Abstract
Like Judith Wright, Les Murray has been concerned with Aboriginal peoples and with the Australian landscape; but his approach has been rather different from hers. There is less emphasis on the ravages which invasion brought to the Aborigines and he does not share Wright’s sense of incommensurability between white and Aboriginal cultures. Instead, he is engaged with a project of creating ‘fused’ identities. Unlike her, he also claims a relationship with the land which is not different in kind from the Aboriginal relationship.1 These differences between the two poets are in part generational, but they are also ideological, manifesting themselves in, for instance, Murray’s partly self-created legend of himself as an embattled, independent man of the people, a ‘vernacular’ Australian confronting an intolerant, mean-spirited, snobbish urban elite full of the fashionable ideas of the 1960s and 1970s, such as mul-ticulturalism, radical feminism and leftism.2
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Notes
Les Murray, The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia (Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove, 1999).
The Athens-Boeotia dualism is set out, most prominently, in Murray’s essay ‘On Sitting Back and Thinking About Porter’s Boeotia’, PT pp. 56–65. Murray’s use of the terms Athens and Boeotia have been widely discussed. See, for instance, Lawrence Bourke, A Vivid Steady State: Les Murray and Australian Poetry (Kensington and Strawberry Hills, NSW: New South Wales University Press/New Endeavour Press, 1992), pp. 26–35.
Judith Wright, ‘Landscape and Dreaming’, Daedalus 114.1 (Winter 1985), pp. 29–56 (p. 32).
Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. xii, xix.
Murray gives a brief account of this family history in ‘The Human-Hair Thread’ (PT p. 85). A fuller description can be found in Peter F. Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 111–12.
A personal interview with Les Murray, quoted by Adam Shoemaker, Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature, 1929–1988 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), p. 199.
Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990), pp. 143–4. Bernard Smith’s remark about ‘false consciousness’ is quoted on p. 143.
Robert Crawford, ‘Les Murray’s “Presence Sequence”’, in Counterbalancing Light: Essays on the Poetry of Les Murray ed. Carmel Gaffney (Armidale, NSW: Kardoorair Press, 1996), pp. 54–68 (p. 61). In ‘Fullness of Being in Les Murray’s “Presence: Translations from the Natural World”’, Antipodes 8 (December 1994), pp. 123–6, 128, 130, Bert Almon also suggests that ‘Aboriginal beliefs are a natural analogue’, although he then goes on to argue that the sequence is ‘rooted in a Catholic view of being’ (p. 123).
Steven Matthews, Les Murray (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 125.
Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 45.
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© 2007 Ashok Bery
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Bery, A. (2007). Fusion and Translation: Les Murray’s Australia. In: Cultural Translation and Postcolonial Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286283_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286283_4
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