Poet Les Murray’s new book On Bunyah tells home truths

Les Murray’s new book, On Bunyah, is a celebration in verse and photographs of the place he calls home.

Author with chickens. From On Bunyah by Les Murray, published by Black Inc (160pp, $32.99 hardback).

Les Murray’s new book, On Bunyah, is a celebration in verse and photographs of the place he calls home, “a rural valley inland from the Pacific, around 300km north of Sydney’’. Bunyah, Murray writes in an introduction, “has been my refuge and home place all my life, though I did live away for 29 years’’. “It, and more generally the lower north coast of NSW, have been essential material in my verse writing for 50 years.’’

Many of the poems in On Bunyah will be familiar to readers of Murray’s work, but the accompanying photographs perhaps less so. The simple caption for each is as printed in the book.

Murray says of this poetic survey of his home: “There is little or no fiction in this book, except for the odd bits of folklore that are understood as such, and not every I is me.”

Poems and photographs extracted from On Bunyah by Les Murray, published next week by Black Inc (160pp, $32.99 hardback).

1960 BROUGHT THE ELECTRIC

Old lampblack corners

and kero-drugged spiders

turn vivid and momentary

in the new yellow glare

that has reached us at last

a lifetime after stoves

put aside the iron pans

in which the skinned koala,

pelican and echidna

were laid on the coals.

How long Grandmother still

Had to study whether boxwood

or mahogany baked longer

or hotter or better,

all that axed splinter cookery.

Now ah! the snapped dazzle

in the eyes of whatever

has fallen on the bed

and the wood cabinet streaming

ice cream and saltless meats.

DOG SKILLS

From his high seat, an owner

of cattle has sent dogs

to work a mob of Angus.

They hit the gravel running

and draft as ordered.

In the old milking days

dogs were apt to be

untrained mixed-breed biters

screamed at from the house

since cows had farmers

imprisoned, unable to go

anywhere, including field days

where expertise and the laconic

style were fostered. Where

whistling reshaped fingers

and words were one syll.

Now new breeds and skill

silence the paddocks

a murmured vowel

brings collie and kelpie flying

along the road-cutting

till each makes its leap

of judgement into the tractor tray

loose-tongued, smiling front.

BEING SPARED THE INQUESTS

A toddler’s scream —

the upward strike of a dingo,

the boy’s father running

with shouts and shovel blade.

The valley came this close

to a deadly later fame.