Drought Year

death ballad dark

Drought Year - meaning Summary

Drought's Hollow Animal Cries

Judith Wright's "Drought Year" depicts an Australian landscape stripped bare by a severe drought. The poem follows scenes of parched creeks, dying animals and scavenging birds, where silence is broken by the unsettling cries of dingoes. These images compress physical loss into an atmosphere of haunting stillness and warning. The poem registers ecological collapse and the visceral, intimate consequences of prolonged dryness on land and life.

Read Complete Analyses

That time of drought the embered air burned to the roots of timber and grass. The crackling lime-scrub would not bear and Mooni Creek was sand that year. The dingo's cry was strange to hear. I heard the dingoes cry in the scrub on the Thirty-mile Dry. I saw the wedgetail take his fill perching on the seething skull. I saw the eel wither where he curled in the last blood-drop of a spent world. I heard the bone whisper in the hide of the big red horse that lay where he died. Prop that horse up, make him stand, hoofs turned down in the bitter sand make him stand at the gate of the Thirty-mile Dry. Turn this way and you will die- and strange and loud was the dingoes' cry.