The Memorial Grove: Judith Wright 'Has Come Home at Last'

Abstract

In the autumn of last year, in the city of Armidale, there was organized and stages what was perhaps the most significant reconciliation and commemorative event in the post-contact history of the nearer New England region. On the cold morning of Wednesday, 24 March 2004, at 11 a.m., there took place, in the presence of more than two hundred people Indigenous and ‘settler’, the public dedication by the late poet’s daughter, Dr Meredith McKinney, of the Judith Wright Memorial Grove in Civic Park, Armidale, a very central location on the corner of Dumaresq and Faulkner Streets. This highly symbolic and appropriate event was planned and organized by a committee – one under the inspiring leadership of Mrs. Suzie Dunn of Armidale – of many local and representative Indigenous and community figures.All of them were concerned that New England's most famous woman should be appropriately and significantly commemorated and honoured in the area where she was born (in 1915) and where she received her early education, at the New England Girls' School. For Judith Wright (who died in 2000) had always returned here in spirit, despite her long exile, first in Queensland, and then in the far south of New South Wales, at Braidwood.