Love & Fury: Judith Wright and 'Nugget' Coombs

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BACKGROUND In 2009 the embargo on letters between Judith Wright and Nugget Coombs held at the Australian National Library was lifted. Wright, among Australia's foremost literary figures, poet, essayist, activist, dedicated herself to writing and fighting for a more humane Australia. Coombs, advisor to governments from Curtin to Whitlam, devoted the last decades of his life to Indigenous Australia. They kept their 25 year relationship a secret. In addition to this newly available archival material, there are extensive and diverse documents produced by and about Coombs and Wright, including their own works of poetry, autobiography and memoir, and other sound and vision files. The researcher explored how to employ these various documents to tell the story of these two extraordinary individuals whilst respecting the privacy they both worked so hard to maintain. CONTRIBUTION In Love & Fury the researcher takes up Wright's own conviction that 'the argument must be felt as much as told', and proceeds by way of using the essay film genre to use the affective potential of cinema in order to explore the two writers' converging preoccupations around activism and art. Hughes achieved his intentions through a careful use of voice over, interviews, archival footage, and his approach to filming the natural environment. SIGNIFICANCE The essay form is employed here to cinematically enact the tensions that the couple navigated in their life, art and politics. It mounts an argument around their political and intellectual influence, whilst simultaneously offering up insight into their personal experiences, without exposing an intimacy they kept from public scrutiny. "The impact from these eminent lovers' shared values... comes not as argument, but through a fusion of feeling, image, sound and vision. This is cinema." (Lawson, 2013). Narrated by Ramona Koval, with 2 pre-eminent Australian actors, Helen Morse and Paul English.