LES MURRAY

Les Murray left us on 29th April 2019, with some 30 volumes of our country’s most visceral, original, breathtakingly bucolic verse. His fellow poets say it so well. To Peter Porter he was ‘the custodian of Australia’s soul’. Joseph Brodsky claimed, ‘it would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ To Derek Walcott, ‘There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.’

Words Mark McGinness Photograph Adam Hollingworth

Leslie Allan Murray was born on 17th October 1938, the son of Cecil, a timber-cutter, and a nurse, Miriam Arnall, in Nabiac on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. The Murrays had left poverty in Jedburgh, Scotland, in 1848 and settled in the Manning River area. Three generations on, Cecil rented a farm in Bunyah from his father, John: ‘Dad’s father kept him poor, and they had a hell of a lot of droughts at the time too.’ While the early view of the world for Banjo Paterson, Geoffrey Dutton, Judith Wright and David Campbell had been from the homestead verandah, for Les it was from a hut. The Murrays lived in a slab house, with a shingle roof, lino on the dirt, light and wind through the walls (‘brutally harsh, smelly, idyllic childhood’). One critic thought Les’s the most destitute childhood of any poet since John Clare.

Les taught himself to read at four. Miriam had an eight-volume encyclopedia and Les read and re-read the Bible (and then ‘every book in the district’, including the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue). He did not go to school until he was nine—rather late, especially for a lonely, asocial, aggressive only child. In 1951, Miriam suffered the last of a number of miscarriages and poor Cecil, in calling the doctor, felt unable to describe her true condition because Aunt Jane (the biggest gossip in the area) was running the phones. Cecil blamed himself for Miriam’s death and was grief-stricken for the rest of his life.

Honouring Miriam, Cecil persuaded Les to continue his education and he endured a hellish few years at Taree High School. Poor, huge and maladroit, the bullying was unbearable; the girls would flirt then taunt him. This poverty, loss and cruelty shaped his life, his outlook, his politics—and fed his poetry. For half a century, it also pitched him into spells of deep depression.

Les won a scholarship to the University of Sydney and, at eighteen, he discovered poetry. Of course, he read everything: Irish, Latin, Greek. Also, Hopkins and Eliot—and Milton in one weekend. A few of his poems were published, yet he was unsettled, left university and for a period was homeless. But while playing Satan in a passion play, he met the remarkable Valerie Morelli, who was the wardrobe mistress. Her love for this awkward giant with no degree and few prospects won through and they married in 1962. Two years later, Les became a Catholic (Valerie’s faith since birth). From then, all his poetry would be dedicated ‘To the glory of God’. Over the next two decades they would have five children.

In 1963, his astonishing facility for languages got him a job at the Australian National University’s Institute of Advanced Studies. He could translate, at sight, 10 languages and manage another four. In 1965, The Ilex Tree, his first book of poetry (jointly with Geoffrey Lehmann) was published. In 1969, The Weatherboard Cathedral included the celebrated

‘HIS ART HAS ALWAYS REMAINED FIRMLY ESTABLISHED IN THE HINTERLAND, AS IF HIS SUMPTUOUSLY VARIED DISPLAY OF POETIC PRODUCE WERE A KIND OF ROYAL EASTER SHOW BROUGHT TO THE CITY’

revelatory ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’; later books featured the joyous classic, ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’ (Selected Poems, 1986) and the powerful ‘The Quality of Sprawl’.

From 1971 he devoted himself entirely to writing poetry and editing. ‘Poetry is what I do in real life,’ he later wrote. Les’s output was prodigious and, while he was often classified as a rural and religious poet, he could, and did, write about anything.

When Les’s grandfather John Murray died in 1962, the farm on which Cecil had long worked 16-hour days was divided up among the family and an uncle bought it. In 1974, Les bought from a cousin a section of it at Bunyah, ‘The Forty Acres’, for Cecil and the family would join him for holidays (prompting the wonderful ‘Buladelah–Taree Holiday Song Cycle’). In 1985, they returned there permanently—and thus, ‘The Bard of Bunyah’.

When Les’s 10,000-line verse novel, Fredy Neptune, appeared in 1998, poet and professor, Ruth Padel, wrote of its ‘dignity, vigor, compassion and bite. It is what poetry ought to be … —at the end of another millennium given over to war—a force for good.’

This goodness—no, this greatness—was duly recognised: his Order of Australia in 1989; the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1996 for the superb Subhuman Redneck Poems and, in 1998, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The photo at Buckingham Palace in 1999 of vast, dark-suited Les beaming at the Queen as she beams back is marvelous. ‘I thought it would be a sin against anthropology not to meet that rarest of human occupations—a reigning monarch.’ Yet he had written, ‘Australia will be a great nation, and a power for good when her head of state is part-Aboriginal and her prime minister a poor man. Or vice versa.’

There was one prize that eluded him: the Nobel. The New Yorker’s Anna Heyward enjoyed imagining ‘the Swedish Academy reading about Coolongolook, Wang Wauk, Forster, Wallamba, Gloucester, and Tuncurry.’ In that vein, Les’s university contemporary, the eminently quotable Clive James, paid tribute: ‘the base of his art has always remained firmly established in the hinterland, as if his sumptuously varied display of poetic produce were a kind of Royal Easter Show brought to the city for a long and imperishable season.’

Les’s death recalled his father’s in 1995 and ‘The Last Hellos’ (which begins, ‘Don’t die, Dad — but they die’ and ends with ‘I wish you God’).

Valerie, their two daughters, and three sons survive him—and those millions of words; among them, his rallying cry, the image of him forever in his shorts:

To be walking meditatively among green timber, through the grassy forest towards a calm sea and looking across to more of that great island and the further topics. n