Patricia Clarke reflects on the life of Jack McKinney and his influence on Judith Wright Judith Wright, the great Australian poet, writer, environmentalist and activist for Aboriginal rights, was asked at a celebration for her 85th birthday, just a few weeks before her death on 25 June 2000, what year had been the best of her life. She chose not one of the years of great public achievementnot the year her first book of poems was published or the years she won the ASAN World Prize for Poetry or the Queen’s Gold Medal. Her best year was when she was 27. It was the year she met Jack McKinney. She met Jack through the publication of her earliest poems in Meanjin Papers, which also published his early articles on the relationship between poetry and philosophy: 'Poet and Thinker' and 'The Poet and the Intellectual Environment'. Though she did not follow all his arguments, she agreed with his view that art had possibilities that neither politics nor economics offered for a new world order, so searchingly sought by intellectuals during the gravest years of World War II. When she met McKinney he was 23 years older, an unorthodox, self-taught philosopher, a man with a mercurial mind and a gentle ironic sense of humour, small and wiry in build with keen blue eyes and a direct, disarming manner. Soon Judith was, as she wrote in her autobiography, Half a Lifetime, 'in love with a man and a mind'. Jack became her lover, the father of their daughter Meredith and, after his divorce, her husband. Although his philosophy and her poetry cannot be directly connected, Jack’s 'sheer tranquil existence' supported her and his hope in the human capacity to create and affirm underpinned her own creativity. They lived at 'Quantum' and then at 'Calanthe', small bush homes on Mt Tamborine, Queensland, where they shared a joy in 'the surrounding world and its sights and sounds'. Their life together was 'full of new joy'.
Who was Jack McKinney?a 'wild' philosopher, a journalist, bushman, soldier, an author who drew on experiences that stretched back to the droving days and to the trenches of the Western Front in World War I. John Phillip McKinney was born at Numurkah in north-eastern Victoria in 1891, a son of a country journalist William Graham McKinney, who later worked on the Melbourne Argus and Australasian, and of Lucy (née Burke), who was related to Robert O'Hara Burke, the famous explorer. McKinney was educated at country schools, then at Scotch College, Melbourne. After some years as a freelance journalist he abandoned Melbourne for the bush, setting out with his swag on a bicycle for Broken Hill. As the bicycle tyres melted in the heat of mid-summer he replaced them with rags tied around the rims. He dug for opals at White Cliffs and then worked on stations in the north-west of New South Wales and south-west Queensland. When he had saved enough money he bought his own horses for a droving team. At the beginning of World War I he was on the road with cattle. At St George in south-west Queensland he decided to return to Melbourne to enlist in the Light Horse. In 1916 in Egypt he was promoted sergeant, transferred to the Cyclist Battalion and sent to the trenches in France. When the War ended he was a Company Sergeant Major and had been mentioned in despatches. He was to speak little about the War but his experiences in the trenches remained a hidden legacy that permanently undermined his health, eventually making him a semi-invalid. By contrast his anecdotes of his droving days in the bush became legendary. Suffering from shell shock and gastric illness, he returned to Australia towards the end of 1919 and was discharged in Melbourne early the following year. On 19 February 1921 he married a former Army nurse, Myrtle Gallagher, and became manager of Sir Macpherson Robertson’s maize plantation near Kingaroy, Queensland. Later he took up a soldier settlement block at Kumbia, south-west of Kingaroy, where he planned to be a dairy farmer and pig breeder. The hard work of clearing, fencing and building, exacerbated by the anxiety of providing for four children in the Depression, led to a recurrence of his War-caused illnesses. He walked off his farm and moved his family to Surfers Paradise, then a small seaside settlement, where he grew vegetables and began to earn money from writing. His greatest writing success came in 1935 when he won a World War I novel competition conducted by the Victorian Branch of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia. Originally named Over the Top, his novel about a group of Australian soldiers on the Western Front was published later the same year by Angus & Robertson under the title Crucible. The first prize was £150, a substantial sum, equivalent to about a year’s income at the then basic wage rate. Crucible was dedicated to 'The memory of all those good fellows (which includes many officially bad fellows) whom we left behind on the other side.' The action begins in a forward area just behind the lines from Armentières and follows a group of Australian soldiers through to the Somme offensive. After the battle of Pozières, the protagonist asks: 'Was this all a colossal insanity, or was it heroic, Christ-like? John didn't know.'
The competition was for published and unpublished novels and many thought the prize would go to Flesh in Armour by the well-known writer Leonard Mann, published in 1932. H.M.Green in A History of Australian Literature, comparing the two novels, described Crucible as 'more introspective' than Flesh in Armour, if 'less broadly thoughtful'. The judges were Sir Harry Chauvel, Sir Keith Murdoch and prominent barrister, Mr (later Sir) P.D. Phillips. During the 1930s McKinney earned money writing innumerable short stories mainly published in the Australian Journal and several radio plays including a long-running serial, 'The Noonans'. Recurring illness led to a period of reading and reflection, as a result of which he increasingly turned to philosophy. From the outbreak of World War II, McKinney questioned why advances in Western thought had failed to prevent further and more deadly wars. He believed Western philosophy had failed to provide answers to fundamental dilemmas facing the modern world and was convinced he could see a way to a new understanding that would explain and solve the errors that had led to the current world crisis. When Judith Wright met him, he was separated from his wife and soon to have no home. They met at the home of the founder and editor of Meanjin Papers, Clem Christesen and his wife Nina in the Brisbane suburb of Dutton Park. Judith’s poems had begun appearing in Meanjin Papers in 1942 and Jack’s articles the following year and Christesen was considering publishing McKinney’s book-length philosophical work, 'Towards the Future'. Although Judith Wright believed Jack’s thinking and her poetry could not be directly cross-related, she traced some of her poetry, including much of 'The Moving Image' published in 1946, to new lines of thought set off by Jack. She agreed with his view that Western thought had reached its limits 'in the development of the intellectual analysis of our world-picture, and that the next development logically ought to be a swing towards the feeling intuitive or emotional view of the world'. McKinney believed the West was faced with an impasse in further development, a 'breakdown' or paralysis which resulted in increasing violence, emotional outbreaks such as wars and passionate nationalism, the misuses of technology and power. Following Jung, he believed much personal breakdown was a search for other ways of viewing the world (religious rather than materialist and rational) and that art, as an expression of the non-rational side of people, could act as a bridge towards the next development and into the neglected inner world of feeling. Judith Wright and Jack McKinney shared their lives for 23 years. During those years Judith Wright wrote poems ranging from the intense lyrical sexuality of 'Woman to Man' to the anguish of the separation she saw between human beings and the world around them, expressed in such poems as 'At Cooloola', a separation that had to be healed before progress towards the 'feeling-side' of life could be made.
Jack McKinney contributed philosophical articles to major journals, published a preliminary book, The Challenge of Reason (Brisbane: 1950) and worked on his major philosophical work. Towards the end of his life, while completing The Structure of Modern Thought, McKinney also turned to playwriting. His play The Well was first produced in Brisbane by Twelfth Night Theatre on 19 October 1960. It was published by the University of Queensland Press in Khaki, Bush, and Bigotry: Three Australian Plays in 1968the other plays in the book were Sumner Locke Elliott’s Rusty Bugles and Ray Mathew’s We Find the Bunyipand republished recently in Plays of the 60s, edited by Katharine Brisbane. Jack McKinney died in Brisbane on 6 December 1966 in Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital. Later, when she visited England, using the proceeds of her Encyclopaedia Britannica Literary Prize, Judith Wright McKinney succeeded in having The Structure of Modern Thought published by Chatto & Windus (1971). The book includes a list of McKinney’s published papers in such journals as Philosophy of Science; Australasian Journal of Philosophy; Hibbert Journal; Mind; and Indian Journal of Philosophy, an understated rebuke to those who during his life were critical of his claims to standing as a genuine if unorthodox philosopher. The Structure of Modern Thought was praised by Australian philosopher Professor J.J.C. Smart for its 'fresh and original' presentation of the 'striking and original idea that knowledge is an interpersonal thing'. Judith believed that in the climate of linguistic philosophical thinking in which it was published it was 'unlikely to be recognised as the seminal work I think it is'. Jack himself thought that the 'breakdown' of the world order would have to become complete before a new kind of thinking would emerge. The question, as Judith Wright remarked in a letter to academic Shirley Walker was 'whether we survive the technological calamities following on the success of the analysis of matter to take another step in a new direction'. Jack’s work, she believed, implied that we are part of a unity with 'nature and that human thought is the development of that relationship'. When Judith Wright moved on from what she described as her 'simple nationalistic poems of the 1940s' that had earned her such a remarkable reputation, Jack’s influence was held responsible. But Judith wrote in her autobiography: 'He alone knew how much I owed to his searching mind, his wit and his help and support in my own work. I would never have gone on with the dead-end poems I had been writing before I met him. But my survival as a poet and as a personwhich was the gift he had given metook me further than the readers wanted to go.' Patricia Clarke edited Judith Wright’s autobiography, Half a Lifetime (1999). She is working with Meredith McKinney towards an edition of Judith Wright’s letters. Judith Wright McKinney’s papers are held in the Manuscript Room of the National Library of Australia |
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