When monuments fall, they create ripples, shockwaves, fragments, pyroclastic flow – pick your metaphor. Les Murray was definitely that. Over his long career, he produced more poetry, more critically well-regarded poetry, and – stranger still – more commercially profitable poetry than pretty much anyone else in the Australian landscape. Unlike the famous expatriate coterie of his peers (Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James and so forth), he did it mostly from his own paddock, without modulating his principles to fashion or his prejudices to progress. You could think of Murray as the problematic old bastard grandad some of us had, if he’d been an internationally renowned poet. Structurally rarer, Murray’s work created and sustained an entire idea or moment or myth of Australia pretty much on its own. Let’s be blunt, there just aren’t that many writers who can pull off a feat of that magnitude. Setting out to write this, I’m attempting to navigate a fair few pitfalls and some possibly irreconcilable priorities, and politics. I’m a poet working in European poetic traditions. A lot of us try to escape or elide that in a number of ways, but settler Australian poetry is European poetry written in and about the Australian continent, it always has been and it continues to be. Forms are not neutral, and these versions of poetry have philosophical and political lineages, and loyalties that are antithetical to – and hostile towards – other ways of thinking and writing, particularly towards the poetries that have been here a hell of a lot longer than we have. This isn’t virtue-signalling, whatever the hell that actually means. Take any prominent definition of the term you like, for instance Roman Jakobson’s Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality. (378) and you’ll find it riddled with binary logics that don’t have any substance in Aboriginal poetics and cosmology. It shouldn’t need stating, but just taking a different poetics and trying it on like Lawrence of Arabia’s keffiyeh, or a possum- cloak, and stitching it to some of the more mythopoeic moments of Greek myth or Judaeo-Christian theology, is also a deeply shit idea. In the Australian context, this was most famously attempted by the Jindyworobak movement of the 30s and 40s, which was mostly centred around Rex Ingamells. The name comes from the Woirurrung language from around Melbourne. It means to ‘join’, or ‘annex’ – as in Poland, 1939. Not inconsequentially, they found it in a 1929 book by James Devaney called The Vanished Tribes. Murray was proud to call himself the last of the Jindyworobaks, a problem I’ll discuss in substance below. For now, I want to emphasise the closure, the antinomy that continues to structure settler writing in Australia, in which any simple assumption of formal cadence implies and reifies colonial possession. As far as I can see, this is the deep grammar of settler writing. There is no direct or simple egress from this predicament, and anything that looks like it is selling you something that belongs to someone else. As Derrida has it: There is no sense in doing without the concepts of The stump: looking back on the Republic of Murray By Jonathan Dunk 7.Jun.19 (41 Comments) ARTICLE / OBITUARY / POETRY