Judith Wright, who has died aged 85, was born into a pioneering bush family and managed to become the conscience of Australia on the vexed issues of Aboriginal rights and the environment before they became fashionable. One of only two Australian poets considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature - the other was AD Hope - her works have been standard texts for many years in Australian schools and universities, but she deplored the way poetry was taught. "Appreciation of poetry, one out of 10 or whatever it might be, is quite alien to what a poet feels about poetry," she once said.
She was described as feeling almost Aboriginal about the Australian landscape and she regularly described that love in her poems. "I've been a writer all of my life and a conservationist for far too much of it," she admitted.
In a poem called Eroded Hills, written in 1950, she described the de-forested scenery of the New England area of New South Wales where she grew up.
These hills my father's father stripped and beggars to the winter wind they
crouch like shoulders naked and whipped humbled, abandoned, out of mind...
when the last leaf and bird go, let my thoughts stand like trees. Here.
Her biographer Veronica Brady said that Wright, who was the first Australian to win the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, was a major poet almost in the "Russian way", because she made a political impact. "I think that Judith Wright's poetry speaks a sense of sacredness in the land, the sacredness of simple things like animals and plants, and the violation of that sacredness. She has a feeling not only for the land but also for the Aboriginal people."
Wright was born at Thalgarrah station near Armidale, NSW, to a leading and wealthy pastoral family. She was a solitary child who spent many hours riding her pony across the property, where a sense of public service and noblesse oblige was instilled in her at an early age.
At first she was educated at home, but on the death of her mother went to New England Girls' school and then the University of Sydney, where she read English. She was 25 before her first poem was published. Her first collection of verse, The Moving Image, appeared in 1946, and because it was full of her feelings for the land and its spirit helped change the traditions of Australian writing, which Veronica Brady said until then had been about men, horses and the conquest of the land.
During the next two decades she produced more collections of poems, including in 1949 Woman to Man, which was hailed at the time as being significant to the national canon because of its lyric intensity and frankness about women's sexuality.
There was also a biography about her pioneering grandparents and a series of acclaimed children's books which followed the birth of her daughter Meredith, who survives her, and her marriage to the unconventional philosopher Jack McKinney, who died in 1966.
The shadow of the cold war and the blossoming of her interest in conservation and wildlife preservation were reflected in her poetry, such as Birds (1961), which was devoted to describing them, and also in her public life as she became a dedicated campaigner against nuclear power and wanton development.
"Her environmental poems, loved and studied now by generations of Australians, are today stopping more bulldozers than any environmental activists," said poet Mark O'Connor.
Wright went on to receive numerous awards, five honorary doctorates from different universities for her poetry, and cemented her reputation as a literary critic with her 1965 work Preoccupations in Australian Poetry.
By the mid-60s she was widowed and had become a major force in Australian poetry. Her style was described as becoming more hardy and muscular with the freer rhythms of direct speech and anger at the materialism of most Australians.
She became more involved in public issues and was involved in successful battles to stop oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef and the desecration of other areas of great heritage value. In 1976 she moved to the remarkable heritage town of Braidwood near Canberra, and lived in a virtual wildlife refuge which was the source of many of her later poems. She also wrote the book The Cry of the Dead, about the treatment of Aborigines by settlers in Queensland from the 1840s to the 1920s.
Wright also became progressively deaf, but academic Julian Croft said the misfortune seemed to reinforce her feelings about language. "Her deafness gave her poetry readings a directness and force any poet would envy," he said.
Australian poet Robert Gray said she filled the highest role of poet and became the conscience of the country. "There was a blazing quality of integrity about her," he said. "She wrote about values, mourning the way land was being destroyed, the way people were being destroyed."
Last year she published a volume of her autobiography called Half a Lifetime, which covered her life until the 1960s. Judith Wright's last public appearance was at a march for reconciliation with Aboriginal people in Canberra late last month. She was working on the second volume of her autobiography when she died of a heart attack.
One of the country's leading poets, John Tranter, said: "What she has left us is a spirited body of writing and a model for a humane and committed concern for the future of the human race."
She is survived by her daughter, Meredith.
I wither and you break from me;
yet though you dance in living light
I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night.
from Woman To Child, in Woman To Man (1949)
Die, wild country, like the eaglehawke,
dangerous till the last breath's gone,
clawing and striking. Die
cursing your captor through a raging
eye.
from Australian 1970, in Shadow (1970)