"One Great World of Fire": Judith Wright's 'Australia, the Land of Fire'

Abstract

Judith Wright stands within a tradition, a tradition of hope but also of anxiety. Colonising is not an easy business, nor is it merely material. "Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country", according to Mircea Eliade, "is equivalent to an act of creation ... [It involves] the transformation of chaos into cosmos" . Put another way, the settler becomes Christopher Brennan's "Wanderer on the way to the self", attempting to fuse new physical realities and the energies and hungers within the self. This is the task Wright has pursued through her long and significant career. In this task the land itself has been central.