Henry Lawson said deafness was ‘in a great measure responsible for my writing’. Wright said hers was ‘part of the conditions I live under’. Their disability was inherent to their creativity.
Wildflower artist Kathleen McArthur led one of Australia’s first major conservation battles, over Queensland’s Cooloola region. Yet this canny activist is rarely mentioned in most accounts of the campaign.
Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.