The Three Crosses Monument in Gdansk, Poland, memorializes the shipyard workers killed on Black Thursday in 1970. While it honors those who died resisting Communism, the monument is also inscribed with a warning from \u201cYou Who Wronged,\u201d by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz: \u201cDo not feel safe. The poet remembers.\u201d With the eyes of a poet, the great Australian writer Simon Leys remembered what he saw in Mao\u2019s China. He lanced the bamboo curtain drawn over the Cultural Revolution and crossed swords with Mao apologists in the West. When he addressed the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Leys lectured on \u201cLies That Tell the Truth.\u201d With self-deprecation, he admitted that his audience would forget his remarks but urged them to remember the epigraph of his lecture, supplied by the late Australian poet Les Murray: \u201cTo think clearly in human terms you have to be impelled by a poem.\u201d Mi\u0142osz\u2019s Poland was caught between Hitler and Stalin. But in Leys\u2019s peaceful, prosperous Australia, Murray resisted the tandem enemies of memory: distance and time.<\/p>\n
The Australian poet Banjo Paterson\u2019s classic \u201cClancy of the Overflow\u201d tracks a lone stockman on a long cattle drive: \u201cClancy\u2019s gone to Queensland droving, and we don\u2019t know where he are.\u201d The bush consoles Clancy in the midst of a vast solitude in the Great South Land as \u201che sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plain extended,\/ And at night the wond\u2019rous glory of the everlasting stars.\u201d<\/p>\n
Murray works within this poetic memory stretching back to aboriginal Australia, a lineage which also includes the natural poets aboard the First Fleet:<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s boats on their first strange shore looked humble
\nbut, Mass over, men started renaming the creatures.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>(\u201cSecond Essay on Interest: The Emu\u201d)<\/p>\n
Murray\u2019s obituarists remembered him as Australia\u2019s greatest poet. Paterson, the great bush balladist, is his most formidable rival for the title. In 1895, Paterson authored the unofficial Aussie national anthem, \u201cWaltzing Matilda,\u201d and a century later Murray was asked to provide a draft preamble to the country\u2019s constitution. Paterson\u2019s \u201cMan from Snowy River\u201d holds a place in Australian memory similar to \u201cPaul Revere\u2019s Ride\u201d in New England\u2019s. Longfellow\u2019s rider raced a warning past the British. Paterson\u2019s riders are roused to rope the prized \u201ccolt from old Regret\u201d running free with the wild brumbies. A young rider, the symbol of Australia in her national adolescence, strains to keep up with a troop of leathery veterans trying to head off the horses before they reach the shelter of the hills. Approaching the climax of the poem, Paterson\u2019s old hero returns to lend a hand:<\/p>\n
So Clancy rode to wheel them\u2014he was racing on the wing
\nWhere the best and boldest riders take their place,
\nAnd he raced his stockhorse past them, and he made the ranges ring
\nWith the stockwhip, as he met them face to face.
\nThen they halted for a moment, while he swung the dreaded lash,
\nBut they saw their well-loved mountain full in view,
\nAnd they charged beneath the stockwhip with a sharp and sudden
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 dash,
\nAnd off into the mountain scrub they flew.<\/p>\n
Paterson wrote poems you can sing from memory. In \u201cKiss of the Whip,\u201d Murray helps us quietly remember:<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For ten or twelve thousand
\nyears this was the sonic barrier\u2019s
\none human fracture. Whip-cracking is that:
\nthonged lightning making the leanest thunder.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the things Murray helps us remember are so familiar that they are often forgotten. In the kitchen: \u201cone of the milder borders\/ of the just endurable\/ is the squint taste of a lemon.\u201d In the shower: \u201cthat toga\/ worn on either or both shoulders, fluted drapery, silk whispering to the tiles\/ with its spiralling frothy hem continuous round the gurgle-hole.\u201d At play: \u201clawn bowlers step down clutching their nuclei.\u201d On the page: \u201cLying back so smugly\/ phallic, the ampersand\/ in the deckchair of itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
While a student at the University of Sydney in the 1950s, Murray was fascinated by the Catholic Church\u2019s \u201cintransigent defiance of all ordinary contemporary thinking,\u201d and he converted from his family\u2019s Free Kirk Presbyterianism. In his conversion, he was preceded by James McAuley, the founder of Quadrant<\/i>, Australia\u2019s leading literary and cultural journal. McAuley was a Cold Warrior poet whose expressive pathos is best shown in \u201cPiet\u00e0.\u201d Writing after the death of his day-old newborn, McAuley preserves the only memory that he and his wife have of their sixth child:<\/p>\n
One touch, and that was all<\/p>\n
She had of you to keep.
\nClean wounds, but terrible,
\nAre those made with the Cross.<\/p>\n
Murray\u2019s faith provided him new vicarious memories pulled from the long living tradition of the Church. \u201cThe Sacrament, which it refused to water down to a mere metaphor, drew me especially,\u201d he wrote in his memoir; \u201cwithout such vertically steep walls of claim, where could we rejects go for shelter?\u201d After his son is diagnosed with autism, Murray the misfit suddenly remembers his own tics and tendencies in \u201cThe Tune on Your Mind\u201d:<\/p>\n
Asperges me hyssopo
\nthe snatch of plainsong went,
\nThou sprinklest me with hyssop
\nwas the clerical intent,
\nnot Asparagus with hiccups
\nand never autistic savant.<\/p>\n
Murray lived to see Australia\u2019s first saint canonized on his birthday. In \u201cThe Canonisation,\u201d he recalls the saintly sacrifices of his fellow Scotch-Australian:<\/p>\n
Mary MacKillop, born 1842,
\nwhat are the clergy giving you
\non my birthday, Mother Mary?<\/p>\n
Sainthood? So long after God did?
\nIndependence? But you\u2019re your own Scot.
\nThe job of Australian icon?<\/p>\n
Well yes. Black flies in the buggy.
\nBush pianos. The cheek-sawing wimple
\nin summer: you did do local penance.<\/p>\n
Murray dedicated each of his books: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam<\/i>. He wrote down his memories under the wondrous glory of the stars of the Southern Cross. He never forgot the words of another poet who composed in the shadow of the cross: \u201cLord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.\u201d Les Murray died on April 29, 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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