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Les Murray (1938-2019) |
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Prolific Australian poet, essayist, and translator, whose major themes were the landscape, nature, colonial history, and mythology of his country. In his verse Les Murray captured the rural life with the timeless elegance of classical poets. Also understanding of the Aboriginal customs and beliefs, especially perception of the land, marked his work. Murray was frequently referred as Australia's "unofficial poet laureate". A man of farm and fact Leslie Allan Murray was born in the Nabiac, New South Wales,
and
raised in the Bunyah district, where his parents labored on his
grandfather's dairy farm. When Murray was twelve his mother, Miriam
Arnall, died after suffering a miscarriage. Murray's father, Cecil
Allan, never fully recovered from the loss, and left his son to fend
for himself. At school he suffered from bullying and name-calling, learning "a plethora of fat-names". After attending Talee High School, Murray studied English and German at the University of Sydney. After failing examinations, he dropped out for a period, but eventually completed his degree. Murray began writing at the university, but as early as 1954 he had planned to become an artist. With the poet Geoffrey Lehmann he co-edited the magazines Hermes, the annual Undergraduate Association journal, and Arna, the annual Arts faculty magazine Murray contributed many poems to these publications. He abandoned his studies in 1960 partly because his father was not able to support him further, and went walkabout. He hitchhiked across the Nullarbor plain to Western Australia and took odd jobs. Towards the end of 1961 he returned to Sydney. In 1962 Murray married Valerie Morelli, a teacher; they had
five
children. After their son, Alexander, was disgnosed with autism, Murray
recognised mild autistic traits in himself, beginning with the poem
'Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver' (1974). However,
Australian critics have rarely paid much attention to it. "I’m
what you might call a high-performing Asperger. I’m not very good at
human relations, and it took me a terribly long time to deal easily
with people." ('A Conversation with Les Murray' by J. Mark Smith, Image, Winter 2009-2010) Murray worked for four years as a translator of science and technical material at the Australian National University. His B.A. degree Murray gained eventually in 1969. From 1967 to 1968 he lived with his wife and children in Europe, away from the heart of his poetry, the "Australianess". In 'The Fire Autumn' from The Weatherboard Cathedral he celebrated the purifying force of the Australian burning season and compared it to the autumn in Europe, where there are only remnant woods with tourist paths and junked beercans. On return Murray worked as a civil servant in the Prime Minister's Office in Canberra. In 1971 Murray devoted himself entirely to writing. The
unifying focus of Murray's poems is the curiously isolated
Bunyah, a sacred place. Farm work, which is observed without
sentimentality, is associated with basic values, freedoms, and
obligations, and laid-back attitude. Commonplace and even national clichés had their place in
his poetry. Before moving back to Bunyah, he said in 'The Dream of
Wearing Shorts Forever': "Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
/ the wish and the knack for self-forgetfulness / all fall within the
scunge ambit / wearing board shorts or similar; / it is a kind of
weightlessness." (Best 100 Poems of Les Murray, Collingwood: Black Inc., 2012; first published in The People's Otherworld, 1983) "Murray is not a poet of the inner life", J.M.
Coetzee has stated. "Instead he relies on an acute sensitivity to sensory impressions and
an extraordinary capacity to articulate them." ('The Angry Genius of Les Murray' by J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books, September
29, 2011)
Murray contrasted urban
and pre-modern, rural ways of life; the latter is based on the natural
order of the universe. Some of his poems show an interest in
makers and interpreters of traditional Aboriginal poetry and song. One of Murray's
best-known poems is 'The Quality of Sprawl,' an ode to the Australian national ethos. Murray
defines this spiritual quality as "doing your farming by aeroplane,
roughly," or "driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home," but it is
"never brutal / though it's often intransigent." (Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet, 1986, pp. 88-89; first published in The People's Otherworld, 1983) Murray repurchased in 1975 part of the family farm, which his
father had lost, but settled in the Bunyah district permanently in the
mid-1980s. He suffered from depression for a while, and later recalled
his crisis in Killing the Black Dog
(2011). Until his breakdown, Murray had been an eight-cigar-a-day
smoker, but he "suddenly became unable to endure the taste of tobacco;
it was worse than burning rubber, and this change has been lasting." (Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 3) Between 1973 and 1979 Murray was an editor for Poetry Australia magazine, during which time he campaigned against intellectual pretensions and postmodern nihilism and obscurity. Many imitators embraced Murray's fierce nationalism and lyrical ruralism. In his essay 'Patronage in Australia' he argued that "Art is not a job; art is work. It is therefore a principle of health in society as in the person, and a model for social and personal growth. In a society characterized, as Western industrial society is, by division, art has an enormous potential value, in that it is one of the very few institutions, all of them archaic in origin, whose effects are essentially integrative. If, however, artists are too deeply estranged from such a society, art can become a powerful disintegrative value." ('Patronage in Australia — A Critique and Two Proposals, in The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 3, September 1972, p. 67) From 1976 to 1991 Murray was Poetry Editor and consultant for
the publishers Angus & Robertson. In 1986 he completed The New
Oxford Book of Australian Verse and The Anthology of Australian
Religious Verse.
In 1991 Murray became Literary Editor of Quadrant.
Murray started to regard poetry as a religious vocation in the 1960s,
but although he had grown up in a strongly Presbyterian community, he
converted in 1964 to Catholicism, the faith of his wife, several of his cousins, and his paternal grandmother. Beginning from The People's Otherworld, he dedicated his subsequent collections "to the glory of God." Poetry is a literary expression of the Divine: "Religions are poems. They concert / our daylight and dreaming mind, our / emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture // into the only whole thinking: poetry." ('Poetry and Religion,' The Daylight Moon, poems by Les A, Murray, Manchester, [England]: Carcanet Press Limited, 1987, p. 51; first published in Australia by Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1987) On July 1996 Murray was rushed into hospital after a large liver abscess. After recovering Murray published Fredy Neptune (1998), a verse novel, in which the hero journeys through the first half of 20th century and some of its darkest events. Taller When Prone, Murray's first collection of poems since The Biplane Houses (2006), appeared in 2010. Murray served as writer-in-residence at several universities. His numerous awards include the Grace Leven Prize for Best Book of Verse in 1965 and 1980, the National Book Council Award in 1975 and 1985, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1984, the Christopher Brennan Medal of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1985, the Australian Poetry Award in 1988 for The Daylight Moon, the Petrarch Prize in 1995, T.S. Eliot Prize in 1996, and the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry in 1998. Les Murray died on 29 April, 2019, at a nursing home at Taree. For many years, he was consistently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. For further reading: 'Murray, Les(lie) A(llan), in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby (1991); A Vivid Steady State: Les Murray and Australian Poetry by Lawrence Bourke (1992); Counterbalancing Light: Essays on Les Murray, edited by Carmel Gaffney (1992); 'Murray, Les(lie) A(llan), in Encyclopedia of the World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 3, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Les Murray: A Life in Progress by Peter Alexander (2000); Les Murray by Steven Matthews (2001); Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, edited by Laurie Hergenham and Bruce Clunies Ross (2002); Les Murray and Australian Poetry, edited by Angela Smith (2002); Les Murray Country: Development and Significance of an Australian Poetic Landscape by Ulla Fürstenberg (2004); 'Les Murray, The Art of Poetry No. 89' by Dennis O'Driscoll, in The Paris Review, Issue 173 (Spring 2005); 'In Their Fathers' Footsteps: Performing Masculinity and Fatherhood in the Work of Les Murray and Michael Ondaatje' by Katharine Burkitt, in Performing Masculinity, edited by Rainer Emig, Antony Rowland (2010); "Art with its largesse and its own restraint": the Sacramental Poetics of Elizabeth Jennings and Les Murray by Stephen McInerney, in Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, edited by Mary R. Reichardt (2010); The Enclosure of an Open Mystery: Sacrament and Incarnation in the Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, David Jones, and Les Murray by Stephen McInerney (2012); The West Verandah: The Life and Work of Les Murray, edited by Sonia Mycak (2016); 'Nonhuman Voices in Les Murray's Translations from the Natural World' by Sarah Bouttier, in Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays, edited by Isabel Sobral Campos (2019); "Never Towing a Line": Les Murray, Autism, and Australian Literature by Amanda Tink, thesis, Western Sydney University (2022); The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry, edited by Ann Vickery and Philip Mead (2026) Selected works:
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