Les Murray: Poet's latest volume reflects on Bunyah, the place where he grew up and always returned

Updated

Les Murray has been haunted since he was 12 by the death of his mother after a series of miscarriages.

That, and appalling treatment at high school, left him with a long history of clinical depression, which only lifted, remarkably, in the 90s after several days in a coma with liver disease.

His latest volume, On Bunyah, collects his writing about the place inland from the mid-north New South Wales coast where he grew up and to which he has always returned.

The host of ABC Radio's PM, Mark Colvin, travelled to Bunyah to meet Murray for an extensive interview.

Bunyah is about eight miles by eight miles in size and it spreads out, it radiates out beyond itself a bit.

"I never felt that I slept a night at any other place that was home.

"It was always, 'Oh I'll be getting home soon' or, 'If I just stay here for the rest of the year I can go home at Christmas'. I was never in any doubt as to where home was.

"Sometimes you see those people on television wandering away from where they'll never go back to, you know, somebody who'll never go back to their part of Syria, and you're terribly sorry for them because you know it's forever.

"And their children won't understand them and their grandchildren will understand them even less."

I've always known that I was a subhuman redneck. We were told that early in life.

"Yes in little simple ways, various ways, like at school — and not the local school on the hillside but one in town.

"Kids who wore the school uniform, to them we were subhuman. They laughed openly at us."

You know that deep down the university English departments are never going to take me seriously because they are in the business of training kids to be members of the middle class.

"I was sent to university to become part of the middle class, I did not do it, I did something else. I became a poet and I've never been forgiven for it.

"People know where they fit in society and you can't move out of it. You can play games with it, which is what I do, but you can't overcome it or dismiss it.

"You are assigned to that part of society and the fires of hell will not move you."

[My father] said to the doctor, 'Oh my wife's having a bad turn, a real bad turn.'

"He didn't give the doctor any details. The doctor therefore, being an idiot, wouldn't send the ambulance.

"My Aboriginal cousin — one of my Aboriginal cousins — Vicki Greaves said years later ... 'Oh Aboriginal people die of that sort of thing all the time'.

"They don't quite know how to talk to the white authority figure. Death is often the result."

Dad was a very good timber worker. He knew a lot more about timber than his father did.

"His father resented this fact and his father wanted to be the champion of everything he put his hand to.

"He thought he was a better timber worker and he wasn't, and there was a certain tree he wanted cut down and Dad said, 'No you don't want that cut down, that's dangerous'.

"He said, 'It's full of white ants and you put an axe into that it'll fall all over you and kill you'.

"So grandfather sneaked away and got his younger son Archie, Dad's younger brother, to cut the tree down instead.

"Archie did.

"The tree fell to pieces and big lumps of it fell all over him and killed him; smashed his brains out.

"From then on, there was a great feud between Dad and his father. 'You caused it.' 'No, you bloody caused it'.

"They were that roused they would have screaming rows and you'd hear them all over the district. They never mentioned what they were rowing about but you knew.

"They were rowing about what was most on their mind, that was that they had killed their son/brother, and each blamed the other."

Cattle are collective creatures. They live close to the ground, they eat the same food and they face the same way.

"And they communicated by their smell and their movements and their sounds and the whole thing, and each animal is an entity bound up to the others.

"Cattle, when they see the death of a fellow cattle, they gather round and they roar and they stomp and circle around and gradually they give up and wander off.

"It's as if they're holding a ceremony to say come back, come back from that death. The death doesn't go away so they give up and wander off."

The Cows on Killing Day All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining. All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out. - Les Murray, Subhuman Redneck Poems

It can be in the morning, any old time, I wake up with an idea and it starts following you around.

"You go, 'Ah that's good' because you know when it's going to work, it's going to be fruitful.

"Other times you'll get the edge of an idea and maybe it fades away or there's just no way it can be made to serve, you know?

"Then you just, it takes its time and you work on it and if necessary you work on it more than once. I'm known to work on it two or three times before you get it right."

I can't get a decent typewriter with a ribbon that'll work and I'm trying to copy things out with a computer.

"I hate the bloody things.

"My natural preference would be to write with a biro but no professional magazine will take your work unless it's typed."

The Privacy of Typewriters I'm an old book troglodyte one who composes on paper and types up the result as many times as need be. The computer scares me, its crashes and codes, its links with spies and gunshot, its text that looks pre-published. and perhaps has been. I don't know who is reading what I write on a carriage that doesn't move or ding. I trust the spoor of botch, whiteouts where thought deepened, wise freedom from Spell Check, sheets to sell the National Library. - Les Murray

Topics: poetry, bunyah-2429, nsw, australia

First posted