Obituary: Les Murray, celebrated poet

Died: April 29 2019

LES Murray, who has died aged 80, was generally reckoned Australia’s greatest contemporary poet; his combative, exuberant verse won him a considerable international reputation, the TS Eliot Prize and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and recognition both as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and listing as one of the country’s “100 Living Treasures”. He was frequently spoken of as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Murray’s poetry began to appear when the Australian cultural establishment was still in the grip of the “cultural cringe” – a lack of confidence when measuring homegrown work against that of European, especially British, competition. The “Bard of Bunyah”, however, didn’t so much ignore such post-colonial hang-ups as wrestle them to the ground and give them a good kicking; far from being embarrassed by his background in the Bush, he drew upon the Australian landscape, mythologising it (in, for example, Late Summer Fires), upon Aboriginal forms (in Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, which concerned city-dwellers returning to their parents’ rural homes) and on the superlatively expressive and pungent Australian vernacular (in, say, The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever).

His poems exalted the virtues of the Outback, its pioneering spirit, persistence and self-reliance in the face of adversity, nativism and republicanism, not only in opposition to literature from the Old World, but to the fashions and what he dismissed as the modernist obscurantism and snobbery of literary cliques in his own country’s cities. Though himself technically expert and almost universally admired for his linguistic dexterity and command of form, Murray was bullishly on the side of the plain-speaking (or taciturn) backwoods farmer, rather than the intellectualism and “sophistication” of the academic critic, and was not slow to make those views known, often in controversial disputes.

Leslie Allan Murray was born at Nabiac, on the northern coast of New South Wales near the Manning River, on October 17 1938, the only child of Cecil Murray, a dairy farmer, and his wife Miriam (née Arnall). The family, of Scots ancestry (Sir James Murray, compiler of the Oxford English Dictionary, was a kinsman) lived in a basic bush shack on his grandfather’s farm at Bunyah, in the central coastal hinterland.

Les attended Bulby Brush Public School before boarding school, but he was there only briefly before the shattering event of his childhood, when his mother died from complications of an ectopic pregnancy, and he returned home to look after his father, who had a nervous breakdown. Les himself was to have several such collapses, and to suffer from clinical depression (he was also diagnosed, late in life, with Asperger’s), but he eventually discovered that his father had been racked with guilt because he could not bring himself to mention “women’s problems” to the “dopey town doctor”, and persuade him to send for an ambulance in time. He was to tackle this incident in The Steel, a poem he reworked over many years.

He went on to Nabiac Central School and, after a year wandering around the bush, spent two years away at Taree High School, where his clumsiness and physical bulk made him the subject of relentless bullying, which deeply affected him, but also prompted him to begin writing verse.

In 1957, he matriculated in the arts faculty of the University of Sydney, but hardly ever attended lectures or seminars and, after dropping out for a year, eventually achieved what he thought was probably the least distinguished degree ever awarded – “I don’t think it’s ever been bettered”. He had, however, read widely, particularly in languages, and threw himself into student life with “childish” enthusiasm, becoming involved in the bohemian set centred on honi soit, the student paper, which also included the likes of Clive James and Geoffrey Lehmann (who shared space with Murray in their first collection, The Ilex Tree, in 1963).

He met and married a fellow student, Valerie Morelli, with whom he was to have five children, and spent some time in the “Downtown Push”, a bohemian group of writers and artists centred on the Royal George Tavern. In Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James described its atmosphere: “As well as the libertarians and the aesthetes there were small-time gamblers, traditional jazz fans and the homosexual radio repair men who had science fiction as a religion… the noise, the smoke and the heterogeneity of physiognomy were too much to take in. It looked like a cartoon on which Hogarth, Daumier and George Grosz had all worked simultaneously, fighting for supremacy.”

In 1963 Murray became a translator at the library of the Australian National University in Canberra. The Ilex Tree had been a critical success, and in 1967, he spent a year in Europe, mostly in Wales and Scotland, on a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship. His first solo collection, The Weatherboard Cathedral, appeared in 1969.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his bohemian and libertarian tendencies, Murray had little sympathy with the social upheavals of the 1960s. He had also, around the time of his marriage, swapped the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his childhood for Roman Catholicism – several of his collections were dedicated “To the Glory of God”. Titles of later collections – Poems against Economics (1972) and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) – gave further clues to his suspicion of “progressive” views, whether political or literary. In the 1970s, he was prominent in what became known as Australia’s “Poetry Wars”; as a critic, and as poetry editor for the publishing house Angus and Robertson, editor of Poetry Australia and later literary editor of Quadrant he exerted considerable influence.

In the mid-1980s he bought back the family farm at Bunyah and moved there to write full-time, but he suffered from a number of nervous breakdowns and depression. He continued, however, to write and publish. “Poetry can work as the highest form of talking cure, but you have to tell the absolute truth, so far as you can drag that up,” he told one interviewer. His Collected Poems first appeared in 1991.

In the late 1990s, he was hospitalised with a liver abscess, which put him in a coma for three weeks. Upon regaining consciousness, he was surprised to find that his depression had gone – “excised by the surgeon’s scalpel”. He wrote a memoir, Killing the Black Dog (1997 and 2011) and an autobiographical verse novel Fredy Neptune (1998). Later collections included An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow (2000); Learning Human (2001); Poems the Size of Photographs (2002); The Biplane Houses (2006) and Taller When Prone (2010). A revised Collected Poems was published last year.

ANDREW MCKIE