Vale Les Murray –– The Bard of Bunya

Jane Gleeson--White

Following the death of poet Les Murray on Monday I’ve been recalling an afternoon I spent with him sitting on the edge of the pier at Walsh Bay talking about poetry and life, his obsession with words, his bouts of depression, his experience of ‘erocide’ and abhorrence of mobs. We met up after a session at the 2005 Sydney Writers’ Festival so I could interview him for Good Reading magazine, but our conversation ranged far and wide until the sun was low in the sky, well beyond the assigned hour. He was on song, ebullient, overflowing with words.

Here’s the story I wrote for Good Reading, August 2005.

Read More at

https://www.janegleesonwhite.com/new-blog/2019/4/30/vale-les-murray-the-bard-of-bunyah-valley

Les Murray and Frank the Poet

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell. Before any terrestrial cities existed in Australia, the convict poet Francis McNamara describes a tour he was given through the infernal one. This jaunty Dantesquerie, dating from 1839, forms the high point of a set of poems that came out of a personal crisis in the last years of that decade.

All are fresher, more varied and more adventurous than the Irish ballads he mainly created' before and afterwards, though the latter can be very moving when sung according to contemporary tunes. They are often credited as the foundation of Australian bush balladry, which is still practised and loved in the bush, though its forms, its subjects and even its attitudes tend to be set in concrete.

Although McNamara always claimed to be a native of Cashel, in County Tipperary, at his trial in Kilkenny in 1832 for stealing a plaid he was described as coming from Wicklow. He was literate and had no previous convictions, but he drew seven years' transportation, and sailed from Cork on the Eliza on 10 May that same year. Arriving in Sydney in September, he would have gone straight to the large Hyde Park Barracks, which still exists under its later designation of the Mint in Macquarie Street.

In his contemporary Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, James Backhouse reports that: One of the officers who had been there [at the Barracks] only about fifteen months, said, that upwards of one thousand men had been flogged in the course of that period. He stated his opinion to be, that how much soever men may dread flagellation, when they have not been subjected to it, they are generally degraded in their own esteem and become reckless after its infliction.

This, we have found to be a very prevailing opinion in the Colony. McNamara was flogged no less than fourteen times over the next eight years, receiving a total of six hundred and fifty lashes. His witty rebellious attitudes also brought him spells in solitary, three months on the treadmill and repeated bouts of hard labour on the gangs made to work in leg irons. It is a near miracle that his turning-the-tables poem “A Convict's Tour to Hell” is so lightly done, free from sadism or rage.

By early 1838, McNamara had been assigned as a shepherd to the Scottish-owned Australian Agricultural Company, still remembered as the A.A. Co. This firm was set up in 1824 to cultivate the frontiers of settlement. The Peel River, on which the Country and Western music capital of Tamworth now stands, was then far out on the very edge, in Kamilaroi tribal country, but loneliness and the off-chance of a spear probably seemed a good bargain when compared with what the poet had endured.

In October 1839, however, he was reassigned, to the Company's coal mines in Newcastle, where men worked naked underground in choking heat and lung-destroying dust. At this, he absconded, and was recaptured with a band of runaways, some of them carrying firearms. This could have got then he was sentenced to the awful Secondary Punishment Station at Port Arthur, in Van Diemen's Land, where the intent was to break the recalcitrant, not reform them.

There, you could be flogged for not giving your towel to the laundry to be washed, or having a crust of bread in your clothes. Van Diemen's Land seems to have subdued the poet, though it didn't stop him making further rebel ballads for his mates to memorise and sing.

Released in 1857, a year after the island colony's name was changed to Tasmania, the poet wandered back to New South Wales and thence into obscurity, with only odd sightings of him over the next two decades. The curious gallimaufry of Irish stereotypes titled “A Dialogue Between Two Hibernians in Botany Bay” was the only work by McNamara to appear in print in his lifetime, in the Sydney Gazette of 8 February 1840.

Doubts have been expressed as to its authenticity, but some believe it is a set of coded messages for Whiteboys and Ribbon Men, members of Irish secret societies opposed to English rule and to the exactions of the Protestant Church of Ireland in the period after Catholic emancipation. McNamara may have been involved in this movement, and it is known that passwords in it were deliberately clownish and ridiculous. The rest of his work was carried in memory until 1861, when he wrote out the best of it in fine copperplate in a home-made book for the Calf family, of Windeyer near Mudgee.

Some of his balladry was collected later in the nineteenth century as folk material, and only ascribed to him after careful detective work. McNamara may have been bilingual, and connected in some way with the McNamara bards of County Clare; he is clearly aware of Irish-language models and alludes to some of them, notably in the emblem of refusal in “For the Company Underground”. He also seems to have admired Burns and Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, among English-language poets. His practice as a poet closely mirrors that of the hedge-poets of penal times, and he is the only poet whose work conies down to us  it from within the convict system as it existed in Australia, though its quality ranges far beyond the merely documentary.

Les Murray was a great admirer of the convict poet Francis MacNamara

In 2013 eagerly Les joined the ABC team who researched and broadcast Frank the Poet: A convict's tour to hell

Download the audio program using the link below

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/hindsight/frank-the-poet/4432142

Les was especially pleased when this program was broadcast in Ireland returning Frank to his birthplace at last:

This Tipperary man's songs and poems were spread throughout convict Australia by his fellow prisoners - Today a new generation of musicians regard him as giving Australia a tradition akin to the Mississippi blues.

https://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/2013/0314/647370-podcast-radio-documentary-frank-macnamara-the-poet-convict-australia/