Andrew Fraser on Judith Wright

Andrew Fraser: Thank you for your contribution – a thoughtful and creative reflection on Judith Wright’s “The Wattle Tree” which inspired your poem “Sydney Easter Show” – thank you!

I first encountered Judith Wright, when I studied The Wattle Tree in Michael Griffith’s Poetry and Being class run online at the Aquinas Academy in September 2022. I was interested to learn that Judith Wright came from a pastoral background yet reacted against the violence of that industry to write poem like the Wattle Tree, that celebrates the beauty and spirituality of the Australian landscape.

The Wattle Tree inspired me to write my poem Sydney Easter Show which I submitted as my entry to this year’s David Tribe Poetry Award. My poem connects pastoral images on display at that Easter show with Judeo-Christian icons like blood sacrifice, purgatory and judgement day, attenuated with a joyous ecological portrayal of the Second Coming. The poem, like Wright herself, transitions to themes found in Buddhism and Sufiism, with a nod to modern evolutionary science along the way.

Sydney Easter Show

Jocelyn holds up her palm menorah,

As the priest splashes her from his holy spa.

Then swept up in experiences dream-like,

She bears witness at Sydney Easter Show,

To Thine coming again on deep green bike,

The crowd jubilant and adoring so!

She pets a lamb at the farm pavilion

And her inner child banishes the grown one.

The tears well up, she holds back her despair;

The Paschal Lamb, penned in, tight packed,

Is living the live export trade nightmare,

That cult blood sacrifice has fomented.

And comes a thought from outside the steeple,

Thou died for all creatures, not just people!

Jocelyn walks to the Aussie circus,

Where axe- wielding gladiators awe us.

Workers clean up the grisly body parts

Of gum trees, once whole, alive in the breeze.

Moved by their vivisection, her heart’s

Pledge rails against old- growth logging disease.

Her woman’s ears take in a warm male voice

And she spies a handsome Country singer,

Who in lewd fancy, tempts her to rejoice,

But her good girl Church upbringing stops her.

A row of nine manic head- roaming clowns

Laughs at her and her face twists into frowns.

Then she is trapped in Side Show Alley;

A crass -neon- flashing- -purgatory!

Jocelyn’s nose follows a fusty smell,

To where an old buck waits to be judged.

It bleats at men sins a White Coat does tell,

Recalling the Scapegoat by Hunt painted.

Upon Majestic Wheel she meditates,

And through Death, to Life evolving, relates.

An Asian woman, whose race has been won,

Beckons her to a blue-green gondola;

The craft twirls off into the autumn sun,

Traversing the roof of the arena.

To the Far East appear city towers,

That out of green- tree -fields mirage- like grow; Seeing them full of spring wattle flowers, Towards Ninth Heaven her freed soul does go

AC Fraser 10 April 2023.

The idea for the final stanza of Sydney Easter Show came to me when I connected the spiritual power of Wright’s, The Wattle Tree, nurtured by its four elements of earth, water, air and sun, with an experience I actually had at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. As I sat in a gondola on the Ferris Wheel and gazed out to the East, the tall towers of Sydney CBD appeared to grow out ‘of green- tree-fields’. Then, as if by magic, yellow wattle flowers bloomed on those trees. And divine peace reigned on the world.

Andrew Fraser

1 November 2023