Years ago I took the Australian poet Les Murray to the launch of an anthology of new poets in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. “Why,” he asked edgily as we came out, “why are they all so obedient?” As a writer, and reader, Murray, who has died aged 80, tended to be impatient with the familiar, easy, bland. He challenged poets to hear, and dare to use, the language an experience required – even if it was local, vulgar, awkward or unfamiliar.

Murray was born in Nabiac, rural New South Wales, and grew up on his father’s dairy farm at Bunyah. He minded cattle, barefoot in winter, and remembered how he got a delicious brief respite from the cold by jumping in fresh cowpats. His poems celebrate the environments of childhood, the farm and its creatures, which he loved.

He did not feel comfortable at school – he was sent to Taree high in 1955. In Burning Want (1996), he wrote:

… all my names were fat-names, at my new town school.

between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale.

Mass refusal of unasked love; that works …



He preferred the pastoral gossip of creatures (rural human beings among them), “bush balladry”, with roots in actual ballads and hymns. All of his books are dedicated To the Glory of God, a Roman Catholic God, but not a harsh one: a merciful creator. His poems are witness and prayer.

The voice and stories of his father, Cecil Murray, inform many of his poems. From this background, Murray learned an intimate, subtle and inclusive way of speaking. From here, he drew the voices of the creatures that speak through him in Translations from the Natural World (1993) and later poems. His last collection of poems and photographs, On Bunyah (2015), celebrated his rural world. He retired to Bunyah, having visited the four corners of the globe. It was sufficient.

His mother, Miriam (nee Arnall), died after a miscarriage when Murray was a boy, an event that haunts the poems. Again, from Burning Want:

From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:

mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,

we’d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.

Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.



Murray studied modern languages at Sydney University and went on to work as a translator at the Australian National University. But his real vocation was poetry.

From 1971 he made literature a full-time career. He travelled widely – first taking a trip to Europe in the 1960s and revisiting regularly – and was celebrated, the first Australian poet to achieve international fame without expatriation. It may be as well that he was not elected to the Oxford chair of poetry in 1994, having been defeated by James Fenton.

Ted Hughes nominated Murray for the Queen’s gold medal for poetry in 1998. For his visit to Buckingham Palace in 1999, he put on a capacious dark suit and waistcoat and beamed down at Her Majesty. She beamed back. His bonhomie was always infectious. His common admirers were familiar with the baggy striped jumpers, comfortable trousers and mischievous grin.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Les Murray after being presented with the gold medal for poetry by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, London, in 1999. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

Though he accepted this honour, and had been made an officer of the Order of Australia in 1989, Murray struck against what he called the “imperial trap of exclusion”. He wrote within a tradition defined by the Scottish writers Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean (he had a strong poetic and ancestral link to Scotland); by Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers; by a host of poets he celebrated in essays and tributes. Only, not the Anglo-American modernists. His impatience with Ezra Pound and TS Eliot was unwobbling.

Murray’s books began in 1965 with The Ilex Tree. His verse novel The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), a tale told in 140 sonnets, is a modest precursor to his massive verse novel Fredy Neptune (1998), a narrative that takes its protagonist through the history of the latter half of the 20th century in a series of adventures and reflections. He was first published outside Australia in The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1981 (1982).

Later books include The Daylight Moon (1987), Dog Fox Field (1990), a Collected Poems (1991 – others followed in 1998, 2003 and in 2018) and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), awarded – ironically in view of his attitude to modernism – the TS Eliot prize. Every three or four years another collection followed.

He enabled other writers; everyone had met him, everyone had an instructive Murray anecdote. The poet Michael Hofmann declared in 2011: “Certainly, for new readers the imperative remains: start immediately, and start anywhere, and wonder, not where Murray has been – because for the last quarter century at least he has been waiting to be found, like an undiscovered or, rather, ‘undiscovered’ continent – but where you have been, yourselves.”

Letter: Les Murray obituary Read more

I saw Murray’s impact on a young South African poet who, having resisted the dialect of home, risked giving things their names. As soon as he did so, the voltage went up in his poems. A Murrayesque poet must prepare to be a medium for voices of experience. In A Cockspur Bush (1992), for instance, a bush speaks through him:

I am lived. I am died.

I was two-leafed three times, and grazed,

but then I was stemmed and multiplied,

sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised,

earth-salt by sun-sugar. I was innerly sung

by thrushes who need fear no eyed skin thing.

Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years

in now fewer berries, now more of sling

out over directions of luscious dung …



What’s wonderful is the plant’s enactive syntax. This is what Murray called “wholespeak”. He insisted that every form of expression can be poetry: some make poems with language, others with dance, skating, chopping wood. Poetry, a universal mode of engagement, is not confined to language, he thought, though (fortunately) his own was.

Neglect of writers not from the “central cultures”, neglect of the eccentric, the misfit, he would not tolerate. “I hate relegation of any sort – I hate people being left out. Of course, that I suppose has been the main drama of my life – coming from the left-out people into the accepted people and being worried about the relegated who are still relegated. I don’t want there to be any pockets of relegation left.”

Murray is survived by his wife, Valerie (nee Morelli), whom he married in 1962, and by their children – three sons, Daniel, Peter and Alexander, and two daughters, Clare and Christina.

• Leslie Allan Murray, poet, born 17 October 1938; died 29 April 2019