Persecution peps the muse

Rosemary Neill interviewed a certain Bunyah resident for the Weekend Australian. Here's my take.

Les Murray, word contortionist and sometime preambler, was mercilessly bullied at school, "mostly at the hands of girls who sexually humiliated him". At the same time, when he was 12, his mother died. She was "tired of living after three consecutive miscarriages". And while for a time the boy was able to suppress the notion that his mother had chosen death over him, his mind eventually yielded, causing a nine year onslaught of depression that started when he was in his late 40's.

A symptom of this was what might be called persecution awareness (I'll avoid using the word anxiety) whose source, at least from the outside, was clear. Murray had never been shy in sharing his views on issues such as feminism, multiculturalism, aboriginal reconciliation etc. -- issues on which, it is fair to say, this country's cashmere horde has a strong consensus. Whether or not he cared about the establishment's unsympathetic attitude to his conservative opinions is a story I can't tell. But at the same time as the poet was being feted by the world's literary elite, he was convinced that he was hated: "I thought I had two or three friends in the world and that I was a national pariah".

And though he's mellowed a bit now, he's still an outsider, proud to be the bush bard bucking the the cultural norms of an arts community that has adopted him, begrudgingly mostly, as an errant yet magnificently talented country cousin.

This got me thinking. Maybe Murray has been enlivened by the freedom of his place beyond the boundary. A freedom which may owe its existence, ironically enough, to his persecution as a boy and later as an opinionated adult fulminating against the Australia Council and political correctness. His views about white Australians hiding their aboriginal ancestry, for example, are intriguing. "He calls the disguising of indigenous bloodlines by whites 'the great secret, covered up'". So interested is he in the possibility of a personal ancestral connection to aboriginal Australia, he's planning to undergo genetic testing!