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important as it is to the Australian psychology,has never thus been assimilated. So akind of spHt in the writer's consciousness isoften manifest; he cannot solve his immediateproblem, he cannot keep attentionconcentrated on his foreground, while hisbackground keeps intruding. Perhaps thisduality, this unsolved problem, is partly thecause of the gaps in Australian literature,and the curious lack of writers with anythinglike a 'body of work' to their credit.Only the single-minded with a track of theirown to follow, or the genuinely great writer,can by-pass that boulder in the road.(Henry Handel Richardson managed it inthe Mahony trilogy, Slessor and FitzGeraldmanaged it, though neither of them can becalled prolific writers; Hugh McCrae andhis circle managed it by simply detachingthemselves completely from the ground andflying over it, but nevertheless their work asa whole was seriously weakened by the evasion.)"It seems to me that the Jindy movementwas essentially an effort to get the probleminto perspective. I don't necessarily meanthat the Jindy writers themselves have donethat, but rather that in the ensuing argumentthe issues found some kind of clarification;and in fact the work of the outstandingJindy writers has to some extent alreadybroken the problem down. To emphasizeour regionalism instead of trying to elude it—this has had a value in itself, and it hasperformed the further function of leadingto a reaction against itself. That is to say,that having found out what happens whenone tries to treat the problem as an end initself, it is now possible to apply the knowledge.The regional, the national outlook hasa value, and no doubt some writers do theirbest work within such a closed circuit. Butthere are other jobs to do; and Jindyworobakhas probably contributed somethingtowards finding the means to do them. Itmay be that because of the Jindy movement,even those most fiercely opposed ormost indifferent to it know themselves alittle better."^^The italics at the end are mine. Whether, infact, Judith Wright herself was opposed or indifferentto the Jindyworobak attitude is notclear, but her poetry in this first volume standsin sharp contrast to that of the bulk of Jindyworobakverse in that, while sometimes sayingthe same thing, it says it from much greaterdepth. Reg Ingamells had written in his firstbook of verse published ten years earlier:Where now uninterrupted sunIs shrivelling the sheaves.Black children leap and laugh and runBeneath a sky of leaves;And where the farmer thrashes wheatWith steel machinery.Go ghmmerings of their little feet.If we could only see.It's a pleasant enough concept and here putforward probably for the first time, but it isshallow and poetically not distinguished. JudithWright in "Nigger's Leap: New England" putsa similar thought into much richer language:Did we not know their blood channelled ourrivers,and the black dust our crops ate was the-rdust?She follows this with an extension of thoughtto the one-ness of man, an extension, it maybe added, which seldom if ever entered intothe verse of the Jindyworobaks:O all men are one man at last. We shouldhave knownthe night that tided up the cliffs and hidthemhad the same question on its tongue for us.And there they lie that were ourselves writstrange.Her main preoccupation in this first volumeis with what we have grown out of; it derivesfrom the inward-looking that was part of thetime in which she was writing. It occurs overand over again. In "Country Town" she says:This is no longer the landscape that theyknew,the sad green enemy country of their exile,those branded men whose songs were of rebelUon.This is a landscape that the town creepsover;a landscape safe with bitumen and banks.The hostile hills are netted in with fencesand the roads lead to houses and the pictures.Thunderbolt was killed by Constable Walkerlong ago; the bones are buried, the storyprinted.And yet in the night of the sleeping town,the voices:This is not ours, not ours the flowering tree.What is it we have lost and left behind?Where the Jindyworobaks were accusing earlysettlers of despoiling the countryside, thunderingimprecations about "the rape of the land",Judith Wright was enquiring into the sources44 WESTERLY, No. 1, MARCH, 1968