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On Bunyah
'Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.' This updated edition of On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.
- GenresPoetry
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2015
About the author
Les Murray
79 books63 followersLeslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 3, 2020
As you might expect, the poems in this collection set on and around Bunyah, Murray's lifelong home on the lower North coast of New South Wales. They are a masterful evocation of place (both physical and social locations), concentrating "on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws." Murray locates these habitats alongside and within the wider created habitats and communities human communities nestle, shelter and stake, mine, clear and fell their claim.
They are also wondrous sketches of time – years of drought and depression, war as well as closer, more domestic conflict and chores.
Murray's language can be blunt and colloquial, delighting in retaining the rough edges of Australian rural and emigrant Scots dialects, or metaphorically and imagistically intense, without ever becoming florid. He turns insights on a single word, the almost-but-not-quite-neologism of noun enlisted to new service as adjective or rough-pressed hyphenated conjoinings.
A single turn of phrase evokes a whole physical location and social world of class and judgement in "The Disorderly", "at the shoe-wearing edge of our world"... or he turns his voice, rhyme, and even shape and spacing on the page to a kangaroo's pregnancy and the birth of a joey – miracle of vulnerability and adaptation – in "Layers of Pregnancy":
I regularly find myself reading his poems out loud from sheer pleasure and they do linger.
Genius.
They are also wondrous sketches of time – years of drought and depression, war as well as closer, more domestic conflict and chores.
Murray's language can be blunt and colloquial, delighting in retaining the rough edges of Australian rural and emigrant Scots dialects, or metaphorically and imagistically intense, without ever becoming florid. He turns insights on a single word, the almost-but-not-quite-neologism of noun enlisted to new service as adjective or rough-pressed hyphenated conjoinings.
A single turn of phrase evokes a whole physical location and social world of class and judgement in "The Disorderly", "at the shoe-wearing edge of our world"... or he turns his voice, rhyme, and even shape and spacing on the page to a kangaroo's pregnancy and the birth of a joey – miracle of vulnerability and adaptation – in "Layers of Pregnancy":
Under eagle worlds each fixed in place
it is to kangaroo all fragrant space
to feed between long feet to hop
fom short to ungrazed sweet to stop
there whittling it down between eyed knees
cocked to propel away through shadow trees
as Rain the father scented ahead through time
greens into motherhood expels a blood-clot to climb
wet womb to womb of fur
and implants another in the ruby wall.
I regularly find myself reading his poems out loud from sheer pleasure and they do linger.
Genius.
June 15, 2019
When I first started reading this collection of Les Murray's poems, he was still alive. Now, Les has gone to what we hope is peaceful rest among the eternal verses of the poets.
As is often the case, poems here can be blunt, even, on one level, crass. Even there we know he is trying to portray something significant. He has the habit of making the ordinary-all-around-us stuff of our days appear to be sublimely beautiful or totally moving. A poignant pause on a tragic tale may be followed by an earthy, comic one. So too it can be with life.
If you have enjoyed Murray's poetry you will probably enjoy 'On Bunyah'. If you are new to his poems, this book is a good gateway into his way with words.
As is often the case, poems here can be blunt, even, on one level, crass. Even there we know he is trying to portray something significant. He has the habit of making the ordinary-all-around-us stuff of our days appear to be sublimely beautiful or totally moving. A poignant pause on a tragic tale may be followed by an earthy, comic one. So too it can be with life.
If you have enjoyed Murray's poetry you will probably enjoy 'On Bunyah'. If you are new to his poems, this book is a good gateway into his way with words.
October 31, 2020
I cannot tell whether I enjoyed this book or not. On one hand, the poetry was expertly crafted, punctuated with excellent turns of phrase. On the other hand, the subject matter was - to me, at least - extremely dull. It felt finite and unspectacular. Perhaps that was the point? Either way, I'd like to explore Murray's work outside of rural Australian tableaux.
September 22, 2017
An amazing collection, enhanced by photos and the grouping of these words. Some great pieces about a particular place (and time) that manage to speak to small, rural places beyond just the aim of evocation here.
November 3, 2015
I've read most of these poems before, in their original collections, but it was nice to see them re-assembled here, with a history and landscape focus, and interspersed with photos of family and (often) deserted farmhouses. Les Murray still might win the Nobel Prize some day!
October 7, 2015
Les Murray's gaze is focused in on his home on Bunyah in this collection. Reading it takes me to my own small-town childhood and the collected flaws,wisdom, lore of that place. These are beautiful poems of a very real place in time. I will read and re-read!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews