LES MURRAY The Gallery: In the inwardness it is twilit and tall, inleaning, with stilled sway.

Flies stay out in the farms. Leslie Allan Murray is an Australian poet, anthologist, and critic. He had published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of prose writing. As a nationalist and republican Murray believes that Australia should throw off the letters of political and cultural dependence and he sees his work as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian. He has written the Preamble for the Australian constitution. Writer J.M. Coetzee regarded him as the leading Australian poet of his generation in The Angry Genius of Les Murray. Literary critic Lawrence Bourke writes that: In a lively, frequently polemic prose style he promotes republicanism, patronage, Gaelic bardic poetry, warrior virtue, mystics, and Aboriginal modes, and attacks modernism and feminism. Murray has a pristine outlook on life. This country is my mind, he says in the early, Evening alone at Bunyan. The impact and beauty that his poetry has and its natural tinge can be made out from these lines from his poem Walking to the cattle place (22-26), . . . barefoot children Muzzy with stars and milk thistles Stoning up cows. They will never forget their quick-fade Cow piss slippers Nor chasing such warmth over white frost. Much of Murrays work makes reference to the concept of Athenian and Boeotian. In short, Athens symbolizes the new, the crass, the commercial, while Boeotia is the place of ritualism and ancestral inheritance. The very inspiration of his poetry is the native culture: In the essay The Human Hair Thread, reprinted in his volume, Persistence in Folly, he says, Aboriginal art has given me a resort of reference and native strength, a truly Australian base to draw on... He presents himself as a champion of The Bush which for him stands for culture which provides Australians with a National Australian Identity. Murrays love for Beolic can be seen in the poem The Broad Bean Sermon, Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest Snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions: Spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage. Or from the poem A Princes Land which opens with the lines,

Leaves fromthe ancient forest gleam In the meadow brook, and dip, and pass. Murray is concerned about the differences between centralized urban culture and decentralized urban culture. He writes, When Sydney and the Bush Meet now there is antipathy And fashionable surburbs float --there is no common ground. (Sydney and the Bush) It is search of this common ground that Murray has proposed his theory of Convergence for. He talks about the convergence of three Australias: 1. Physically speaking affect the contemporary life pattern 2. Post-Industrial Australia 3. Future Australia of Murrays dream Murray is aware that Australias multicultural society is plagued by a host of problems and issues. Therefore, he advocates a new system based on a different ideology founded on the concept of convergence. This is his word for the coveted integration or fusion of three integral streams of Australian culture The Aboriginal, the Urban and The Rural. It is in this respect, he has referred to himself as the inheritor old the Jindyworobak movement of the 1930s and 1940s, the poets of which sought assimilation of two cultures - urban and aboriginal. According to Jaslene Walia, Murray is exceptional in this triadic division, where Australian white culture is not simply (or only) opposed to aboriginal black culture , but is essentially divided against itself. His poem The Conquest captures the moment when two races face each other near what is Sydney now (guns vs spears) The Governor proffers cloth and English words, The tribesman defy him in good Dhuruwal Marines stood firm, known warriors bite their beards. According to Bill Perrett in Les Murray and the Aboriginal Way, Considering Murrays poems themselves as forms of communication, ways of seeing, the reader is drawn to contemplate not only the problem of an historical instance of the two cultures visually misconstruing each other , but also the status of the poets vision. The convergence is not a utopian vision but a formal composition of a placement, attunement and atonement in three cultures. Gaelic tone Scottish Ancestry Mythical past

India Vernacular Republic The Vernacular republic is LMs ideal state where two Boeotia and Athens come into a mutually beneficial balance albeit a balance that favours Boeotia. Gandhi Ritualistic concept Shindoism (from Japan) At once I came into a world wherein I recovered my full being Tagore. Longing for unison can be seen in the poem The Action: Turning slowly under trees, footing off the rivers linen To come into shade some waterhens were subtly Edging away to their kampongs of chomped reeds- Similar is the idea in The Buladelah Taree Holiday Song Cycle, It is good to come out after driving and walk on bare grass; Walking out, looking all around, relearning that country. Looking out for snakes, and looking out for rabbits as well; Going into the shade of myrtles to try their cupped climate, swinging by one hand around them, In that country of the Holiday.... In the words of Christopher Pollnitz, His principal technical effort is striving after large -scale unities. The Ballad of Jimmy Governor and The Conquest Murrays first success with aboriginal subjects Christopher Pollnitz. Murray embraces the continent through his family: The war is farmers and miners. Both sides own me. Kenneth Slessor sets LM above colonial poets Harpur & Kendall: touch, smell, dazzle & sounds of Australian countryside are created here for our age most sharply and truly than Harpus and Kendall ever presented them. Essence, Types. Three principles of Ezra Pound are observed. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature writes that: The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity respect, even reverence, for the pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character, down-to-earth, laconic... and based on such Bush-bred qualities as egalitarianism, practicality, straightforwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime ... and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment. The important works of LM are:

1965: The Ilex Tree (withGeoffrey Lehmann) 1972: Poems Against Economics 1974: Lunch and Counter Lunch 1977: Ethnic Radio

1982: The Vernacular Republic: Poems 19611981, Angus & Robertson; Edinburgh, Canongate; New York, Persea Books, 1982 and (enlarged and revised edition) Angus & Robertson, 1988[14] 1989: The Idyll Wheel 1996: Selected Poems, Carcanet Press 1997: Killing the Black Dog, Black Inc Publishing 2007: The Biplane Houses Macmillan:[15] Carcanet Press 2010: Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing 2011: Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp (autobiographical)[2]

Verse novels

1979: The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, Angus & Robertson, 1979, 1980 and Manchester, Carcanet, 1989[14] 1999: Fredy Neptune, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove[14]

Prose collections

1978: The Peasant Mandarin, St. Lucia, UQP[14] 1984: Persistence in Folly: Selected Prose Writings, Angus & Robertson[14] 2002: The Full Dress, An Encounter with the National Gallery of Austra