Les Murray on the advantage of rural poverty
Especially to a poet
Considered Australia’s leading poet, the “bush bard” Les Murray grew up poor in a farming community north of Sydney, which formed his poetry and his thinking about the wider world — he was very critical of “elites” — to which he returned to live when he’d become an established poet and critic. He wrote essays and criticism as well of poetry and was the literary editor of the cultural journal Quadrant. He died in 2019. Murray’s description of the effects of growing up where he did appeared in his Paris Review interview in 2005.
The interviewer notes that a reviewer of his poetry had said “that to be a farmer's son is the equivalent for a poet of being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Can you tell me what is silver, gold, and tin for a writer from a farming background?”
Gold, I guess, would be the brotherhood with fellow creatures and nonhuman entities, with the weather and the elements — a godsend if you're an only child deficient in people skills. Poetry beckoned to me from the start by its not putting humans above other subject matter. You could work on the basis that whatever subjects you wrote about, your readers would relate them to the human for you, and that wouldn't be inaccurate!
Another gold bit might have been the sheer contradiction farming represents in relation to the majority of the world. Farming’s a world where having outside employment is a curse and a thing of shame, something you resort to if the farm’s a failure. It's where stark poverty can be a thing of pride, when it's caused by hanging on to your land and your independence beyond mere reason. I was happily crippled for being an employee by where I came from. . . .
Silver might be the strong oral culture I grew up in, just before radio and TV, and the intricacies of pride and lies that went into family and ancestor worship. . . . An immense common property of black and white rural folk is what we've been learning to call “country,” an intense connection with one's home region as a resource not just of survival but of the spirit. That has probably saved my life, more than once. . . .
Tin is probably mainly the taste of being relegated and scorned, as a country bumpkin, an uncultured yahoo, all that sanctified anti-rural prejudice that goes right back to classical times and which no antidiscrimination law or postcolonial rhetoric ever protects you from.
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