The Leisured Classes
Robert Wood on Les Murray
My love of the world game and of world literature exist alongside one another. 1994 stands as a remarkable year when I both fell in love with USA ’94, watching Roberto Baggio sky the ball over the cross-bar to lose on penalties, and when I began reading novels on my own. In 1998, I watched France win while visiting family in Singapore, a true testament to adolescence, eating fried kway teow in front of the big screen, watching Frank Leboeuf and Lilian Thuram defend as though their lives depended on it, which they surely did. In that year, I remember with great fondness reading J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K as I began to find my way through contemporary writers who had won ‘Big Prizes’. By 2002, when South Korea and Japan hosted the World Cup, I had started making my way through the classics, from Kharms to Camus to Coleridge. And so, football and reading have always been about leisure to me.
In thinking of how football and reading remain joined, I want to highlight how there are at least two Les Murrays in Australia, just as there are at least two ways to read the poem ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’. That the poem is in a book called Ethnic Radio only adds to the double vision, for the more famous Les Murray was not a poet, but the actual voice of ethnic radio serving as a football commentator at SBS from 1980 to 2017, including for many World Cups, and with the honour of coining the phrase ‘the world game’. Les Murray—the SBS Commentator—was emblematic of many immigrants here, a true beacon in my model minority household, a man who Anglicised his name from László Ürge after arriving as a refugee from war-torn Hungary, becoming known as the Father of Australian Football who mentored that great Socceroos Captain Craig Foster, who himself has been a consistent advocate for refugees and against racism. This Les Murray loved the world that I love.
The other Les Murray was never known as a love poet. Maybe he loved language, and maybe he loved a certain political project here, but he was no Neruda of Northern New South Wales. Ethnic Radio, the book, was, of course, written by this second Les Murray in 1977, the less famous, more notorious Les Murray, born and raised to [white] settlers here and active voice against ‘the multicultural industry’. That the two Les Murrays lived and died within a couple of years of each other seems poetic enough, but it is their contrasting ideals of leisure that matter now and what that means for the truth of ‘the nation’ as a whole.
‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ is a poem about leisure, maybe even the most well-known poem about holidays in Australia, with thirteen stanzas of varying length in rhythmic free verse that narrates a return to the country during the end of year ‘celebrations’. Murray famously composed it after reading the Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone, which belongs to the Wonguri Mandjigai people of eastern Arnhem Land, as translated by Ronald M. Berndt. That apparent note of ‘celebration’ and the question of appropriation makes it worth reflecting on, three years after the death of its author, when a little more light than heat has shone on his ample pasture. As Ben Etherington writes in Sydney Review of Books:
The Buladelah cycle is something of a litmus test of critics’ attitudes. J. M. Coetzee, who wrote on Murray for the New York Review of Books a few years ago, calls it an ‘expansive, joyous holiday-season poem’ whose use of the Moon-Bone cycle is‘a stroke of genius on Murray’s part that is also an act of homage’. Peter Garrett, Peter Goldsworthy, and Peter Craven all nominate the cycle as a highlight of his corpus. [John] Kinsella calls it ‘astonishing’ but suggests it is appropriative.’ Though he was writing in The Monthly a little before Murray’s death, it’s interesting to note that Nam Le judges the cycle ‘the seminal poem of modern Australia’ and makes no comment one way or the other about appropriation. (It’s also interesting to note that Noel Pearson calls Murray ‘the poet of my country and my people. The Australia that began more than 60,000 years ago, not just the one invented in 1788’, though he does not mention specific poems.)
Even Murray’s strongest critics see the poem as one of ‘praise’. I want to reflect on this, especially on Coetzee’s position, who comes, quite famously, from South Africa, where the 2010 FIFA World Cup took place, a place where football and politics form a unique and elemental poetry. In the course of Coetzee’s ‘The Angry Genius of Les Murray’, he calls ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ ‘celebratory’ on three separate occasions. Coetzee, like many other critics, suggests that Murray’s poem is a leisurely, fun, even ‘joyous’ paean to the holiday period, where common [white settler] people can take pride in how far they have come. Other critics have shown the political complicity in a racist national project, but it is arguable whether the poem has that celebratory tone at all, upon which so much can rise or fall, in both aesthetic and ideological terms.
If anything, ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ is an elegy, a violent lament, which we will see in a close reading of the language itself. After an innocuous opening of ‘The people’, Murray calls this place ‘the country of memorial iron’ suggesting something of a faded past, a memory and a monument to the ordinary and fallen through a quotidian image. In the second stanza, he clarifies where we are—‘Nabiac chokes in glassy wind’—which adds to the threat; ‘chokes’ here captures the reader’s attention to highlight the throat of a place, a suffocating, strangled place, which is added to with the phrase ‘fumes of fun hanging above ferns’. This foreshadows the poem’s ending, which we will come to.
Needless to say, the police are already here, for ‘crime flashes in strange windscreens’ and ‘Parasites weave quickly’ with ‘girls walking close to murder’. These phrases in stanza two come to highlight the danger that is present even, or maybe especially, on holidays in this part of the world. Using repetition throughout, we then catch sight of more threats in stanza three—‘Looking out for snakes’ and stepping ‘as if you had a gun’. The stanza ends with the line ‘the mother duck who'd run Catch Me (broken wing) I'm Fatter (broken wing), having hissed to her children’. In keeping with Murray’s well-known misogyny, we see that an innocent, maternal image is complicated by the hissing of the mother duck, the quintessential role model to her ducklings now capable of violence. We realise in stanza four that even the trees are dead amidst the ‘bone-turds’. And in stanza five, ‘the jointed soldiers pour out then, tense with acid.’ Not joyous relaxation witnessed by the poet celebrating the occasion, but one of tension following closely by ‘a lost gin bottle’; a ‘loose-slung stockwhip driving them’; and ‘devilry to the grinners under grass’. This is not an easy drink.
Almost half-way through now, the poem is settling into its rhythm of discord, which we see again in stanza six where the ‘Dogs are running around disjointedly’ with ‘confused emotions from their eyes’. ‘Humans snarl at them’ and we see their owners as ‘the impoverished dog people’. If the trees are dead, then the dogs are crazed, maddened like their owners by the situation here, no matter what the rhythmic propulsiveness suggests. After all, man and man’s best friend is unhappy here.
The violence begins to become more explicit in the stanzas that follow, for ‘they are firing hoehandle machine-guns’ and ‘the mosquitoes are always living in there; needing blood for their eggs; they feed on the membranes and ears of bats; needing blood to breed their young’. If anything, this resembles a theatre of war, especially the violence in South East Asia that was still happening at Murray’s time of writing, where disease-borne mosquitoes were more likely to cause the death of troops than many other factors. Here though, the [white] settlers are simply settling with ‘the warriors cutting timber with brash chainsaws; slashing pasture in the dinnertime sun; the warriors who have killed.’ In a pitched moment of repetition, these are warriors against the natural, against the virgin territory, against country, continuing to battle even in this holiday season. The effect is there on the trees once again, for they are ‘Abandoned’ or ‘split and rotten-elbowed’. If the insects want blood and the warriors labour, then the trees are the silent witnesses, their wood sacrificed for progress, made inanimate when once were living.
In the penultimate stanza, Murray reaches higher again, becoming frenzied almost, with the following phrases:
a white blast on the sea face; now it is burning off the mist; hovering about the casuarina needles; it abolishes the milker's munching breath; it stings a bucket here; the cicada is hanging up her sheet; darkening, boiling up and swaying on its stalks; of the dead trunks braiding water.
There verbs accumulate—‘darkening’, ‘burning’, ‘hanging’, ‘boiling’—drawing the reader into complicit embrace. In the final stanza, Murray adds a coda with Christian tones, and the word ‘hanging’ is repeated again and again, while the stanza also names the place of the Myall River. Astute readers of poetry and of history, readers like Coetzee, would, of course, know about the Myall Creek Massacre, where twenty-eight unarmed Aboriginal people were killed by [white] colonists in 1838, exactly one hundred years before Murray’s birth. After two trials and great controversy, seven of the twelve murderers were found guilty and hanged. At the very least, this is a sad tale of violence, no matter what side of the genocide debate you come down on. And so, there is something immeasurably sorrowful about the poem, a lament, a homecoming that is not a return of a prodigal son, but a mournful, violent one. There is a certain shame papered over by hollow leisure, the topsoil blown away to reveal blood on the ground. The poem may be expansive, in the sense of an expanding empire, a grab for territory, but there is precious little joyous about it. If this is a holiday, it begs the question, a holiday from what? This is leisure as warfare without a ceasefire in sight, and Murray is on the losing side. The poem is full of death and the dead, a kind of violent heraldry that permeates the language, one that builds towards an ominous ‘hanging’ at the end.
I find it strange and wrong yet unsurprising that Coetzee and other readers fail to recognise the violence in the poem. I can acknowledge the critical consensus that there are moments of joy in ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ and have not detailed them here, precisely because they can be found repeated at length elsewhere. But the willful desire to read Murray’s poem as ‘celebratory’, when it is also quite clearly haunted, threatening, and violent suggests to me that fiction matters little compared to fact, that the blinkers of race obscure any text one encounters. To do so consciously, and with the heft of the New York Review of Books and Nobel Prize behind you, avoids a truth-telling process that the poem, the critics and the nation sorely need.
‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ is not a ‘triumph’ as Coetzee would have it, but a travesty. After all, it is not that the poem or Murray tells a ‘beautiful lie’, but rather a haunting truth about a hollow world, a veneer of the quotidian and normal papering over an irredeemable fall and loss, a [white] people cast out from their homeland. It is a haunting truth about people who cannot even find their rest here and instead become violent and ‘angry’, which is a label that Coetzee did so rightly apply to Murray and that is self-evident in the language of the poem itself. What many [white] readers and [white] critics reflect in Murray then is their own raced preoccupations, spending a great deal of space genuflecting towards his appropriation of Aboriginal material, including in ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’.
On this, it might be worth noting that not every engagement with Aboriginal song texts is appropriation—if I write on Robert Parraru Churnside that could be acceptable precisely because tjabi are public, open, personal, accessible song texts that people can ask to use, that we can travel to Ieramugudu and speak with his descendent Andrew Dowding about, then return for approval from. That is not the case for Birrida Songs, which are held in communal trust and sung at Lawgrounds, which might be more easily recognised as songlines by people in other parts of ‘Australia’ where rules of engagement may be different after all. And so, Ngarluma or Wardandi or Whadjuk traditional owners cannot be easily glossed into white settler fantasties of what Aboriginal writing is or may become, just as Coetzee writing on Murray writing through ‘Aboriginality’ cannot break the cycle of its racist past and present. To project onto song texts a set of literary rules of engagement that do not line up with the rules that traditional owners themselves have of those texts is to impose a set of racist assumptions that do a disservice to the texts as well. How else do we understand the difference between homage and plagiarism, between respectful veneration and outright piracy, between ethical use and stolen land? After all, Coetzee never mentions the Myall Creek Massacre and Murray never went to Arnhem Land where the very song cycle he appropriated comes from.
Those two shortcomings seem like fatal failures in hindsight. And yet, many poets still do not travel to the places they engage with, which suggests a problem with the field itself, and which is why Stuart Cooke’s Bulu Line is just as bad, if not worse, than Murray’s own creation, which might be why Cooke can also boast of sexual conquests in the Philippines without lament, contrition or regret. This is about an intersectional understanding of colonialism and race. The poem enters a literary sector, both in university and the market, that is overwhelmingly white; its acceptance means an easier acceptance of race transgressions, of colonial violence, instead of genuine understanding that is critically aware of its structural complicity. It means someone as astute as Coetzee, author of the Booker winning Life and Times, can easily gloss the tragedy and violence here as triumph and celebration. If one does achieve best practice at the level of authorship and maybe even production, how can one encourage the right consumption? The only hope is to find audiences, in institutions and reading publics, where whiteness does not dominate in quite the same way.
We might yet find a way to enjoy our leisure, to watch and play the World Game and read world literature in this colony, that is ethical and just. For all the ink spilled on Les Murray’s ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ we might have instead listened late at night to the other Les Murray. He always called the football with a sense of compassion, purpose and good will. This is a form of leisure enjoyed by millions of people in every corner of the globe, those who can celebrate their freedom from violence, from history, and indeed, from colonial masters who would often sing songs for the death of countries that they never truly spoke for, not in their life, and certainly not in ours.
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Note—all emphasis is the author’s own. ✷
Works Cited
✷ Ben Etherington, ‘The Living and the Undead’, Sydney Review of Books, 29 April 2020.
✷ J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Angry Genius of Les Murray’, The New York Review of Books, 29 September 2011.
✷ Les Murray, ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’, Ethnic Radio, (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1977).
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.