Rowan Henderson: Good evening everybody. Welcome to the National Library of Australia. My name's Rowan Henderson and I'm Acting Director of Curatorial and Collection research here at the Library. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's first nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and give my respect to the Elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Thank you for coming to this event, coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, and now would be a really good moment to turn off your mobile phone if you have one with you today.

So this evening's presentation is called The Battle for the Biosphere: The Political Ecology of Judith Wright, and it's by Professor John Morrissey, a 2025 National Library of Australia Fellow. Our distinguished Fellowships programme supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of 3 months. National Library of Australia Fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support. John's Fellowship this year has been supported by the Stokes family.

John Morrisey is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Galway and programme director of the University of Galway's Award-winning MA in Environment Society and Development, which addresses core challenges of development, sustainability, and environmental and social justice. His current research is concerned with human security from a critical political ecological perspective. This has spawned his interest in the Australian poet Judith Wright, whose writings on ecology have been largely overlooked. In his presentation today John will delve into the writings and archives of Judith Wright, exploring how her work, the emerging trajectory of environmental crises and how it considered the vital challenge of communicating a pathway to a more ecologically responsible world. Please join me in welcoming John Morrisey.

John Morrissey: Thank you very much, Rowan. That's really kind. I began by extending my respect to all those with First Nations heritage here this evening and joining us online. And indeed to all who hold dear a post-colonial sensibility of the world we live in, which seems more important to me than ever. To the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples of the ACT I want to offer [unclear] from one post-colonial culture to another by saying a few words in my own country's first nation language as a mark of solidarity. [speaking in language]. We all live in each other's shadow.

Before I begin my talk, I want to extend my thanks to the National Library of Australia and to all those who make it such a rich place of research and learning led by Marie-Louis as Director-General. There's a soaring sense of public scholarship alive and well here in a world. I think of populist political shorthand that couldn't be more important. Institutions like the NLA are vital. They stand for knowledge, they stand for informed citizenship. They mirror the best of humanity. I wish Marie-Louise, Luke, Conor, Eric, Nat, Lauren, Rowan, and everyone I've met here, all the best in that continued mission.

I also want to say thanks and how grateful I am to the fellowship selection committee. Ryan Stokes as key Library donor and to all the NLA colleagues in the library. I've met so many who have been such a great support to me from Simone and Sharyn and the Fellows team to everyone in Special Collections and the Main Reading Room, all I have met have a genuine curiosity and interest and that makes the National Library a joyous place to do research.

To Judith Wright, I want to begin with a relatively obscure poem. In 2023, I was a fellow at ANU in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, working with Lorraine Elliott and other colleagues here tonight. For 3 months I stayed at Judith Wright Court just across the lake in Acton, and so before arriving I just wanted to familiarise myself more with her work. I knew her poetry a little, but it was very much the established canon that I knew. In initially diving into her wider world of poetry and prose I came across this poem first published in 'The Bulletin' in 1950. Though never cited as especially important I think it signals beautifully her environmental thinking, her sense of always learning and also her subsequent life work. My journey to Wright's environmental vision really began with this poem.

So while studying at ANU on another project entirely, I took the opportunity to have a look at her house papers in the National Library. I then fell down the rabbit hole. What I found in the archives in 2023 was a story that I could already see was vital for our age. It's a story of climate action. It's a history of environmental campaigning and crucially many successful ones. It's a story of heroism. It's a story of struggle, it's a story of despair, but ultimately it's a defiant story of stoicism, responsibility and hope.

From the early 1960s, Judith Wright's work shifted. She increasingly dedicated herself to environmental writing and at the same time a highly engaged level of activism as she became increasingly alert to the anthropogenic proprieties of planet Earth. Her environmental writing was vocally about how to be true to the earth. True values beyond the economic with a respect for all things living, which is how she defined conservation. Her sense of not being simply in a human world was acute and she had a very fatal sensibility of the interplay between ecology and late modern capitalism.

By 1969, Judith Wright is already presciently writing about human environment relations for our contemporary age. In a piece entitled 'The Battle of the Biosphere' in the 'Socialist Journal' Outlook no longer published, sadly, she described the battle as part of the most important, perhaps fatal crisis of our time and saw a global battle for the whole of the biosphere. To win it would require a change of attitude in ourselves so drastic that it may never be won.

'The Battle of the Biosphere' was republished in 'Walk' the following year, also now discontinued. It was a Melbourne Walkers magazine. In the article, she outlines three key concerns. Here they are. The first is the interdependencies of human environment relations in a wider ecosystem. The second is the political economy of irresponsible and destructive ecological extraction. And the third is the challenge of changing ourselves.

In academic circles from geography to ecology, the term biosphere wasn't really used at this point. In one of her obituaries, Wright was described by a scientific colleague as having an amazing intuitive grasp of science for a non-scientist, citing how for example, she argued against Concord in the 1970s, successfully I might add, because of its likely impact on the ozone layer. This is at a time when ozone and climate change were barely noted.

Wright's shift to environmental writing and activism really began in 1962. In my initial foray into her archives in 2023, I found a rich set of writing hidden in the midst of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland newsletters in September, 1962. She had co-founded WPSQ and became its president, a role she held for 14 years. In those newsletters, she writes a range of envisioning articles that were later rewritten, such as 'Wildlife conservation and the teacher' from 1967, 'The relation of man and nature' of 1968 and 'Conservation is a concept' from 1968 as well.

What Wright was primarily concerned with in the newsletters was introducing and disseminating conservation as a vital concept for Australians. Ten years ago she wrote, in 1972 when I first began my education into the problems of being a conservationist, the very words conservation, ecology, and pollution were unfamiliar. Working through the newsletters, my sense grew of the prescient of Wright's environmental writing.

I decided to contact Meredith McKinney, Judith's daughter. I was so thrilled when Meredith got back to me. I felt like I was connecting in a very privileged way to Judith herself. Meredith, who's here tonight, is a deeply cerebral person to chat with and a fantastic writer to boot. She is of course Judith's greatest legacy. Thank you, Meredith, that for all your support.

So back in 2023, several coffees with Mary that later here at the NLA and in Judith's beloved Botanic Gardens Cafe, I was directed to a set of largely unseen archival boxes in the NLA archives. They record a shatteringly brilliant environmental vision and their illumination forms in essence the project of my NLA fellowship these past 3 months.

What my fellowship has been focused on is effectively joined the dots on Wright's vision of human life in a wider ecosystem. My work is exploring what is in effect an early critical political ecology, though that's a [unclear] that really didn't exist when Wright began rising in the environment. I'm seeking to capture, in the wider canon of Wright's work, a sense of her understanding of humans in that wider ecosystem through the lens of human geography and political ecology rather than the usual English literature model. I'm trying to uncover, in other words, how her work envisaged the then emerging trajectory of environmental crisis and crucially, as Rowan said, how it considers the key challenge of communicating a pathway to a more ecologically responsible world.

Now, until her death in 2000 right worked tirelessly in disseminating what she called a new kind of understanding of humankind in an ecosystem of quote living processes and interdependencies. She communicated this holistic understanding of the earth in art, in education, in activism and government policy, in academic circles and in the media, all in an effort to transform how we see and live in the world.

This story is there to be told from the archives in the National Library, and to give you a sense of this tonight in a presentation that I spent more time cutting out material for than any presentation I've ever given, such is the richness of this story, I want to concentrate on Wright's correspondence with a little known but then prominent rainforest ecologist, Len Webb.

After co-founding the WPSQ in 1962, within 2 months, she was joined by Dr Leonard Webb, who was based at the CSIRO Rainforest Ecology Unit at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.
Webb was instrumental in bringing scientific expertise to the group and had a very important influence on Wright's environmental thinking, but crucially also vice versa as we'll see. They spoke repeatedly to each other of their vision for deep ecology.

What is deep ecology? The term deep ecology was coined in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. Næss cited Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' as a key influence for his vision from 1962. Wright also variously acknowledged the import of 'Silent Spring' for her thinking. Deep ecology in essence embraces a sense of environmental ethics and presents an ecocentric view rather than an anthropocentric view of the world. Deep ecologists criticise the narrative of human supremacy, which they show has not been a feature of most cultures throughout human evolution. Through connecting with the works of ecofeminist, Val Plumwood, geographer Peter Dwyer and others, Wright became critically well-read on deep ecology.

And it's really important to note as well she was sceptical of what she called 'acies' or academics in general. But was never hesitant in acquiring academic knowledge. And she wasn't merely accepting a prevailing doctrine either. She was cautious, for instance, of deep ecology's contention that the natural world has equal claims with the human, fearful of our inability to see the ongoing implicit western [unclear] of the law of progress and the survival of the fittest, which we've used to claim the right of dominion over the fate of inferior races and cultures as well as of the natural world.

She also asked how new is the ecocentrism which Næss sees. For her this was very old indeed, echoing earlier identifications and relationships between human and natural entities and first nations relations with country in particular, as she brilliantly talked about in a talk in Townsville in 1987 at a conference called Science Values and Meaning.

Wright and Webb also have capitalism and its successes in mind very much in much of their thinking together. In this sense, theirs is very much a political ecology, a political reading of ecology and how the earth is controlled, managed, regulated or not. Wright spoke of the challenge of eliminating the institutional and narrow-minded abuses of science, for example, by vested interests. And of countering industrial threats through effective lobbying. For Webb the choice in how to manage the earth should not be economics versus ethics or rationalism versus holism. Both could see the overwhelming dominance of economic rationalists or eco-rats as they called them to each other in letters, in government circles.
They had great fun by the way in their letters as well. It wasn't all serious.

They both also had a clear understanding of the mobilisation of science in governments. I used to say it wasn't a scientist wrote Webb in 1992. It was the technological application for profit and control by the nasty capitalists, by the fascists etal. Now I know that the scientists and science intrinsically are flawed. He had noted the then groundbreaking, he had at the groundbreaking conference. Science values and meaning in Townsville had noted that there is no technological fix that can preserve the values at stake.

And Wright herself had much earlier in the early 1970s, noted how quote Science is financed not by forces interested in the welfare of the biosphere, but by industry and asked a very simple question, is any big corporation going to go in for the business of maintaining the biosphere?

Other political economic influences of Wright included, no question, Nugget Coombs. I think Fiona Kapp may be out a little in her timeline of their relationship actually. Their intellectual relationship certainly began in the early 1970s with Coombs attending WPSQ general meetings and writing in a WPSQ newsletter, newsletters. He wrote a brilliant piece entitled 'Ecological and Economic Man' in 1973 in which he outlines how entirely doable it would be to compile quote, an index of ecologically undesirable commodities and activities. This is in 1973, which the market would then promptly respond to if more sustainable ways were designed, made, known, and crucially acted upon. The economic system would adapt to provide the goods and services required.

His argument, which he rehearsed repeatedly with Wright before delivering as revealed in their letters, was that quote, there are conceivable lifestyles more modest in their demands and less destructive of the physical environment. There's incredible wisdom of course, as you all know, in Nugget Coomb's work. His writing for me is very indicative. It's very precise and it's very instructive still.

So these are the kinds of thoughts and reflections that are evident in the Wright and Webb papers. They divulge in divulged an iterative thinking on environmental stewardship. So she asked this question to Len Webb in 1978: how do we get back the physical environment into the cognitively defined world of human action? Not much chance when a world is run by exploitative interests. Man in the ecosystem would have to be rephrased the ecosystem in man, or is that too esoteric?

Their letter is also reveal, I think a self-critical understanding of white Australian colonial identity. The refusal of ideas like wilderness for example, and the broadening of the conservation movement to incorporate Aboriginal land rights in particular.

But to give you sort of an overarching view or purview of Wright's work and writing, I want to sort of coherent into three recurring themes that I've picked out from her wide canon of writing.

The first is the idea of human life in a wider ecosystem. In Wright's vision for human environment relations, a repeated theorising advances an understanding of humankind's position in a wider ecosystem as part of a deep ecology understanding of the earth. Her deep ecology equates in many ways to a critical political ecology as my discipline or subdiscipline would understand it. In seeing humankind in a highly politicised and interconnected planet. Wright felt profoundly a sense of being in a more than human world. She felt a whole human reality, a deep respect for all things living and was truly haunted I think by the urgent environmental crisis being ignored.

She noted how Australians felt they were in a position, in possession of a virtually unlimited country whose only problems were those of developments and progress. For Wright Australia's whole legislative, economic and social system was based on this accepted Australian myth resulting in a prevailing political economy in which we were all quote hooked into a world replete with needs in food, minerals and energy.

The second theme which repeatedly is referenced and repeatedly comes up and features in her writing, is the idea of safeguarding the future of the planet. Wright wrote to Webb in 1972 that humanity's biggest task lay in learning how to manage and look after the lonely little planet that is our only home. She identified the biosphere as an essential concept in thinking through how to become quote fit managers and maintainers of the planet.

She wrote earlier in 1968 of the need for a new kind of understanding that recognised the planet's interdependencies. A year later, she wrote for the battle of the whole of the future of the biosphere involving a necessary new subjectivity or way of living, transformative of the destructive economic subjectivity of irresponsible capitalism and consumerism. For this vital challenge Wright consistently looked to the future in arguing for a necessary behavioural change in the present and one that could not be avoided by a technological fix. We trust science to solve all, she wrote in 1969, but our core challenge for the future is a transformation in ourselves.

The final theme, which really is a central and focal element of her writing, is the idea of communicating necessary climate action. A key global challenge today is the effective communication of planetary emergency and the urgency of climate action.

I met David Pocock two weeks ago. He was incredibly interested in this project work at the National Library. Unfortunately, he can't be here tonight, but he was interested primarily in thinking about the longer history of climate action and that challenge that Wright wrote about, really brilliantly, as you'll see in a few minutes, which is the idea of communicating emergency and doing it in a way that isn't preachy. And this is one of David Pocock's eternal concerns is the idea of reaching people without lecturing to them.

In Wright's correspondence with Webb is an incisive awareness of exactly this pivotal communication task. Her writings and correspondence divulge her struggles and sustained enterprise to convince governments, industry and citizens to alter, alter excessive capitalist, individualistic and irresponsible modes of production and consumption.

Certainly for me, the saddest part of reading through Wright's papers, as I'll talk about right at the end, is encountering the currents of despair as she endeavoured to communicate environmental emergency, necessary solidarity and action.

It's vital as well that I note this element of Judith Wright's work in her correspondences and writings on the wrongs of white colonial history in Australia. She variously refers to how appreciatively she learned from Aboriginal understandings of the environment. And how valuable this learning is in terms of orientating a more responsible management of the earth. We are a colonial, not a post-colonial society still, she wrote in an open letter to Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1991, and which she resigned as a patron for society's refusal to orientate an Aboriginal land rights policy. Aduring to principle was a consistent feature of Wright her entire life. She was 14 years leading this. She founded it and yet she resigned on principle and she was incredibly consistent on that. She did the same thing with the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1972. She resigned over their failure to orientate a policy on Concord.

She repeatedly and very, very hilariously pushed back against a wilderness society for many, many years for their refusal to rid the society of the very, very racist orientations that were rife in their understanding of wilderness.

Working with Aboriginal poet and activist, Oodgeroo Noonuccal or Lance Corporal Kath Walker as she's seen here, co-founding the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, spending 10 years researching and writing 3 books, 'The Cry for the Dead', 'We Called For a Treaty', 'Born of the Conquerors', all the for and part of attempting to quote at last to do something to redress the old wrongs.

I think Wright had a key ally in Oodgeroo Noonuccal who she called a sister. She was devastated when she died in 1993. From 'Two Dreamtimes' in 1973 she captures how both she of the conquerors and Noonuccal of the prosecuted, Freudian slip there, persecuted boat I guess were both shackled by an alien law and the idea of progress and economics.

In the latter stages of her life Wright pursuit of life work of repair towards Aboriginal culture and in reading her archives, I'm especially conscious of this context. Her envisioning of a holistic understanding of the earth deeply respects, learns from and echoes First Nations knowledges of human environment relations.
Immersed in the archives we sometimes think we are in an antit, disconnected and maybe even ephemeral world whose relevancy has passed. But Judith Wright only died in 2000. My own mother died 2 years before that. That's coming up 27 years. But of course it was just a moment ago.

I met Pat Clarke, and I know you're online Pat, hi. A great friend of the Library for so many years, last week for lunch, she's 99 now, starting her seventh book would you believe. We [unclear] the world over a few hours taking aim at the depressingly impoverished leaders we have across the planet and the [unclear] media we have here in Australia, Ireland and elsewhere. We talked about Ireland for ages, her fiercely proud Irish heritage radiantly coming through. From our unshackling from the Catholic church to a recent successful citizenship assemblies that oversaw Ireland becoming the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage through a popular vote. She was incredibly proud of that.

But it was something that Pat said off the cuff that struck me in a very subtle but moving way. We were talking about her husband Hugh, who had been a POW during World War II and died in 1996. Without any fanfare she said she missed him of course, but was always okay because she could at any time have quote his immediate presence by simply remembering. And maybe that's what I'm trying to do with Judith Wright. Remembering and more importantly to flip Flanagan's aphorism refusing to forget.

Remembering Judith Wright's successful environmental campaigns has a relevancy and vital relevancy I think for our age. In establishing the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act in 1975, Wright wrote that the goal was the protection of the reef in perpetuity. But she had an acute awareness of the continuing struggle to defend the act against various industrial threats and keep it operative through active citizenry who have decided it should stay so. Wright saw the Great Barrier Reef as her greatest achievement and it certainly proved to be a perpetual battleground as she predicted.

In 2021, a new proposed coal mine by Clive Palmer I think his name was required renewed opposition, which was eventually defeated. In February, 2025 saw the 38 compilation, 38 of the great barrier reef act, just earlier this year.

Wright was particularly concerned I think, with the persistence of fossil fuels, government subsidisation and suspension of responsible governing principles. In other words, deregulation. In John Baptiste Fressoz's recent book 'More and More and More', he offers the first systematic history of energy transition and explains why so-called energy transition operates without replacing each other. He reveals the persistence, in other words, of their entanglement as a key obstacle to decarbonization. After two centuries of energy transitions, as he notes, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood. Today around 2 billion cubic metres of water fell each year to be burned, 3 times more than a century ago. So thanks to transition theory, climate change calls for a change of technology, not a change of civilization. 

Now, Wright pointed to exactly this worrying trend in the 1960s. She wrote of the technological fix that was a lie in the battle of the biosphere in 1969. Quot we trust the science to solve all this and science created it, but our spaceship has its limitations. Wright could not only see the destructive effects of capitalism, but crucially understood too the dangers of allowing it to be unregulated, all in the name of markets and prevailing discourse like endless economic growth that are bereft of ecological responsibility.

Between 1854 and 2010, 90 corporations have been responsible for 63% of all global CO2 and methane emissions. That's almost two thirds. I think we need to stop blaming an undifferentiated humanity for the climate crisis. I think we need to expose actually the capitalist actors, institutions, and decisions so profoundly damage the planet. We need to bloody well go after them actually, which is exactly what Wright did over 7 years in Securing the Great Barrier Reef in 1975.

Quickly, I was appointed as consultant for unhuman security at Human Development Report Office of the United Nations in 2021. We produced this report, New Threats to Human Security in the Anthropocene in 2022. The report outlines the range of human security concerns in the world today over 200 pages and provides a roadmap of how to address them holistically and systematically through global governance, cooperation and regulation.

But my biggest learning from this was in delivering the report I was amazed at the reluctance and fear in fact of taking on the vested interests that are opposed to regulatory powers, all with the end game of course, of making production cheaper, access easier, and profits higher. Our report was met with the kind of political paralysis we were witnessing everywhere today.

Wright had a particular concern for how a population can be nullified by paralysis in the face of censorship with very vested interests I just spoke about and political intimidation.

The governmental management of knowledge was not just confined to the third Reich. 'The Third Reich of Dreams was published in 1968. It's since fallen out of print. The book was written by Charlotte Barratt, a Jewish journalist based in Berlin when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. That year, she was banned from publishing her work and secretly began recording the dreams of her fellow citizens in West Berlin where she lived. Just after, just before the outbreak of World War II, she mailed her notes to New York where she herself escaped as a refugee in 1939. She lived with Hannah Rent in the West Village.

In April, 2025, Princeton released a new version of 'The Third Reich of Dreams'. The book captures brilliantly the political paralysis that grips society under the hegemony of knowledge control. Today, the world as we all know, faces a range of spiralling crisis in which political leaders dictate the underpinning knowledges of governmental action. From the waging of political violence and war to the ongoing enabling of destructive capitalist production.

In the last years of Judith Wright's life, she increasingly noted society's biggest challenge is communicating an intertwined human environmental precarity for the planet that would be denied by vested interests everywhere and in particular by populous governments and powerful industrial actors.

Wright worked defiantly to expose the damaging consequences of late modern capitalism. She was especially keen to document a detritus left in the aftermath of unregulated economic development. So here she is writing in the National Estate Report in 1975, mangroves up shit creek.

And can I just say my three little kids are in the audience that doesn't count and doesn't go into the Curse Star. By the way, that's a direct quote. I probably should say and explain quickly why my kids are here. This is a very Irish story in so many ways. So when Sharyn and Simone sent me the timeline for my talk, I immediately noted the date, okay, and instead of just simply asking could I change it by a day or go one way or the other, I went home to my wife Olive and said, Olive, guess what we're doing for our wedding anniversary? We're going to a talk by me. But yeah, and my 3 kids are here. One of my little fellas asked whether or not it would be the same as going to the cinema. It is way better than the cinema Adrian. I hope you didn't bring in smuggle in some popcorn.

To return to the National Estate Report and what happened in Homebush Bay. Homebush Bay, by the way, is right adjacent to Sydney Olympic Park and it's an area that has the second highest dioxin levels in the world. And what's dioxin? Well, dioxin is there largely because of the former union carbide factory, which was there for many, many years and led to fishing bands and so on. The highest levels of dioxin in the world are in the A Shau Valley. By the way, dioxin was used centrally in the CS nerve gas that the US infantry used in the Vietnam War. It was also a byproduct of agents, orange agents, white agents, blue, all illegal weapons of mass destruction of course. Highest instances of every known cancer in the world during the A Shau Valley. This is the second highest level of dioxin anywhere in the world is right in the vicinity of Sydney Olympic Park.

Now, how did they do this? They simply built over it. The most famous area of Galway city is the Claddagh. Okay, well, long after the Claddagh ring was forged there centuries ago, it became a dumping ground. South Park. My little boys play soccer there. It's the highest lead concentration anywhere in Europe and it's simply built over it. That's the human and environmental detritus of unregulated capitalism and you can see it. I
followed this up about Homebush Bay. There was a ban on fishing and health advisories in the 1990s and they've never been revoked, never been revoked.

In referencing the national state, we have the blueprint, I think, of how to do conservation, how to do governments, how to do regulation, how to do taxation education, and how to do active citizenship. Progressive visions, in other words, in and with the public. There are 3 copies of this in the Library. I had one of them out and returned it today. This 415 page report should be sent to every school. David Pocock, Luke, a few others, we should rework this for our contemporary age, that report. It's absolutely vital.
There's a problem always, it seems on the left where we can't articulate how government should work. Well, yes we can. This is how it should work. This is what we want to invest in. This is what taxation is for. This is how we want to regulate.

And in that report there is a really, really important blueprint I think, of how to do conservation in a very, very indicatively practical way. Wright lamented indeed for the rest of her life, that blueprint, which she edited and comprised pages of technical expertise allied with collaborative community knowledge and how it was effectively shown. She went literally all over Australia in a collaborative way to get knowledges feeding into that report. It's an absolutely brilliant report on how to do collaborative knowledge. We talk about this all the time in our university. Civic engagement, collaborative knowledge, et cetera. She did it in 1974 with Len Webb and about 4 others. She went all over the country. And she met and listened to and reacted to and fed into a wider assemblage of knowledge. That is a really, really important testament, one of our most important testaments for me.

What else can we learn from Wright's reflections and the challenges of conservation and communicating environmental emergency? I think her understanding of how the media works, it's really incredible. She talks about, for example, the need for a hot issue. She's incredibly aware of that. She talks about the need for personality. The problem of who can we get to speak, who is willing to spend the time to get informed, to quote not come across as an idiot, as she kept saying to Len Webb, to really know the issues, to be convincing, to identify stakeholders, to be savvy in how you communicate in a succinct way when dealing with media. She noted repeatedly the problem of money and the idea of promoted stories, promoted knowledges. And she talked very, very instructively about the problem of censorship and prioritised knowledge, noting the negative influence of Murdoch in particular. From a very, very early stage.

I've had far more letters rejected than published, she wrote in 1972, we called for a treaty later, was not reviewed by the media and this stems always back to the people who run the media with advertisements and other moneyed members of society.

I think we can also learn from her incredibly savvy strategizing and garnering of political support. She was really, really brilliant at this. In fighting the Great Barrier Reef campaign. For example, she attended the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Conference in Geneva as far back as 1968, where she also connected with the Dan World Wildlife Fund head, Peter Scott, all to get overseas sympathy for the reef. I urged him to write letters, she wrote, to the Australian government and they did. We got a lot of information and a lot of involvement and a lot of pressure from overseas and quote, that was the one thing that did help a lot. In Australia as we all know, you never think that anything can be important until somebody from overseas is interested too.

For multiple campaigns, she tirelessly contacted influential individuals, politicians, writers, friends like Patrick White, Sidney Nolan, and many, many others, urging them to write letters, protests and more.
Wright also instructively focused discursively on the future throughout her activist life if they realise what the issues are, she wrote. I think people do come on side. The question of what we're going to leave our children is one that we should have far more at the forefront of our minds. You can see with a lot of people that they're worried about the future, they're worried for their children.

She also underlined the import of focusing on singular issues in communication. Here she's writing to Webb in 1996, I'm suggesting the local greens to the local greens that they concentrate their minds on issues of land and water. Too many issues spoiled the debate. Pocock was saying exactly the same thing. If he goes beyond the remit of one point, he says he loses his audience.

She was also committed to communicating a wider, to a wider public. And she didn't, I think, and here she's rising in 'Women's Day' in 1972, she didn't shirk from distilling either complexity or responsibility. Here she is writing about the new toxic pollutants we're pouring into the biosphere, which are not food for anything we know the earth has a biosphere. This tin vulnerable coating of life is not separate from man. He's part of it and dependent on life. The biggest question is whether or not we can get the planetary rescue system working and whether we can change ourselves, our attitudes to growth and production and consumption so as to become fit managers and maintainers of the planet. And she notes as well, in a man-centered society, women must speak fearlessly against the havoc technology is creating. Women must force men to listen.

Wright ultimately refused to be a pacifist and repeatedly prompted us to reprogram, reactivate and contribute. How not to be preachy and turn people off in this task is a real challenge. There's no question about that. And even as a teacher, I know how important that is. Climate change fatigue is all around us as is the worrying head in the sand syndrome. But there are many things we can do. Have a look at the brilliant overshoot, a list of things we can support, and I do think it's a case of both choice for us all on the micro level and compulsion for governments on the macro level, as Wright wondered about in 1975 in her piece, Conservation: Choice or Compulsion.

For communicating engaged citizenship and action was ultimately about simplicity and sincerity, as she wrote to Edgeworth just a month before she died.

I was just over here today with my little crew, simple informed public knowledges here in Questacon. It's about communicating climate change as convincingly as we can, making stakeholders of us all and having the courage to face the world honestly. And that honesty is something that Judith Wright wrote about her entire life and the importance of it, not ignoring the facts. Since the early 1970s, we have been ignoring ecological overshoot in relentless overproduction and overconsumption driven by elite, the word elite is really important, capitalist interests.

So this is a very depressing, I don't want to depress anybody on a Thursday evening too much, but these are the number of earths that will be required for the levels of consumption in the world today. Five and a half now that's actually from last year, sorry, that's from 2022. It's five and a half for the United States, Australia, second four and a half. Ireland is depressingly somewhere between France and Spain as well, so it's certainly not off the hook.

What is ecological overshoot? Well, ecological overshoot, really quickly, occurs when human demand for resources and services exceeds what the earth can regenerate in a given year. Globally, ecological overshoot has been increasing since 1971. Blue here on the graph is Earth's bio capacity. Red is the number of earths required to sustain economic production and consumption. In 2025 eartch overshoot day fell on July 24, a few weeks ago. It marked a date when humanity exhausted nature's budget for the year. And since then we have been adding to deforestation, soil erosion, food shortages, and the buildup of CO2 and methane in her atmosphere. Long-term, in other words, devastating human and environmental costs. But not costs, crucially, for the industrial actors of elite capitalism that Wright incisively identified in her vision of safeguarding the planet.

Wright's writings on industrial raw climate change and the challenge of communicating a pathway to a more sustainable and ecologically responsible world is presciently relevant today. But she, just like us all here tonight, faced intense and prolonged periods of despair and I think we need to historicize despair too actually. It will help us to remain stoic and determined in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. Impoverished leadership and powerful vested interests.

Wright's letters to Nugget Coombs in the 1990s were very hard for me to read. It was a long week going through them. Thanks to Meredith especially, for reentering that terribly difficult set of memories with me over multiple emails, conversations and coffees. Judith's series of delusions and profound distress over surveillance, theft of letters and more is reflective of what can only be described as PTSD. The consequence, in other words, of putting your head above the parapet and standing up against powerful interests. And let's not forget, she knew she was under ASIO surveillance, disgracefully so from the 1950s. She experienced repeated intimidation over her Great Barrier Reef campaign, Fraser Island campaign, and many, many others in Queensland in the 1970s. And she received recurring repudiations regarding her support for Aboriginal land rights and a treaty in the 1980s.

Her sense of despair was regularly evident throughout her life as an environmental activist. To make any change, she wrote quote, in 1992 to an edgeworth that will really matter is almost astronomically out of reach. Now, how do you stop chemical petrochemical, mining and industrial companies who now finance governments around the world? We've given ourselves over to greed and materialism. We know we're going to cook or choke to death if we go on as we are, but we still don't do anything. Greed wins out every time. This is from her infamous 'Sydney Morning Herald' magazine article in 1993.

I don't any longer feel confident that anyone is listening out there, she wrote to Anna Edward in 1998, if there ever was. Really, I think the whole situation's beyond hope, but I continue to battle some things at least.

The last part here is key to Wright's life for me. Despite everything she's deep down retaining hope, she's continuing to give everything she has to every cause she believes in. She gave donations, everything she gave away her house of course. A very long story, which Meredith can tell you over another lecture. But she carried on the struggle in a way that really is ultimately, what I get most from going through all of her papers, is that she didn't crucially give up.

Here's her last letter to Len Webb. And I think in it we see the sense that even in 1999 she's still learning and she's not giving up. So John Harris, freshwater ecologists, really good ecologists came in the other day bearing articles and we had a good chat about the state of the world and what a state it is. There may be some hope in the future, but it isn't my experience that people are rushing to save the world. Rather at the contrary in fact, they're rushing to get their cut before it all falls apart. Maybe we are programmed to get no further than the millennium, but then we can reprogram ourselves if more of us wanted to.

Len Webb wrote a formal tribute to Wright in 'Wildlife Australia' in 2000 after she died. In it he acknowledged Wright's influence in opening him up to a self-critical understanding of the role of science in the management of the earth. But these are the things he didn't write in public from one of his last letters to Wright as her health was failing. You were a cracker Sheila, mate, I so greatly admire your line and the environment, Aborigines and everything else. I'm so privileged to know you.

Over the last 12 weeks I've gone through 104 boxes of files on Judith Wright and connected colleagues and friends including Len Webb and [unclear], Nugget Coombs, Barbara Blackman and others. Some days I felt as slow as a light rail inching its way up to City Hill and beyond to Commonwealth Avenue. Light rail stage infinity maybe. No, actually that's going too far.

Sometimes I got to be honest. I wish you write wasn't so prolifically productive. 14, 15 letters a day at times me that no doubt the clicky clack of that typewriter late night at edge often kept you up. As Olive knows unfortunately, I have Raphael Nadal levels of OCD, so every box had to be checked and worked through. I've learned so much though. There is a great ancient Irish [unclear] or proverb [unclear], which roughly translates learning is the key to life. It's been a joyous 12 weeks for me here at the National Library, immersed in the world of someone who I think was in lots of ways a hero and maybe not just an Australian one. Her vision is needed everywhere I think.

The end game for the work of my fellowship is a planned book that presents how Judith Wright envisioned a transformative custodianship of the earth. How she became critically informed of the overlapping threats to the planet's biosphere and how she endeavoured to act, to enact a reprogramming of how we see, live and govern. In the book, I want to elevate her committed public scholarship and activism in saving the Great Barrier Reef, in anti-mining campaigns and anti wood chipping campaigns in industry pollution campaigns, in defeating concord, in household waste campaigns, in biodiversity campaigns and campaigns against deforestation, in supporting First Nations lands rights from the very beginning and so much more. These stories are all there in the National Library of Australia archives and my goal is to showcase them as inspiring exemplaries of past environmental activism and vision. They give much needed hope to contemporary campaigns and all of our efforts towards a better world. [unclear].

Rowan Henderson: Thank you so much, John, that was so fascinating and I know we all really hope that your book comes to pass so that we can learn more about your research.
So we now have some time for questions As this presentation is being recorded, please wait for the microphone to reach you before asking your question. We've got one on each side here. Yes, down here.

Audience member 1: Thanks very much, John. Thanks for coming from all the other side of the world to tell me about my own history. I appreciate the effort. I was reflecting on the current trend in the environmental activism world about giving a sense of the idea of agency and personhood and legal rights to ecosystems, almost analogous to the way in which we give a sense of personhood to corporations. How do you think Judith might've thought about that as a tactic in this world?

John Morrissey: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think in her early writings she references deep ecology almost in an uncritical way initially. And she slowly, through her interactions with Val Plum in particular, and Peter Dwyer and others, she becomes more critical of the sort of academic theories that can be mobilised in very practical ways. And I think she reflected a lot on exactly your concern, which is how do we convince stakeholders of rights that are difficult to cohere, difficult to indicatively convince somebody that these are the kinds of ecological responsibility protocols and conventions that we have to get behind. And that we don't have to endlessly refer to discourses like an economic growth or betterment or development.

And it's the same in Ireland, by the way. It's the same everywhere. If you look at the congressional record of the Irish Parliament, the most used phrase is economic growth. I mean, that's bankrupt now, intellectually I mean. We surpassed ecological, the idea of economic growth in 2003. We've already reached the point. We have to talk about degrowth in some engaged way. And we can't marginalise those who are trying to talk about innovative forms of economy that also have an eye for sustainable development in real ways, in real practical ways. If you go to the Overshoot website, they have over 150 exemplars of what could be supported, but you have to get behind your government, you got to make them active.

I read just 2 weeks ago, and Connor from Cork, [unclear] in the old Ireland, by the way, the writer in the 'Irish Times' noted how there are multiple areas throughout Ireland, multiple areas, I think it's something like 40,000 hectares, where the protection of local bogs is being left to local councils, right? In other words, the laws are there to protect them. They're not being activated. And from all of my experience, at a much higher micro level, that's exactly the same thing. Conventions exist, landscape conventions exist, protocols exist. It's just not been activated.

So what would Judith Wright say? I think she would, politic. She would get involved. She's an organiser mostly. Judith was brilliant organiser actually. And she would organise support and get people to write to their local, to write to Pocock and say, here's what we believe in. We think this is important. Why is this law not being activated? Why aren't we following true on this? And I think that's what Judith Wright would do. And she felt that way right until the end, even as her health was failing. So yeah, she was an organiser and I think she would try to activate the mechanisms and tools that are at our disposal if we choose to invest in them crucially. Rather than leaving it mindless discourses now like economic growth that Irish politicians were incredibly brilliant at throwing out repeatedly. So I'm sure it's the same here. It is.

Audience member 2: I have a question. Sorry, I steal the mic since I'm holding it.

John Morrissey: Sure.

Audience member 2: I was wondering how your research of Judith and her work has changed your opinion about the environment and what your planning to do in your own actions to make a change.

John Morrissey: Yeah, brilliant question. Yeah. If you come all the way over to the other side of the world and you have obviously an impact in the environment, even in travel. Yeah, I think within the academy now, there's much greater reflection on exactly your question, in a way. I think the day of jolly and conferences going overseas that can happen virtually is totally accepted now. I haven't been to my major conference in 10 years in any other way other than virtual.

But I'm very conscious of your question in relation to my own kids who are here not eating popcorn. When you go to their schools and you try and communicate what environmental awareness is all about, you hear brilliant things in Salt Tale and Galway, I heard about a year ago, just a little girl talking about why climate action was important and it's really just to save the planet. It's an understanding that is about simplicity, but it's about getting an as early an awareness as possible.

Over in Questacon today, there was endless school tours. It is about thinking on a public scholarship platform level for me about how to communicate environmental awareness.

I chatted about this for a long time with David Pockock who's politically obviously really involved at that seam. And he identified exactly the same thing. It's about communicating in a way where you build stakeholders and you get people to see it as, yeah, I can do that. And doing it in a way that isn't preachy is really, really important.

And I think the last thing I'll say on your question, Sharon, is I think the day where you publish in the best journal in academic circles, in mine it's [unclear]or political geography or whatever, just 3000 people who read it. We got to keep our eye on that. And all of the metrics, the neoliberal metrics in the university system, we need to insist, I think really meaningfully, on what public scholarship should look like and can look like. And very properly engaged way with communities, with schools, with organisations, with societies and so on.

The Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland is still going. Brilliant thing about Judith Wright, she never held a grudge. Glenn Ingram wrote the Land Rights policy in 1993 and she returned to the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and she supported for the rest of her life. Unbelievable work that they do and organisations like them all over the world. And we should support them and get behind them and interact with them. And Nugget Coombs was an academic, as well as a really vital political presence. And he went to societies everywhere and engaged publics more widely and in the kind of plethora of discourses in the academy about civic engagement and so on, all of these empty signifiers. I think we should really remind ourselves of that.

Audience member 3: Thank you. Thank you John. I think this is me wearing my international relations hat. You've hinted a little at the way in which Judith Wright engaged not just within Australia, but outside. Can you say a little bit more about that? You've talked about the way she looked to sources outside as part of an influencing of the Australian government, but I'm perhaps also interested in this kind of idea of global citizenship, if you like. And if there is material from her, from the archives and your work there that show how she saw herself, not just in the Australian context, but in that global context, both intellectually, but also how did she physically engage? How did she politically engage?

John Morrissey: Yeah, no, super question. I will answer it in two ways. I think in terms of the politicking that I already mentioned a little bit, she was just really savvy. She was just very knowledgeably aware of how important it was to ping the Australian government in particular around issues that were coming up elsewhere, were being encountered elsewhere, and practises were being introduced elsewhere around conservation, particularly in the United States. Seems like another country back then really, really, really advanced in terms of protecting the environment, especially after Rachel's Carson's 1962 book.

So in that sense, she was very adept at going to international conferences. She went to one in London in 1969. She went to one in Rome, a really important conservation conference in 1972. And she mobilised support for a whole range of things, particularly about the Great Barrier Reef campaign. And she brought with her Royal Commission testimonies, circulated them, talked with Len Webb about the importance of actually disseminating how it's done, the practicalities. She wrote about that a lot. The practicalities of what's required, if you put your head above the parapet, you've got to do this. You've got to go and produce a report that's exhaustive. She spent 7 years doing this. And I think that's the first thing that she did really, really well, is that sort of internationalising of the issue.

But the other thing which she did, and this kind of relates to the global citizenship question really at the heart of your question, is she learned from overseas. So you come across these brilliant references, and this is where you really fall down the rabbit hole in the archives, by the way. You find a reference to an article on Ghana or an article on Ethiopia or an article on Uganda and between Len and herself, and it takes bloody ages to find those articles. But eventually you find them, and when you find them, you find a brilliant sense of this is new information. This is a new challenge to me to think about how the environment should be managed.

A brilliant piece, for example, from Ethiopia in 1993 that Len and herself enthused about, which refused the idea of capitalism in a very simple way by insisting upon local agricultural practises, right? Absolutely brilliant piece by the way that said no to Monsanto and said, no on grounds of this is a locally attuned understanding of environment conditions here that you don't have a bloody clue about. And stood up in that way. And the writer, a local Uganda writer, she connected with over letters for many years since.

So I think her sense of learning extended beyond this sort of conceptual to what can I learn from what happens somewhere else? And remember that she travelled it, it's literally 10 lifetimes in some ways when I look at her work. I mean, she travelled all over Europe before World War II. She was in Germany noting exactly what Barat noted, the ways in which society was being shackled. In 1938 she wrote about it, much later, to Kathleen MacArthur. She was very close to exactly the same kinds of shackling senses of knowledge production in the 1930s that she could then see in the 1970s in Queensland in particular.

So yeah, I think it's a great question and I definitely reflected on that a lot because I think that kind of connects to that really key issue of global citizenship that we all need to think about a lot more, about cooperation, about regulation, in everybody's interests. And certainly not allowing predators and Irish politician or Australian politician, the lazy discourse of we're all into economic development and does not even have an eye for ecological responsibility. So yeah, I think she very much learned from overseas.

Rowan Henderson: Thank you everyone. I know there's a number of other questions out there, but I think we're just running out of time. So thank you everybody for the wonderful questions.

As we draw to a close, I just have a few quick plugs I've been asked to give before we leave. I hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture Defending Australian territory, which will be delivered by 2025 National Library Fellow Dr Andrew Carr at 12:30 PM on Wednesday the 17th of September.

Our website is the place where you'll be able to find recordings of recent talks and performances from our fellows. These are also available on the Library's YouTube channel.

So thank you for coming along to this event tonight, and please join me once again in congratulating John Morrisey for today's fascinating presentation.