Voice of the outback

The son of impoverished farmers, Les Murray was mercilessly bullied at school. He discovered poetry at 18 but challenged 'high art' and saw Keats as the enemy. Though regarded as Australia's national poet, he sees himself as a pariah, outside the country's literary establishment, because of his anti-liberal views

Voice of the outback


Les Murray coined the phrase "the quality of sprawl", referring to the land of Australia and an ethos and poetics inspired by it; extensive, flexible, exceeding boundaries or measures, genially unconfined. Murray himself demonstrates sprawl: from his teenage years to his current comfortable corpulence, he has been a large man. His poetic corpus is also imposing; his New Collected Poems (2003) - a selection of most but not all his books - weighs in at 577 pages. And he cuts an impressive figure in terms of reputation; critics have ranked him alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott in terms of international fame. He is also regarded as a national poet, the voice - or a voice - of Australia.

But "it will be centuries before men are truly at home in this country", Murray once wrote, and his work has embodied some of the difficulties and conflicts arising from the violent history of white settlement - the tensions between the rural and the urban, and issues of inheritance (whether of language, literature or land). He has offered a complex and sometimes unsettling account of the country: "My course is at a slant," he writes in one poem. Sometimes, though, especially in the later poems, his approach has struck some readers as dogmatic and simplistic. In his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems , for example, "A Brief History" includes the lines:

   "All of people's Australia, its churches and lore
   are gang-raped by satire self-righteous as war
   and, from trawling fresh victims to set on the poor,
   our mandarins now, in one more evasion
   of love and themselves, declare us Asian."

Three years later Murray became embroiled in controversy when attempting to write a preamble to the Australian constitution, at the request of John Howard, the prime minister. But Murray - sometimes called "Howard's poet" as a result - has recently written an anti-war poem for an anthology which was presented to Howard by opponents of Australia's involvement in Iraq. Murray accused the government of "crawling in the dirt after America" and said of his uncharacteristic participation in the protest, "I don't do much of it because it gets so one-eyed and compulsory, but this time I thought to hell with it, I don't like this war."

Murray was born on October 17 1938, the son of a farmer, Cecil, and a nurse, Miriam Arnall, in Nabiac, on the north coast of New South Wales. His ancestors had come from Scotland in the 19th century to work for the Australian Agricultural Company, establishing themselves in the Manning River area. Cecil rented his farm in Bunyah from his father, John; the two had quarrelled a month before Les's birth, and Cecil was given little help thereafter: "My parents used to complain a good bit about poverty. They didn't need to be poor. Dad's father kept him poor, and they had a hell of a lot of droughts at the time too."

The only child, Murray experienced alternate periods of intense parental attention and isolated self-reliance. His father, who had been beaten as a child, would thrash Les; when he was old enough and big enough he ran away. He also roamed widely through literature and general knowledge; although the house, like the community, was not bookish, his mother did have an encyclopedia, which Murray read and re-read, with the Bible, courtesy of the Presbyterian church. Later, a local schoolmaster encouraged him to use the library.

"I taught myself to read when I was four. There wasn't much to read around there - people had a cultural life, but it was based on music and dancing. I was no good at it. No musical ear. Couldn't dance. I wanted to be a painter. Only thing wrong with that was I couldn't paint - no gift for it."

That lack of musical ear might seem strange in a poet who plays the rhythms of speech against regular metres with such suppleness. As one of Murray's younger admirers, the Australian poet and critic John Kinsella, remarks: "Interestingly, he is tone-deaf, and his work actually relies on very specific received rhythms... those of the 'bush ballad', the popular song, the movement of a car or a tractor or a horse galloping... The poems quicken in pace linguistically, though the metre seems to remain constant - another apparent contradiction. But it's the case more often than not: a ripper of an example is 'The Tin Wash Dish'."

In this lively piece, a sadistically jocular sing-song rhythm is perversely employed to evoke the lasting shame of early poverty. In addition to their financial difficulties and sense of disinheritance, Murray says that his parents' "general happiness was undermined by a number of miscarriages, which depressed them horribly. And then my mother died."

His mother's death in 1951, and its manner, had a terrible and lasting effect on Murray and his father. She was carrying a second child when she began bleeding heavily. Because no ambulance was sent for several hours, she died in hospital, as did Murray's unborn sibling. For years, Murray blamed the local doctor for not taking his rural patients seriously; much later he realised that his father bore some of the responsibility, for being unable to explain the seriousness of his wife's condition: "Because he was speaking one code and the doctor was speaking another. He was speaking like a 19th-century person - he essentially was a 19th-century person - and you don't give details of women's troubles over the phone, especially when the worst gossip in the street [Murray's aunt Jane] is running the phones."

The story is told in the last version of "The Steel", a poem Murray revised in light of his discovery of the whole story; though the class animus is still strong:

   "Perhaps we were wrong
   to make a scapegoat out of you;
   perhaps there was no stain
   of class in your decision,

   no view that two framed degrees
   outweighed a dairy.
   It's nothing, dear:
   Just some excited hillbilly -"

Murray thenceforth grew up in a grief-stricken household, and for a long time had to look after his father. "Of course dad was shattered and never really recovered. He wouldn't allow himself to recover: he was like an old soldier who won't consent to have the happiness his mates who were killed at the front had missed out on. He wasn't always the most cheerful company as a result. Deep down he blamed himself."

Murray did not go to school until quite late, and remarks that "for an only child in the bush, nine is a late age to start socialisation, or to start acquiring habits of numeracy and externally imposed discipline". Lonely, asocial, aggressive - and fascinated by war, because of widespread fears of a Japanese invasion and later the Korean war - Murray wanted to leave school and apply for Portsea Officers School. But his father, despite sharing the Bunyah farming community's general suspicion of education, honoured his late wife's wishes and persuaded Murray to do another two years of school, at Taree High; an experience that scarred Murray for most of his life.

He was mercilessly bullied, particularly by the girls, who would flirt with him, then ridicule him whether or not he responded. Cruel nicknames about his size and strangeness abounded. For Murray, who lacked social skills, this was extraordinarily painful, and may help explain some of his more contentious attitudes towards feminists. He had few friends, and none brave enough to stand up for him publicly.

After more than 30 years, memories of this time would provoke a breakdown. He wrote explicitly about the experience only much later, especially in Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), linking the schoolyard bullying with all forms of mob mentality and persecution, right up to fascism:

   "Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew
   this at your school. To it, everyone's subhuman
   for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.
   You'll be one of those if these things worry you."

"Essentially my politics come from that - I will not be bullied... chased around and managed by applied fashion," he says.

But Murray was an exceptionally bright child and a voracious collector of language and information. He won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Sydney University and he started writing poems. "I discovered poetry when I was 18, and I went 'yeah, that's the equivalent of painting. That's what I can do'." He also discovered an Australian poetic tradition, encouraging him to throw off the attitude of "cultural cringe", whereby Australian poets felt inferior to the traditions of British poetry. "I never meant to 'join' high art - I meant to match it. I wouldn't read the poetry they set us at university, because I regarded them as collaborators. Still haven't read Keats. I had this funny attitude: this was the enemy's poetry. I read everything else; the entire corpus of poetry from around the world: Irish, Latin and Greek..."

Lyn Innes, a fellow student and now a lecturer, recalls that "despite his diffident manner he was a memorable figure: I remember him on campus as a large man in navy-blue bell bottoms and overshirt. This uniform was worn not out of any commitment to the navy or the empire - he was something of a republican even then - but to make use of whatever clothing he had to hand. But it was also a mark of his refusal to obey the dictates of student fashion - or writing, for that matter."

Clive James, a university contemporary and still a huge admirer of Murray's work, took his poem "Property" for the magazine Honi Soit. And in 1961, Southerly, edited by the great Australian poet Kenneth Slessor, published one of his poems. But Murray, despite making good friends who were of enormous help thereafter, still didn't feel settled, and was dogged by depression. After a broken engagement, and feeling uncomfortable on the farm in Bunyah where his father had begun a new relationship, he left without completing his degree (he eventually graduated in 1969). For a while he went walkabout.

"I was living rough. I'd kind of gone off my head; it wasn't noticeable, I wasn't extravagant or anything, I just drifted off the ground - it was a form of the manic side of depression. For a couple of years I just drifted around, I had no possessions, I was a street person."

Fortunately, he had met Valerie Morelli while at university. He played Satan in a Passion play staged by the German department; Valerie was the wardrobe mistress. Despite his intense shyness and defence mechanisms, not to mention her parents' suspicion of this aimless and strange creature, she won him over and married him in 1962. They have five children, many grandchildren, and a marriage of evident and enormous strength.

Also in 1962, Murray's grandfather died. Although Cecil had always expected to inherit the land he rented, the will did not allow for this; and after various family conflicts, he lost the farm. Murray took this hard. In 1974, when his writing had earned him enough, he bought a section of the farm known in the family as "the Forty Acres", and installed his father there.

Murray worked for a while as a translator of science and technical material at the Australian National University, employing his remarkable knack for languages. He placed poems in reputable magazines, notably the Bulletin, which published "The Burning Truck", the first in his New Collected Poems, and recognised as one of his major achievements.

During the 1960s, as he established himself as a writer, Murray was encouraged by several of Australia's leading poets. Vincent Buckley took some of his poems; AD Hope was also very helpful; he and David Campbell, poetry editor of the Australian newspaper, recommended Murray to ANU press, which published his first book, The Ilex Tree (1965), co-authored with Geoffrey Lehmann. James Macauley introduced Murray to Quadrant magazine (then funded by the CIA, as was Encounter in the UK), of which Murray has been literary editor since 1989. He also helped Murray make the first of his literary trips.

In 1967, having been semi-detached from his job for some time, he left it altogether, requesting a grant from Australia's leading poetry publisher Angus & Robertson to go to Britain with his wife and children. Murray found it hard to find or keep jobs in Britain. A literary fellowship saved his bacon, and after a trip around Europe he returned to Australia. He worked briefly for the Liberal prime minister John Gorton. Murray says: "Best thing he ever did was to tell people he was a bastard: suddenly all the illegitimate people were legitimised, not stigmatised. Nice knockabout sort of a bloke."

Thereafter, the Murrays supported themselves "a day at a time". Valerie was a teacher; Murray, over the years, received fellowships and awards. He also held influential positions, editing Poetry Australia in the 1970s and reading submissions for Angus & Robertson until 1991.

In 1969 Murray published his first solo volume, The Weatherboard Cathedral; Slessor, already Murray's supporter, praised it and gave it a prize. In the next few years, Murray came to be regarded as the most promising candidate for the role of white Australia's national poet.

Despite this, Murray has long believed the Australian literary establishment is essentially in the hands of the left and that he has been their "token fascist": "I'm only marginally part of any set-up in Australia, I'm more or less a pariah there." Asked about this now, he quotes from one of his shorter poems: "A brutal politics, like inferior art, knows whose fault it all is"; he still maintains that fellowships are denied to his friends.

As Innes remarks, "Australians in the '60s and '70s were desperate to break away from what they saw as the limiting figure of 'the bushman' which had been central to the fashioning of an Australian cultural identity ever since the 1890s. In this climate, Les's determination to speak for the small country workers rooted on the land seemed almost a betrayal to those new urban sophisticates. And as his work became acclaimed internationally, it seemed also to play to an image of Australia that the rest of the world sought to maintain, whether in the figure of Crocodile Dundee or more recently Steve Irwin. Hence the often bitter opposition in his own country in direct proportion to his increasing acceptance in Britain and the United States."

Murray's blending of nationalist traditions and rural pieties is harnessed to a proud reclamation of the vernacular, of the phrases arising from the mixed origins of the settlers, their encounters with Aboriginal vocabulary, and their own neologising of the new and alien world of the bush. Murray writes of The Macquarie Dictionary (1981), in an essay titled "Centering the Language", that it shows "how much larger and richer our dialect is than many had thought, in part by gently but firmly shifting our linguistic perception, so that our entire language is henceforth centred for us, not thousands of miles away, but here where we live".

Peter Porter wrote recently of contradictions Murray's work throws up: "Murray's stance is ostensibly generous: he sees it as his duty to protect ordinary people from culture snobs, but his own art is prac tised at a level of elite virtuosity. He is for the people, but he continues to write over their heads in the high style required if he is to confront his educated enemies. It's an observable paradox that among his political and social opponents there are many admirers of his poetry. It is essential to him that they remain identifiable as enemies."

It is difficult to discuss Murray's poetry without reference to these political (and literary-political) issues, because they are so much a part of the work, especially later on. He is at his best when disrupting conformist and patronising ideologies, but can end up tipping the baby out with the bath water. By associating the progressive liberal politics arising from the opposition to the Vietnam war with "fashion", he often rejects positions such as feminism or multiculturalism in toto.

Murray explains: "Suddenly a tone of politics that sounded exactly like the high-school playground was loose among us: it wasn't just feminists, it was that method of howling people down, the politics of unbridled exaggeration. And I thought, 'I've heard that tune before' and recoiled from it." In his verse novel The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), one of the characters is a caricature feminist who is ultimately disfigured by having boiling water thrown in her face; a passage even Murray's admirers have struggled with.

The rejection of dogmatic positions (as he sees them) does not extend to religion. Murray had long associated religious faith with poetry, and was increasingly drawn to Catholicism after his marriage to Valerie, a strong Catholic since childhood. In 1964 he converted. His later work is dedicated "to the glory of God". Michael Schmidt, Murray's British publisher, remarks that "there is a proper sense of spiritual severity there. Religion is for him a matter of belief, not of opinion, and as a result there are some rigours that are a little hard for the bien pensant liberal to take, though for me as a sinful, old-fashioned Anglican, Murray's lack of spiritual sentimentality is generally bracing and only occasionally rebarbative." Kinsella points out that Murray's is "the Catholicism of the convert. Always on guard, always the creation of a need to confess. These contradictions are what drive the language of the poetry, though."

Murray seems to feel that Christians are another threatened minority not granted the same care and respect as more vocal groups. One of his poems, written after his father's death, ends "Snobs mind us off religion / nowadays if they can. / Fuck them. I wish you God."

Murray's sympathy for the white farmers of Bunyah and elsewhere should not be dismissed as straightforwardly right wing; it is part of an inclusivist philosophy that regrets Australia became so divided in the first place. He has shown a great deal of interest in Aboriginal culture, at times adopting or adapting its styles and outlooks ("The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle", for example), and including Aborigines in his anthology of Australian poetry.

Murray, who has Aboriginal relatives by marriage, once wrote, "whether I have Aboriginal ancestry I don't know... it would be such a simple solution to all my worries. I would be fashionable, there would be no more literary rivalry... If I were part-Aboriginal, I would be honoured." He conveys a complicated array of feelings: a genuine respect for those who once owned the land, an unease about inheritance and legitimacy of occupation that would be solved by Aboriginal roots, an unusual deference to the politics of literary fashion, and a desire for a "Creole" Australia in which mixed blood would prevent division and conflict. His poem, "The Genetic Galaxy", delights in the possibilities of suppressed bloodlines becoming apparent, eliminating coercive notions of legitimacy, whether of class or ethnicity.

At his worst, though, he has struck poses uncomfortable even to his supporters; hectoring, simplistic, apparently reliant on caricatured abstractions and coercive certainty. It can be argued, as Schmidt does, that "his politics, which some misconstrue as agrarian and anti-metropolitan, is an attempt, not appreciated by the empowered, to enfranchise those whom our systems of politics, education and belief tend to sideline and exclude".

But it is also the case that, at times, in the view of his critics, he becomes a caricature of himself: one cannot but notice his own propensity to use the word "fascist" as loosely as his ostensible opponents. The Irish poet and critic John Redmond, reviewing Subhuman Redneck Poems (which won the TS Eliot prize in the UK), wrote that "one gets the impression that if Murray's car refused to start he would spray swastikas over it". Porter has pointed out that "his brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, are often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness". Schmidt politely demurs: "Some critics hate his more political poems and the starker opinions. I am glad that for him poetry does not have to be a language of irony and evasion, and some of his rebarbative verses at least provoke thought and an articulation of response."

Murray seems to recognise that he has sometimes engaged in the forms of conflict he deprecates in others. "A lot of my wickedness happened in the context of dreadful depressive illness, I really was terribly sick, for years. I was chronically depressed from the age of eight until about 58." The black dog, as Murray refers to it, was not seen off until he had a near-death experience in 1996: "I only had half an hour's life left in me, and they saved me. And I realised - in a foggy way - 'ah! the black dog's dead!'"

After he miraculously survived the liver infection - the doctor's phrase that Murray was "conscious and verbal" became his next book title - "I also realised I could finish Fredy Neptune - find out what happened!" Fredy Neptune (1998) is Murray's second verse novel, a picaresque adventure whose hero, witnessing an Armenian genocide (the burning alive of women), becomes physically numb, and tremendously strong. His adventures take him through the 20th century's dramatic and horrific events, including Nazi Germany, where he rescues a mentally handicapped child, Hans, who would have been sterilised, and finally is able to feel again; the poem is a redemption narrative, poised around issues of empathy, suffering and forgiveness.

In the characters of Fredy and Hans, one detects Murray's persistent if complex concern with victimhood, and also with autism; although the word crops up throughout his work, it was with the birth of his autistic son Alexander in 1978 that Murray recognised the qualities in himself.

"Alexander is a terribly interesting human being, he comes out with wonderful things, but the price he pays for it is hard. There's a touch of it in me. Not crippling in my case: just a touch of Asperger's. Alexander's tragedy is he's like a fellow in a sack race, ever trying to catch up."

Murray's extraordinary poem, "It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at 15", weaves together the delights and sadnesses of the boy's condition in an aptly robotic series of single-line statements. It is a piece that can make an audience laugh and cry in the space of a few minutes. Murray is a highly entertaining reader of his work. He employs a practised patter of enormous charm, brings out the compulsive and extremely pleasurable rhythms of his poems, and wittily ventriloquises the characters in them.

In 1999, Murray was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, at the nomination of Ted Hughes; perhaps an odd award for a republican to accept. Australia is once again tentatively returning to the question of throwing off its history of constitutional monarchy, with Opposition Leader Mark Latham promising a fresh referendum if elected. The fierce disagreements within and about Murray's poetry are an indication both of the difficulties the country faces and of what is at stake.

Les Murray

Born: October 17 1938, New South Wales.

Education: 1955-56 Taree High School; '57-60 Sydney University.

Married: 1962 Valerie Gina Morelli (five children: '63 Christina; '65 Daniel; '74 Clare; '78 Alexander; '82 Peter).

Career: 1963-67 translator, Australian National University; '70-71 prime minister's department; '73-80 joint editor Poetry Australia; '89- literary editor Quadrant.

Some books: 1965 The llex Tree (with Geoffrey Lehmann); '69 The Weatherboard Cathedral; '72 Poems Against Economics; '79 Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic; '86 Selected Poems; '90 Dog Fox Field; '92 Translations From the Natural World; '96 Subhuman Redneck Poems; '98 Fredy Neptune; '99 Conscious & Verbal; 2001 Learning Human: New Selected Poems; '02 Poems the Size of Photographs; '03 New Collected Poems.

New Collected Poems by Les Murray is published by Carcanet at £14.95.