Les Murray

Les Murray (born October 17, 1938, Nabiac, New South Wales, Australia—died April 29, 2019, Taree, New South Wales) was an Australian poet and essayist who in such meditative, lyrical poems as “Noonday Axeman” and “Sydney and the Bush” captured Australia’s psychic and rural landscape as well as its mythic elements.

Murray grew up on a dairy farm and graduated from the University of Sydney (B.A., 1969). He worked as a writer in residence at several universities throughout the world and served as editor of Poetry Australia from 1973 to 1979. He also compiled and edited the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986).

Murray’s poetry celebrates a hoped-for fusion of the Aboriginal (which he called the “senior culture”), the rural, and the urban. The poem “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle,” in the collection Ethnic Radio (1977), reflects his identification with Australia’s Aboriginals; it uses Aboriginal narrative style to describe vacationing Australians. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1979) is a sequence of 140 sonnets about a pair of boys who surreptitiously remove a man’s body from a Sydney funeral home for burial in his native Outback. Murray’s poetry collections Dog Fox Field (1990), The Rabbiter’s Bounty (1991), and Translations from the Natural World (1992) won him praise for his versatility and evocative descriptions of the Outback.

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Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) brings to the fore Murray’s ever-present disdain for Western intellectual attitudes; many critics found his satirical assaults unbalanced. In Fredy Neptune (1999) Murray presented a verse narrative of the misfortunes of a German Australian sailor during World War I. Later collections such as Learning Human, Selected Poems (2001) and The Biplane Houses (2005) use forms ranging from folk ballads to limericks to express his appreciation for the natural world. In 2002 he published The Full Dress, which pairs poems with selections of art from the National Gallery of Australia, and Poems the Size of Photographs, a collection of short-form verse. His 2010 collection, Taller When Prone, celebrates ordinary Australians, often with a healthy dose of humour. The poems in Waiting for the Past (2015) hearken back to Murray’s rural upbringing and ponder the peculiarities of modernity, frequently through the use of imagery drawn from the Australian landscape.

In addition to poetry, Murray also wrote several essay collections. Peasant Mandarin (1978) champions the antielitist vitality of “Australocentrism,” at the same time demonstrating a high regard for a classical education and its traditions. The essays in A Working Forest (1997) indict academia for making poetry inaccessible to the average reader and give vent to Murray’s dislike of modern poetic forms. Murray also presented the work of five leading but little-known Australian poets in Fivefathers (1995). In Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression (2011), Murray used both prose and poetry to describe his struggles with clinical depression.