Portrait of the poet as a redneck bard

It is a rare thing for an acclaimed modern poet to dedicate his work to the glory of God' while battling against the intellectual orthodoxy of his homeland.Australian Les Murray is such a man. CHRISTINA WHITE met him T ES MURRAY iS
Australia's national oet and more: a
T ES MURRAY iS
Australia's national oet and more: a
rize winning wordsmith, foe of liberalism and of progressives, a devout Catholic convert. He writes of his homeland, of a poor childhood in the Outback, of death and love and the cruel, taunting words of children with an honesty that is deeply moving. The heat and dust of Australia are manifest. He cites Gerard Manley Hopkins as a "major influence". The same fluidity and beauty is here. It's breathtaking writing.
In January this year Murray was awarded the prestigious T S Eliot prize for poetry, beating a formidable field that included Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. He stands, say his contemporaries, as one of the "superleague". But his prize though greeted with accolades — "the worthy winner", "the champion of the backwoods" ruffled a few literary feathers.
Les Murray doesn't fit the mainstream and shies from the pretensions of the literati. When all about him are wracked with guilt for the treatment of Australia's aborigines, he dares to speak up for the "redneck", the unfashionable poor white farmer. Murray is champion too of aboriginal rights, of just causes, but he revels in an element of anti-political correctness. He believes in God. In a land keen to shed the enduring image of the sheep-shearer and the billycan, it's fighting talk.
We meet at Liverpool University, where he is giving a reading at the invitation of Philip Davis of the English Department. In the flesh this formidable literary giant is a gentle man; I am drawn to his quiet speech and his mannered ways. There is an inherent dignity about him that belies the soft, slightly shuffling appearance. Forget the idea of the romantic, hollow-eyed poet. Les Murray has fought his own demons but the image he presents is unworldly and innocent.
He is a large man. His physical bulk settles about him as he sits, spine erect, comfortable in his largeness. Small, dark eyes dart and flicker and avert their gaze. You sense the child within the man, the loner. He agrees: "I regard being singular as the norm."
His mother died when he was 12 years old: "She died of a miscarriage; she died because she was too far from help. My father blamed himself and I blamed myself for ever being born." He had discovered as a child that he was induced at birth. "I got the idea, the unspoken idea, into my head that I had ruined the works. It was an unconscious thing but it left me with the impression that sex leads to death — a burning preoccupation for much of my life."
He laughs: "The Catholic Church did nothing to hamper my sexuality. I can't blame the Church for this one. If sex, if love, shows you its terrible face before its beautiful face you can be wrecked." He returns to the topic of his mother: "She was a cool person, Mum. A good observer. She was educated. She came to her marriage with the books she'd won as prizes at school."
His father wasn't a man for written words. "At 14 he'd forgotten how to read". He was a man of the "oral culture": a dancer, a fiddle player, a timber worker and dairy farmer. Mr Murray senior mourned his wife for 45 years. "He was like the old soldiers. He couldn't bear to have the things she couldn't have, to feel and touch things she would be missing, that she wasn't there to share." It left the boy isolated and sowed the early seeds of the "black-dog" depression which until this year has haunted Les Murray into adulthood, pulling him back repeatedly into the abyss. "As a boy I tended to run away inside myself. Dad lived in mourning and he expected me to do the same." There was little spiritual comfort. The Murrays were of strict Free Presbyterian stock and he paints a picture of formidable aunts swathed in black . The "terrible doctrine of predestination" haunted the child: "If you're having bad luck, as I was, you start believing it was deserved. I was damned."
The conversion to Catholicism came much later. He mixed, he says, with a Catholic crowd at university and he would eventually marry a Catholic girl, Valerie. He was baptised in 1964: "I knew instantly that I had come home. I think I must have what the Jesuits call a 'naturally Catholic soul'. I thought, I belong to that, it feels right." His father never approved, he never mentioned it: "Too dreadful a subject to raise. Mum wouldn't have approved either but she'd have said something."
TE CHURCH in Australia has been dealing with its own demons of child abuse and mistrust. The campaign to expose the abusers, has, he insists, turned into a crusade against the Church by those who wish it dead. "The great wind of accusation has torn the people apart. It will leave a broken legacy. You must never put your hands on anyone — no touch, no feeling, no comfort and it will be more so. This will put the freeze back on. It's
like a victim being buried alive. The Church is being slowly covered with soil while the congregation is inside.
"I think the Church hides her light under a bushel. It's the only place you neither have to win nor lose. It's a fundamental strength. They should be addressing this point. God loves you as you are. People haven't been hearing that."
He rails against those who view the present Pope as "an impediment" to be got rid of. "If they've got any sense next time they'll choose an ethnic Pope, a black or Asian Pope. The liberals wouldn't dare say a word against him for fear of being marked racist. The Church shouldn't be whipped by her so-called friends." We talk of the "black dog" which has haunted his life and work. "It's chemical. I inherited it from my father and his father before him."
In his youth, towards the end of the 1950s, Murray suffered what he calls a "benign" nervous breakdown. "I lost all my energy and just started to drift, in and out of rented premises. I ended up on the streets, sleeping on building sites. I gravitated back, eventually, to reality. As suddenly as I had stepped out of the world; I stepped back into it."
In 1988 he came apart again: "I continued to work but suffered agonising panic attacks, weeping as I drove the car, the full horrible depressive rigmarole." It ended finally last July. The tyranny and emptiness of depression was lifted by a near-fatal illness. A liver abscess banished the "dog" but left its mark. His balance was affected and he finds himself often "slightly at sea". It was a small price to pay.
Poetry was also the saving grace: "I'm going to kill you with my pen, you bastard." Subhuman Redneck Poems, the collection that secured him the Eliot prize, was the result. "The poem Burning Want broke the back of it," he remembers. It explains the sharpness and hammer of the poems. It's a brutal, awesome collection.
Murray defines depression as internal and external exter
nal being the result of "coercive" politics. "It's rife in Australia. A total Left-wing orthodoxy, any other opinion is proscribed, people are blacklisted."
How would he describe his politics? "I wouldn't describe myself in their terms. I'm just a human being who doesn't like school bullies."
The sense of the child returns and Murray speaks with feeling of the ridicule which he endured when he left his small country school for the town school: "I'm a little autistic and I didn't understand their rules. I was ridiculous and incredible to them. Everything I said was received with a snigger. Every reference to me contained the word fat." He claims that when the liberal mob descended, he was prepared: "Being set upon is nasty but I'd had the time before. The school bully grown up."
HIS DISTASTE is palpable: "I write," he says, "for the people, the public, behind the backs and over the heads of our intellectual managers. Poetry rules the world. It's a way of thinking that reaches out beyond the stanza. People are afraid of a language that can carry such a tremendous charge, a medium that can be melted and sculpted."
He abhors the "obnoxious, intellectual culture" which, he says, has Australia in its grasp. Is this a people running from its roots? "In my experience anyone who uses the term 'working-class' usually sets out to destroy it."
He believes in things "coming home to roost", in humility and in grief: "To some extent we are made of our resentments. It's one of the proofs of God that people can learn to forgive family feuds. My Dad spent his life blaming his father for his troubles. And then before he died it all became unimportant. To forgive is hard. Sometimes you fail and you have to do it many times over.
"I have a feeling that Christ was crucified as a form of penance for the creation of evil," he continues. "We used to be obsessed with Original Sin but it's just part of the freedom of the Universe. Good and evil; pain and pleasure are the motors of life."
Les Murray tried hard to banish his mother's image from his memory and then his daughter Christina was born and she looked like his mother. Remembrance became life. "I think," he admits sadly, "I was harder on her because of that. That sense of reliving the past."
On stage, reading his work, Australia's poet is centre stage, articulate and witty, reading a poem dedicated to his autistic son, Alexander. Hearing Les Murray relish the rhythms and words of his poems is to experience him in his element. Free at last.