The most prominent contemporary Australian poet placed firmly in the Aboriginalist tradition is Les Murray. He is a poet who is often occupied with questions of land ownership and rights, depictions of landscape, and the impact of the country on its people, and has often been acclaimed as our foremost poet on these matters.
Murray’s vision of Australia, in which nature has the prominent role, is more comprehensive than that of any previous Australian artist, though it includes elements from most of the others. The difficulty of the environment is not denied — the way it drives some to despair and anger is admitted — yet Murray’s work expresses a deep love of the land ... As his poems work upon his Australian readers, they will change and deepen their appreciation of the land.
(Clunies Ross in Eaden and Mares, 1986: 240 and 241)
Murray’s relationship with the land is more complex than he tends to suggest in his public statements. He presents himself as a bloke from Up Home, and his primary identification is that of a small-holder from Bunyah. Murray is also of course, many other things, and his poetry and prose range across many areas and interests, just as his actual life experience has taken him far from Bunyah. He has come in for his fair share of criticism, and does not shy from debate, cultivating a very public persona that consciously combines the intellectual with the redneck, the poet laureate with the stirrer from the bush.
Peter Porter characterised him thus in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’, which Murray later either graciously (or possibly contrarily) included in the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse:
Like a Taree small-holder splitting logs
And philosophizing on his dangling billies,
The poet mixes hard agrarian instances
With sour sucks to his brother
... and the same blunt patriotism,
A long-winded emphatic, kelpie yapping
About our land, our time, our fate
Murray’s closeness to the land is hardly unique amongst poets, nor, clearly, is his interest in portraying the country with which he is most familiar. Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Robert Adamson, David Malouf, Dorothy Hewett and many others have pursued the same aim. Similarly, his interest in the working people of the country, and particularly the rural poor, holds echoes of the Bush Poets of the last century. His work explores the same issues of the hostile landscape and the need to belong that so many others have attempted, but with a great deal more authenticity than many of his predecessors.
One of his most famous poems, ‘Noonday Axeman’, published in 1965 (11), resonates with the melancholy pondered by Clarke, but lightened by a sense of place which few have managed to convey. The world of the axeman is filled with silence, stillness, wordlessness, and even “Dreaming silence”, broken only by the clamour of the axe. Whereas in Jack Davis’s ‘The Red Gum and I’ (see 3.5.3) the poet’s world is crashing down with the tree, Murray’s axeman is creating his world, shaping his environment, creating a space in which the songs of the children and the words of the women can be heard. Murray’s world is being created at the expense of Davis’s.
This belonging, there is no doubt, is created through force, almost through violence, as the axe thuds into the wood. Yet despite the axeman’s efforts, belonging to this place is not something to be achieved in one lifetime:
It will be centuries
before many men are truly at home in this country,
and yet there have always been some, in each generation,
there have always been some who could live in the presence of silence.
It is an early poem, and Murray’s thoughts on place and belonging have shifted subtly over the years, along with the development of his political persona as the anti-intellectual intellectual, the monarchist nationalist, and the ratbag conservative conservationist. He has also taken on the mantle of the Jindyworobaks, and his writings reflect his keen interest in Aboriginal writing, traditions and concepts. In his exploration of these themes, he has often returned to the question raised in the ‘Noonday Axeman’: can white people really belong to this country?
My contention is that of course ‘we’ can, and some of us do possess the land imaginatively in very much the Aboriginal way. We have recently been awed by the discovery that the Aborigines have been here for thirty or forty thousand years, or even longer, but I think too much is often made of this. Forty thousand years are not very different from a few hundred, if your culture has not, through genealogy, developed a sense of progression of time and thus made history possible. Aboriginal ‘history’ is poetic, a matter of significant moment rather than of development. (1992: 95)
There is an intellectual and perhaps emotional equivocation about Murray’s statements on this issue. Like so many poets sited within the European tradition, he both wants to belong, but also longs for the land to continue to be a mystery, a frontier, a unknown known only to him (see 2.2). He wants to belong, but as an initiated man, one of the “some in each generation”: but he doesn’t really think it is generally possible. A confusingly conservative political framework leads him to make statements which mix the rhetoric of the right, with the longing of the tradition of landscape poetry:
Great tributes have to be paid to that [conservation] movement for, in particular, implanting the Aboriginal concept of the sacredness of the land and of one’s native region in the minds of many Australians. This has come about largely as a by-product of the agitation for Aboriginal land rights — and has begun provoking some white country people to start thinking about their land rights, rights to live in places which have formed and continue to nurture their spirit. Where this is merely an attempt to trump the Aborigines, it is to be deplored, but it does point to the inequity of, as it were, releasing one section of our population from the ordinary laws of economics while letting the rest continue to suffer the effects of these. (1992: 95)
One of the clearest examples of this is the 1972 poem ‘Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit’ (12), in which he describes in detail the light, the grass, the dust and the lines bordering his family home, and imagines it decaying, being taken over by “drifts of grass”, orchids and the ever-present bush.
The ambient day-tides contain every mouldering and oil
That the bush would need to come back right this day,
Not suddenly, but all down the farm slopes…
Murray wrote later that the poem “counteracts a feeling of dispossession by talking about dimensions, intimacies, knowledge of the place which dispossession cannot touch”. (1992: 85) He attempts to relate his experiences and his poem closely to the experiences of the dispossessed, and his understanding of the spiritual framework of Aboriginal cultures. He goes on:
The speaker [ie the poet] is thus in a rather Aboriginal position, vis-a-vis the usurper, and this is underlined by his becoming in effect a totem ancestor in the last line; like the figures in the legends, ‘I go into the earth near the hay shed for thousands of tears’. [sic: the actual line is “I go into the earth near the feedshed for thousands of years” — the confusion over the name of the shed in the mind of the poet writing years later is understandable, but it’s unclear whether the fascinating Freudian slip over “years” and “tears” was made by the poet or in production.] (1992: 85)
Shoemaker has argued against Murray’s insistence, evident in this poem, that “some of us do possess the land imaginatively in very much the Aboriginal way”, and claims that Murray’s position invalidates the experience of dispossession as it affects Aboriginal people. Shoemaker observes:
Here it is implicit that Murray’s feeling for the farm which he will be denied is akin to the sense of loss which has afflicted Black Australians confronted with the white encroachment into their continent ... While it is true that White Australians have developed a real and heartfelt feeling for their sometimes unlovely land since 1788, Murray’s reference to ‘thousands of years’ pushes the parallel too far. The sense of belonging of which he speaks is of a different order of magnitude to the sense of being owned by the land, which is the traditional Aboriginal concept, with all the sanctity of religious veneration. (1989: 199)
In his poetry and prose Murray writes of his experiences of living near rural Aboriginal communities as a child, and the influence of his later reading of the Jindyworobaks and anthropologists and translators of the songs and stories of Aboriginal communities, such as those translated by the Strehlows and the Berndts.
Murray has a keen interest in reading and promoting Aboriginal texts. But unlike the Jindyworobaks, Murray does not perceive indigenous cultures as vanishing or passing away, and he has played a role, particularly though his New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, in ensuring that songs composed by Aboriginal peoples are framed and read in their contemporary contexts, and as poetry, rather than as quaint symbols of a lost culture.
The inclusion of several songs in the New Oxford was a breakthrough in the representation of Aboriginal poetry by white editors and publishers, and gave Murray the opportunity to feature David Unaipon’s ‘The Song of Hungarrda’, and the Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone, which he has described as “one of the very great poems of Australia”, and later wrote, “it may well be the greatest poem ever composed in Australia”. (1992: 53 and 90) However, many prominent modern Aboriginal poets writing in English, such as Fogarty, Gilbert and Davis, were not included.
He identifies strongly with the Aboriginalist tradition, and argues for a “convergence” of the cultures, one which acknowledges the heritage of, and allows for interchange and interaction between, the two very disparate literary and artistic forms and traditions. He has quite consciously used influences from Aboriginal songs and stories in a number of his poems, and in his essay ‘The Human-Hair Thread’, he explains that in ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ he was “after an enactment of the longed-for fusion between the three cultures [Aboriginal, rural and urban].” (1992: 92) Similarly, in ‘Cycling in Lake Country’ he claims:
No man ever composed
a sacred song. The honey ant,
euro and wagtail feathers brought them forth
thigh-slapping in showers of selves,
lying down, being outcrops.
Like the Jindyworobaks, he is attempting to incorporate his understanding of Aboriginal songs into his own work, in search of a further result — the “fusion” which will result in the maturity of an Australian cultural identity. He is, however, a little more conscious than the Jindyworobaks about his methods:
Artistic borrowing is quite unlike the processes of finance from which the metaphor is drawn: it leaves the lender no poorer, and draws attention to his riches, which can only be depleted by neglect and his loss of confidence in them; these cause them to be lost. Borrowing is also an act of respect which may restore his respect for his goods, and so help preserve them. And he is at all times free to draw on them himself with the benefit of his own superior understanding of his treasures. (1992: 71)
Murray is clear that he is engaged in a transaction, although he is obviously unaware that the power dynamics of the exchange weigh fairly heavily in his favour. Given the known history of assimilation and cultural disintegration affecting the indigenous people, it is simply not good scholarship to claim that the “riches” of Aboriginal literatures can only be depleted by some neglect on the part of Aborigines. It flies in the face of logic to pretend that it was not the dominant culture which caused the “treasures” of the indigenous cultures to be “lost”. It is patronising, in both senses of the word, to suggest that by appropriating another culture's traditions one might be helping them out of a nasty hole into which they have dug themselves.
Hodge and Mishra, perhaps not surprisingly, posit a different view on the “neglect” of Aboriginal literatures:
Aboriginal culture is not a set of simple and transparent but neglected texts. On the contrary it is typically enigmatic and deceptive. The mystery of Aboriginal culture is the product of Aboriginal protectiveness as well as White indifference. (1991: 72)
For Murray, though, these borrowings are one of his signatures, used in several key works, not least of which is his Dreaming poem — ‘The Flying Fox Dreaming’ (13) which opens with the extraordinarily tender lines:
Now that the west
is lighting in under leaves
and Hookfoot the eagle
has gone from over the forest
there is no sound except the
tree-foxes, unwrapping from rest
It is an intimate view of the life of the country, a peek into the boudoir of the fruit bats with which Murray feels a tremendous affinity. They are:
Upside down all their days
Antipodean
and we are even on first-name terms with the eagle that threatens their days. This is a key poem for Murray, and one through which he explores his own belief in the possibility of white-man Dreaming. He wrote in ‘The Human-Hair Thread’:
The fruit bats are very nearly my ‘dreaming’ in the half-serious, half-joking way that Douglas Stewart identified his totem animal as a bandicoot while claiming David Campbell’s was a big red fox ... the people of the east coast tribes were supposed to discover their dreamings for themselves through a sort of waking revelation ... Without pressing the point further than it will go, I know I would be most reluctant ever to hurt a flying fox. (1992: 84 and 85)
The Dreaming was incorporated also into ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ (14) using not just the concept, but an interpretation of the kind of structures Murray had read in the great song cycles of northern Arnhem Land, collected and translated by the Berndts. The following passage focuses on family and ancestors, a major theme in Murray’s work, in this case seen through white eyes but in Aboriginal terms rendered into a contemporary Australian vernacular (or at least, the white poet’s version thereof):
The Fathers and the Great-Grandfathers, they are out in the paddocks all the time, they live out there
at the place of the Rail Fence, of the Furrows Under Grass, at the place of the Slab Chimney
Like his yearning to have his brand of belonging validated as being as authentic as a perceived Aboriginal experience, so too he hopes to engender the mysticism around the memory of his own ancestors that he imagines surrounds those of Aboriginal people. He commented “the pioneer ancestors are, as it were, given the aura of the great ancestral sites of the Central Australian sacred sites, and the timelessness of these founding ancestors is stressed as against their successiveness, so there is convergence”. (1992: 93) Borrowing and convergence, then, are not just methods, they are aims in themselves, and their ideological point is clear: this land is as sacred to me as it is to anyone whose people live here for 60,000 years, as it holds my ancestors.
So we can see that Murray’s use of concepts and structures “borrowed” from Aboriginal cultures are intended, not to protect or extend their source as he has claimed, but rather to justify the ownership of, and belonging to, the land. These justify and inform both his stated political views on Aboriginal land rights and his emotional need to belong to the country he loves and describes so tenderly in his poetry.