, along with Les Murray, both were probably better known internationally than any other Australian poets.
Alec Hope, the elder by some eight years, though born in the New South Wales country town of Cooma, would generally be seen as a much more cosmopolitan poet than Wright. Despite the about-turn of its final stanzas, his well-known early poem Australia, with its scathing descriptions of both the Australian landscape - "A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey" - and Australians - "monotonous tribes", seems never to have been quite forgotten or forgiven. Certainly Hope's poems have not been as widely loved as Wright's, nor have they been so readily conscripted to the nationalist poetic canon.
Some years ago I chaired a poetry reading at Sydney's Parliament House. As a fund-raiser for the May Gibbs" House, Nutcote, members of parliament were asked to read their favourite Australian poem. Top of the pops were poems by Judith Wright and John O"Brien. I don't remember anyone reading a poem by A D Hope.
For Wright, the fact that some of her earlier poems, such as Bullocky or South of My Days could be fitted so readily into a literary tradition which celebrated the bush landscape and the Australian bushman was later to bring much anguish. So much so, that she refused to allow Bullocky to be reprinted, feeling it had been used to glorify a pastoral tradition she increasingly wished to disown. Her own deep love for her New England birthplace only made more unbearable her growing awareness of the bleaker consequences of her ancestors" pioneering - Aboriginal dispossession and the degradation of both the landscape and its original owners.
Changing attitudes have made Wright's championing of the environment and of indigenous issues much more acceptable than Hope's advocacy of more traditional poetic forms and his celebration of wine, women and the classical past.
