Les Murray | |
|---|---|
 Murray in 2004 | |
| Born | (1938-10-17)17 October 1938 Nabiac, New South Wales, Australia |
| Died | 29 April 2019(2019-04-29) (aged 80) Taree, New South Wales, Australia |
| Education | Taree High School |
| Alma mater | University of Sydney |
| Occupations | Writer, poet |
| Political party | Australian Commonwealth Party (1972-1974) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 5 |
Leslie Allan Murray (17 October 1938 – 29 April 2019) was an Australianpoet,anthologist andcritic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as twoverse novels and collections of his prose writings.
Translations of Murray's poetry have been published in 11 languages: French, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, and Dutch. Murray's poetry won many awards and he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation".[1][2] He was rated in 1997 by theNational Trust of Australia as one of the 100Australian Living Treasures.[3][4]
Les Murray was born inNabiac, New South Wales, and grew up in nearby Bunyah. He attended primary and early high school in Nabiac and thenTaree High School. At age 18, while watchingmayflies along the river, Murray decided to become a poet.[5]
In 1957, Murray entered theUniversity of Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and joined theRoyal Australian Navy Reserve to obtain a small income. Speaking about this time toClive James he said:
"I was as soft-headed as you could imagine. I was actually hanging on to childhood because I hadn't had much teenage. My Mum died and my father collapsed. I had to look after him. So I was off the chain at last, I was in Sydney and I didn't quite know how to do adulthood or teenage. I was being coltish and foolish and childlike. I received the least distinguished degree Sydney ever issued. I don't think anyone's ever matched it."[6]
In 1961The Bulletin published one of Murray's poems.[5] He developed an interest in ancient and modern languages, and eventually qualified to become a professional translator at theAustralian National University (where he was employed from 1963 to 1967). During his studies he met other poets and writers such asGeoffrey Lehmann,Bob Ellis,[7]Clive James andLex Banning, as well as future political journalistsLaurie Oakes andMungo McCallum Jr. Between times, hehitch-hiked around Australia. Murray lived for several months at aSydney Push household atMilsons Point,[8]: 97–99 where he readVirgil'sEclogues at the suggestion of his host, Brian Jenkins.[8]: 120
Murray returned to undergraduate studies in the 1960s. He converted to Roman Catholicism when he marriedBudapest-born fellow-student Valerie Morelli in 1962. His poetry frequently refers to Catholic themes.[9] The couple lived in Wales and Scotland and travelled in Europe for over a year in the late 1960s. They had five children together. Their son Alexander was diagnosed withautism, which prompted Murray to discover traits of the condition in himself.[10] In an interview withImage, Murray described himself as "a high-performingAsperger".[11]
In 1971, Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator andpublic servant inCanberra to write poetry full-time. The family returned to Sydney, but Murray, planning to return to his home at Bunyah, managed to buy back part of the lost family home in 1975 and to visit there intermittently until 1985 when he and his family returned to live there permanently.[7]
Murray died on 29 April 2019 at aTaree, New South Wales, nursing home at the age of 80.[12][13]
Murray had a long career in poetry andliterary journalism in Australia. When he was 38 years old, hisSelected Poems was published byAngus & Robertson, signifying his emergence as a leading poet.[1] The Murray biographer Peter Alexander has written that "all Murray's volumes are uneven, though as Bruce Clunies Ross would remark, 'There's "less good" and "good", but it's very hard to find really inferior Murray'."[8]: 278
When Murray was a student at the University of Sydney he was the editor ofHermes withGeoffrey Lehmann (1962).[14] Murray edited the magazinePoetry Australia (1973–79).[7] During his tenure as poetry editor for Angus & Robertson (1976–90) he was responsible for publishing the first book of poetry byPhilip Hodgins. In March 1990, Murray became literary editor ofQuadrant.[15] He edited several anthologies, including theAnthology of Australian Religious Poetry. First published in 1986, a second edition was published in 1991. It interprets religion loosely[7] and includes the work of many of poets suchA. D. Hope, Judith Wright,Rosemary Dobson, Kevin Hart,Bruce Dawe and himself. TheNew Oxford Book of Australian Verse was most recently reissued in 1996.
Murray described himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as the last of the "Jindyworobaks", an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promoteindigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. Though not a member, he was influenced by their work, something that is frequently discussed by Murray critics and scholars in relation to his themes and sensibilities.
In 2007,Dan Chiasson wrote inThe New Yorker that Murray was "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets".[16] Murray was talked of as a possible winner of theNobel Prize in Literature.[17]
Murray retired as literary editor ofQuadrant in late 2018 for health reasons.[15]
Murray published around 30 volumes of poetry and is often called Australia's bush-bard. The academicDavid McCooey described Murray in 2002 as "a traditional poet whose work is radically original".[18] His poetry is rich and diverse, while also exhibiting "an obvious unity and wholeness" based on "his consistent commitment to the ideals and values of what he sees as the real Australia".[7]
While admiring Murray's linguistic skill and poetic achievement, poetJohn Tranter, in 1977, also expressed uneasiness about some aspects of his work. Tranter praises Murray's "good humour" and concludes that "For all my disagreements, and many of them are profound, I found theVernacular Republic full of rich and complex poetry."[1]
Bourke writes that:
Murray's strength is the dramatization of general ideas and the description of animals, machines, or landscape. At times his immense self-confidence producesgarrulity and sweeping, dismissive prescriptions. The most attractive poems show enormous powers of invention, lively play with language, and command of rhythm and idiom. In these poems Murray invariably explores social questions through a celebration of common objects from the natural world, as in "The Broad Bean Sermon", or machines, as in "Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman". Always concerned with a "common reader", Murray's later poetry (for example,Dog Fox Field, 1990, Translations from the Natural World, 1992) recovers "populist" conventions of newspaper verse, singsong rhyme, anddoggerel.
American reviewerAlbert Mobilio writes in his review ofLearning Human: Selected Poems that Murray revived the traditionalballad form. He goes on to comment on Murray's conservatism and his humour:
"Because his conservatism is imbued with an angular, self-mocking wit, which very nearly belies the down-home values being expressed, he catches readers up in the joke. We end up delighted by his dexterity, if a bit doubtful about the end to which it's been put."[19]
In 2003, Australian poetPeter Porter, reviewing Murray'sNew Collected Poems, makes a somewhat similar paradoxical assessment of Murray:
"A skewer ofpolemic runs through his work. His brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, is often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness. The parts we love – the Donne-like baroque – live side by side with sentiments we don't: his increasingly automatic opposition to liberalism and intellectuality."[20]
Twelve years after Murray's induced birth, his mother miscarried another child. She died after the doctor failed to call an ambulance. Literary critic Lawrence Bourke writes that "Murray, linking his birth to her death, traces his poetic vocation from these traumatic events, seeing in them the relegation of the rural poor by urban élites. Dispossession, relegation, and independence become major preoccupations of his poetry". Beyond this, though, his poetry is generally seen to have a nationalistic bent.The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature writes that:
The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity – respect, even reverence, for the pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character, down-to-earth,laconic ... and based on such Bush-bred qualities asegalitarianism, practicality, straight-forwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime ... and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment.[7]
Of his literary journalism, Bourke writes that "In a lively, frequently polemic prose style he promotes republicanism, patronage, Gaelic bardic poetry, warrior virtu, mysticism, and Aboriginal models, and attacks modernism and feminism."
In 1972, Murray and some other Sydney activists launched theAustralian Commonwealth Party,[8]: 144–145 and authored its unusually idealistic campaign manifesto. During the 1970s he opposed the New Poetry or "literary modernism" which emerged in Australia at that time, and was a major contributor to what is known in Australian poetry circles as "the poetry wars". "One of his complaints against post-modernism was that it removed poetry from widespread, popular readership, leaving it the domain of a small intellectual clique."[7] As American reviewerAlbert Mobilio describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility".[19]
In 1995, Murray became involved in the Demidenko/Darville affair.Helen Darville, an Australian writer who had won several major literary awards for her novelThe Hand That Signed the Paper, had claimed to be the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, though her parents were in fact English migrants. Murray said of Darville that
"She was a young girl, and her book mightn't have been the best in the world, but it was pretty damn good for a girl of her age [20 when she wrote it]. And her marketing strategy of pretending to be a Ukrainian might have been unwise, but it sure did expose the pretensions of the multicultural industry".[8]: 281
Biographer Alexander writes that in his poem "A Deployment of Fashion", Murray linked "the attack on Darville with the wider phenomenon of attacks on those judged outcasts (fromLindy Chamberlain toPauline Hanson) by society's fashion police, the journalists, academics and others who form opinion.[8]: 282
In 1996, Murray became involved in a controversy about whether Australian historianManning Clark had received and regularly worn the medal of theOrder of Lenin.[8]: 276
In 2005,The Widower, a short film based on five poems by Murray, was released. It was directed by Kevin Lucas and written by singer and festival directorLyndon Terracini, with music byElena Kats-Chernin. Its cast includedChris Haywood andFrances Rings. The five poems used for the film are "Evening Alone at Bunyah", "Noonday Axeman", "The Widower in the Country", "Cowyard Gates" and "The Last Hellos".Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Paul Byrnes concludes his review with:
The film is stunningly beautiful at times, and wildly ambitious, an attempt to be both wordless and wordy, to get to the hypnotic state that poetry and music can induce while saying something meaningful about black and white attitudes to land and love. This last part, as I read Murray, is largely imposed and disruptive, trying to pin a romantic political agenda to the work that's hardly there. It makes the film too literal, too current, when it wants to lodge itself in the more mysterious part of the brain. The film still has a power – Haywood's performance is magnificent – but it never achieves a strong inner reality. It falls short of its own tall ambitions.[21]
