Les Murray is “quite cheerful” about old age these days.
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The 79-year-old says he wobbles a bit when he walks and his memory is faulty.
“Gradually old age has crept upon me and said ‘I’m the real thing’,” admits Australia’s most acclaimed poet.
“We can’t go anywhere much – (my wife) Valerie’s not highly mobile and I don’t like to leave her.”
Murray spends his days “reading and writing with no arithmetic” in the family home at Bunyah, near Taree on the north coast of NSW.
He has largely abstained from public engagements after collapsing on a British speaking tour in 2017.
“I passed out on the street where cars were invited to run over me,” he recalls.
“I was in hospital for two or three days, put on a plane and flown home.”
So it is no mean feat that Murray has been coaxed out of his hinterland retreat for the 10-hour drive to the Border as an honoured guest at Thursday’s Albury-Wodonga Winter Solstice event.
Solstice stalwarts Stuart Baker and David Astle – both ardent fans of Murray’s work – travelled to Bunyah on Tuesday to accompany him on the long journey south.
For the past five years the esteemed poet has been an unofficial patron of the community event that shines a light on the dark grief of suicide and mental illness as the longest night of the year closes in.
In 2017 a special recording of his poem, Dead Trees in the Dam, was beamed across the gathering at Albury’s QEII Square.
This year Murray will read one of his poems in person and speak to those gathered about beating the black dog of depression.
The poet’s presence will add a poignancy to the event now in its sixth year, according to Mr Baker.
“Les doesn’t give many public talks and I think this will be a beautiful fit,” he says.
As for the man himself, well he believes “it is time I got up off my old age and moved around a bit”.
“I’ve been through the miseries of mental anguish and I’ve left it behind,” Murray says.
But he concedes at times it’s been a long and agonising battle – for himself and his family.
The sickness that has plagued his life first hit in his teens, triggered perhaps by the death of his mother.
“I think my condition was influenced by the early death of my mother when I was 12,” Murray muses.
“She had two miscarriages after I came along and died after considerable bleeding with the third.
“She ordered my father that I get a good education. It was a sacred trust and he fulfilled it well.”
However Murray’s father was to never recover from the loss and the boy who felt guilty for his mother’s death bore the burden of caring for his remaining parent.
The brutal bullying meted out by vicious girls during his two years at Taree High School had a further “savage impact”.
Decades later Murray admits he is still unable to face past tormentors at the inevitable funerals that crop up in town.
“They would not consent to be forgotten,” he says sadly.
Yet out of this cruel coming of age emerged a poetic genius lauded as one of Australia’s living treasures.
Murray has published 30 volumes of poetry and a memoir in the late 1990s, Killing the Black Dog, described as a courageous account of his struggle with depression.
There have been at least three prolonged periods of illness – the third attack in his fifites was a “long drawn out bloody thing”.
Murray describes how the cloud of depression would come upon him every afternoon at 4pm and linger until 8pm before striking again in the cold, dark hours from 4am.
Initially he was unable to counter the “mistaken beliefs” that accompanied his mental agony.
Through it all his beloved Valerie took care of Murray when he was in “the horrors” while raising five children.
“She was sanity itself,” Murray says.
He found medical help – and sensible advice – in a doctor at Taree.
Murray later learned the good doctor gave up psychiatry after 20 years because “it was eating him alive”.
But he left Murray with the tools to deal with his demons largely on his own.
“I found if I lay quite still and said nothing; telling myself those beliefs were just an illusion, I did not give in to its demands,” he says.
“I refused to participate in the act of making myself even sicker.”
Murray was never “tempted” to end his life.
“I was too stubborn,” he says.
“I have known people who have taken their lives.
“I recall one girl … she couldn’t agree that the world was a good place.
“I had to decide I wouldn’t give in to suicide.”
I refused to participate in the act of making myself even sicker.
- Les Murray
But Murray knows intimately “the crowded loneliness” of mental illness.
He describes it as "shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain".
Of “tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff ...”
“We can surrender to it,” he says.
“I did very early on when I didn’t know I was ill.
“It has to be resisted and denied.”
It was in his writing that Murray found a safe harbour from his sickness.
“Writing was the only thing in me I could trust,” he says.
“If I was writing well it was a sign that not everything was lost.”
Murray says you couldn’t judge from his work when he was ill.
That’s not to say he still doesn’t reflect on some of his writing and critique it as “mediocre”.
“I have to make sure I believe in it,” he says.
“There are an awful lot of poems that are still good – they still have my respect.”
It was in the work of the acclaimed poet that Albury schoolgirl Mary Baker also sought solace.
Mary suffered with an eating disorder and depression for three years before she took her life in March, 2011 at just 15 years of age.
Before she died Mary compiled an anthology of poetry, Out of the Shadows, which explored the topic of mental illness and included an analysis of one of Murray’s poems.
Stuart and Annette Baker reached out to the esteemed poet in the mind-numbing months after her death.
Murray responded with a poignant, now treasured, letter to the family.
“What a filthy, unjust thing mental illness can be, taking away a life that clearly had every reason to be happy and proud of itself!” he wrote.
It’s why Murray’s appearance in Albury on June 21 carries such significance.
The man himself is looking forward to a rare public reading of his poetry and chatting with those gathered.
At the same time he doubts he has any wisdom to offer on a topic so close to his heart – and mind.
“Oh, I’d make a mess of it … most of us do,” he chuckles.
“I mean, imagine getting your advice from someone as crazy as Murray.”
- Les Murray will join fellow presenters NRL legend Ian Roberts, cancer campaigner Samuel Johnson and author Tim Elliott at the 2018 Albury-Wodonga Winter Solstice event from 5.30pm on Thursday, June 21.
- For further details visit the Winter Solstice Facebook page.
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