Analysis of ‘At Cooloolah’

Longing to Belong: Judith Wright’s Poetics of Place by Jenny Kohn

“One cannot examine the way Wright deals poetically with the legacy of the past
without mentioning “At Cooloolah” (140-1), published in The Two Fires in 1955,
about a decade after the earlier poems to which I have already referred. In this
poem, the haunted landscape again serves to remind us that our possession of the
land is tenuous at best. The vitalistic blue crane “fishing in Cooloolah’s twilight / has
fished there longer than our centuries”, and is thus majestic, a symbol of the eternity
of nature. In contrast, the speaker is a “stranger,” and uneasy in nature because
rejected – “unloved” – by it. The “dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah”
are not the source of fear; rather, they know what is ignored in peril, that the land is
spirit, and is thus itself the source of threat, as “the invader’s feet will tangle in nets
there and his blood be thinned by fears.” The ghost which beckons the grandfather,
the “black accoutred warrior armed for fighting, / who sank into bare plain, as now
into time past”, is part of the landscape (“bare plain”) as well as history (“time past”).
It is clear from this that the dislocation the speaker feels in the landscape has at least
as much to do with history. Like the grandfather, the speaker is confronted by a
spectre from the landscape – the spear “thrust from the water” – yet the speaker’s
heart is “accused by its own fear.” Interestingly, in the end, though the speaker is
uneasy about past murders, feels out of place in the land and challenged by history,
the source of the speaker’s anxiousness is not Aborigines, nor the land, nor even
history: the speaker’s fear comes from within.” pp.119-120

A H U M A N PAT T E R N – S E L E C T E D P O E M S by Judith
Wright.
Teaching notes prepared for by Stefaan Steyn p.30-31

‘At Cooloolah’
It is interesting to observe how Judith Wright maintains thematic and aesthetic
continuity as her work develops. While Wright more dispassionately narrates the
disjunctions within her observations of nature in ‘Bora Ring’, with her anger and
grief implicit, the two poems ‘At Cooloolah’ and 'Landscapes' (p. 84) demonstrate
something of her growth in personal awareness and an increasing attempt at
wholeness despite loss. ‘At Cooloolah’ it is Wright herself who is challenged by ‘a
driftwood spear/ thrust from the water’. This time it is nature that sides against her
and she herself who ‘like my grandfather,/ must quiet a heart accused by its own
fear’.
Wright's close connection to and understanding of nature is under threat here. She
has come to understand that, unlike the blue crane ‘fishing in Cooloolah's twilight’ -
integrated with the environment - she is ‘a stranger, come of a conquering people.’
This time too, the knowledge and acceptance of guilt and alienation is explicit,
rather than repressed - ‘being unloved by all my eyes delight in/ and made uneasy,
for an old murder's sake.’
Wright extends awareness of this disjunction in addressing her audience. The
growing alienation of Australian society from its natural bedrock and its authentic
cultural substrate becomes her predominant poetic and personal concern. The
 Analysis of ‘At Cooloolah’
abstract rider of ‘Bora Ring’ is now the poet's own grandfather and the accused is
herself. Equally too, the disquiet here is that of the speaker herself - juxtaposed
carefully with the ‘calm’ of the landscape's ‘certain heir’, the blue crane which is at
one with nature and part of it, ‘he will wear their colour till he dies.’
It is ironic that the nature poet is out of step with nature, that nature poetry here is
de- romanticised. It is about the lack of connection to nature, the resistance of
nature and society to the poet's gaze. In post-colonial terms the land and culture of
settlement resists the domination of the renaming process of enculturation. The
poem is here a religious and social confession: ‘I know that we are justified only by
love,/ but oppressed by arrogant guilt, have room for none. ‘
Wright's language inverts the standard colonial discourse here - it is the oppressor
that is ‘oppressed by arrogant guilt’ - a colonised space that has ‘room for none’. The
internal, crowded, oppressed space of the oppressor is here contrasted with the
free, ‘clear heavenly levels’ which is ‘frequented’, rather than dominated by crane
and swan.

Reflection Activity:
Trace the rhyming pattern of the poem. Is the rhyme pattern consistent?

Do you consider it to add to the poem or is it a distraction?

How noticeable is the rhyming effect, and do you consider it at all important to the
poem's feel and message?