Judith Wright belonged to the generation who began writing and publishing in The Bulletin and new literary journals such as Meanjin Papers in the 1940s, as World War II was drawing to its end. C. B. Christesen, founder and first editor of Meanjin Papers, described the period as one in which it seemed as if "the old world had died at the end of the tremulous 'thirties" and that it was the task of writers and thinkers to build a new one. Wright shared these ambitions, believing, as she wrote later in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), that it was time to "reject outright the literature of nostalgia" and set about the task of "making Australia into our real spiritual home." Wright was also a public figure passionately involved in the environmental movement, an opponent to uranium mining and nuclear power, and a champion of Aboriginal people in their...