The Murray Talk 2025
Time and Wonder
By Ivor Indyk
The following is an excerpt. The full essay was published in HEAT 21, available here.
In a series called ‘The Murray Talk’, it is fitting that I begin with a tribute to Les Murray, who was until his passing the presiding deity of this festival, and is likely still present in this capacity in your memories as he is in mine, down early to breakfast and still there after most of the guests had gone, a Buddha-like figure, eager for conversation and fellowship.
My own more personal memory of Les is of the morning he arrived at my place in Artarmon, near his city home in Chatswood on Sydney’s lower north shore, with a box of fresh, brightly coloured fruit and vegetables that he had grown – or said he had grown – and wished to give to me as a present. I had arranged to interview him for a program to be broadcast on ABC radio on ‘fathers and writers’. There would be two other writers who had written powerfully of their fathers, though less fondly than Les: Helen Garner and Fay Zwicky. Perhaps Les was hoping to disarm me in advance, but what I remember most is the spontaneous generosity of his gift of vegetables, the details of which remain in my mind to this day, and the sense of innocence and wonder that the gift conveyed to me.
My lecture is titled ‘Time and Wonder’, so it is natural to turn to Murray in this context – he is one of the great poets of wonder in our literature. He also liked to sermonise, about wonder and its enemies, and in this respect is also one of its keenest theorists.
Murray’s poem ‘First Essay on Interest’ begins with a detailed description of the physiology of wonder, and in particular, the sudden capturing and expansion of one’s attention which is characteristic of the state. He calls this state of mind ‘interest’, in recognition of the fact that the whole of one’s interest, all of one’s attention, is caught up in wonder; at the same time, he is careful to distinguish this interest, which comes unbidden, from that other kind of interest, which is based on calculation, and is all about making money:
Not usury, but interest. The cup slowed in mid-raise,
the short whistle, hum, the little forwards shift
mark our intake of that non-physical breath
which the lungs mimic sharply, to cancel the gap in pressure
left by our self vanishing into its own alert –
It’s a very homely scene, the poet struck with wonder while taking a cup of tea (other Australian writers of his generation preferred stronger stimulants), and it is typical of Murray to insist on the ordinariness of the detail or situation that causes the alert – he describes the wondrous element as ‘the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common,/ not postmarked divine’. So he takes the minute disturbances in the attention of an eagle, a creature known for its intense focus, to illustrate the sudden capture of wonder – ‘even her gaze may tilt left, askance, aloof, right,/ fixing a still unknown. Delaying huge flight.’ Murray’s keen perception of the behaviour of birds is itself, for us, a source of wonder, as is the play of his language:
This is interest, that blinks our interests out
and alone permits their survival, by relieving
us of their gravity, for a timeless moment;
that centres where it points, and points to centring
that centres us where it points, and reflects our centre.
Murray’s companion poem on the subject, ‘Second Essay on Interest’, is less about the state of wonder, than the kind of object that might elicit wonder. Here, it is that strange Australian bird the emu – and in capturing the strangeness of the bird, it is clear that Les is also making a claim for the poetic imagination as a source of wonder in itself.
Weathered blond as a grass tree, a huge Beatles haircut
raises an alert periscope and stares out
over scrub. Her large olivine eggs click
oilily together: her lips of noble plastic
clamped in their expression, her head-fluff a stripe
worn Mohawk style, she bubbles her pale-blue windpipe
the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae…
There is always something comical or awkward about Murray’s depiction of wonder, as here, with the emu’s extendable neck emerging first, like a periscope, from its nest, and then the proliferation of metaphors building up the details and heightening their incongruity, until at last the bird emerges, in a dramatic climax, in all its strangeness – wait for the climax – ‘the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae’.
Then, from the otherworld of Murray’s imagination, there is this wonderful image, created when one of the metaphors paraded in the poem suddenly turns literal:
Rubberneck, stepped sister, I see your eye on our jeep’s load.
I think your story is, when you were offered
the hand of evolution, you gulped it. Forefinger and thumb
project from your face, but the weighing palm is inside you
collecting the bottletops, nails, wet cement that you famously swallow,
your passing muffled show, your serially private museum.
I imagine the private museum evoked by association here is a country museum, thus confirming the emu’s status as a vernacular icon, though this is implicit anyway in its accretive habits, that mastery of the makeshift and the improvised, which is a characteristic of the Australian provincial outlook, and indeed Murray’s own poetic craft.
It is worth stressing the provincial nature of Murray’s portrayal of wonder – he was happy to characterise himself as the subhuman redneck poet after all – not only in the nature of his subjects and their comic elaborations, but in his portrayal of the poet himself – not foolish or ignorant (the opposite in fact, he does not miss an opportunity to parade his knowledge), but clumsy, innocent, awkward in his enthusiasms. Indeed we usually think of the capacity for wonder as one of the defining characteristics of the provincial outlook, especially when set against the metropolitan – that picaresque moment, when the country person is caught speechless and wide-eyed at the busyness of the city, amazed at the strange behaviour of its inhabitants, fascinated by appearances. This is ‘the gaze of wonderment’, lit by the blue glare of the tram wires, that absorbed Murray on his first visits to Newcastle, ‘big smoke to a four-year-old from the green sticks’.
‘Today, out walking, I considered stones’, Murray announces in ‘Evening Alone at Bunyah’, a poem which celebrates his return home from the cities of the world, ‘It used to be said that I must know each one/ on the road by its first name, I was such a dawdler,/ such a head-down starer.’ Along with the self-deprecating comic aspect of wonder, there goes another expansive aspect, which builds out from the closely observed local detail to the wider world beyond. This expansion is integral to our understanding of wonder, as not just an attentive state, but one which is absorbed by the immense perspectives opened by the detail which has captured its attention. Murray has many poems that begin with an ordinary object and build from there a large statement of cultural value, or an expanded vision – shorts, louvres, broad beans, cattle, the bed, the shower, the ferry, fishermen, mudflats, a piece of farm equipment. In ‘The Quality of Sprawl’ Murray has a phrase which really captures the paradoxical focus and expansion of the provincial point of view: ‘It is the rococo of being your own still centre.’
In ‘Second Essay on Interest’, as across his whole oeuvre, it is Murray’s use of metaphor which transforms one thing into many things, pushing the expansion to encyclopaedic proportions. In ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’ the stalks that bear the beans become a congregation of sceptics, a parade of air force recruits, a party of drunks, then a forest, where the beans themselves multiply alarmingly – ‘ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,/ thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,/ beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,// beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers…’; and multiply again, ‘like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,// like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string/ and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,/ the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers’; until, just when you think there can’t be more, there is yet another metaphor, ‘you vow to pick them all/ even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.’
In ‘The Craze Field’, the pads of cracked mud left behind in the dried-up watercourse as the legacy of drought offer up eighteen analogies in the first eighteen lines, and as many again in the second half of the poem. This is an extraordinary proliferation for something that is, to all appearances, devoid of life. Murray’s metaphors invoke hell and the underworld, go way back to the origins of civilisation and the primal conditions of creation, and then forward, from ‘palates of drought-stilled assonance’ to ‘the invention of networks’, from ‘shrivelled viscose’ to ‘mineral matzoh’, from ‘primal tissue’ to ‘palimpsest’…
In a series called ‘The Murray Talk’, it is fitting that I begin with a tribute to Les Murray, who was until his passing the presiding deity of this festival, and is likely still present in this capacity in your memories as he is in mine, down early to breakfast and still there after most of the guests had gone, a Buddha-like figure, eager for conversation and fellowship.
My own more personal memory of Les is of the morning he arrived at my place in Artarmon, near his city home in Chatswood on Sydney’s lower north shore, with a box of fresh, brightly coloured fruit and vegetables that he had grown – or said he had grown – and wished to give to me as a present. I had arranged to interview him for a program to be broadcast on ABC radio on ‘fathers and writers’. There would be two other writers who had written powerfully of their fathers, though less fondly than Les: Helen Garner and Fay Zwicky. Perhaps Les was hoping to disarm me in advance, but what I remember most is the spontaneous generosity of his gift of vegetables, the details of which remain in my mind to this day, and the sense of innocence and wonder that the gift conveyed to me.
My lecture is titled ‘Time and Wonder’, so it is natural to turn to Murray in this context – he is one of the great poets of wonder in our literature. He also liked to sermonise, about wonder and its enemies, and in this respect is also one of its keenest theorists.
Murray’s poem ‘First Essay on Interest’ begins with a detailed description of the physiology of wonder, and in particular, the sudden capturing and expansion of one’s attention which is characteristic of the state. He calls this state of mind ‘interest’, in recognition of the fact that the whole of one’s interest, all of one’s attention, is caught up in wonder; at the same time, he is careful to distinguish this interest, which comes unbidden, from that other kind of interest, which is based on calculation, and is all about making money:
Not usury, but interest. The cup slowed in mid-raise,
the short whistle, hum, the little forwards shift
mark our intake of that non-physical breath
which the lungs mimic sharply, to cancel the gap in pressure
left by our self vanishing into its own alert –
It’s a very homely scene, the poet struck with wonder while taking a cup of tea (other Australian writers of his generation preferred stronger stimulants), and it is typical of Murray to insist on the ordinariness of the detail or situation that causes the alert – he describes the wondrous element as ‘the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common,/ not postmarked divine’. So he takes the minute disturbances in the attention of an eagle, a creature known for its intense focus, to illustrate the sudden capture of wonder – ‘even her gaze may tilt left, askance, aloof, right,/ fixing a still unknown. Delaying huge flight.’ Murray’s keen perception of the behaviour of birds is itself, for us, a source of wonder, as is the play of his language:
This is interest, that blinks our interests out
and alone permits their survival, by relieving
us of their gravity, for a timeless moment;
that centres where it points, and points to centring
that centres us where it points, and reflects our centre.
Murray’s companion poem on the subject, ‘Second Essay on Interest’, is less about the state of wonder, than the kind of object that might elicit wonder. Here, it is that strange Australian bird the emu – and in capturing the strangeness of the bird, it is clear that Les is also making a claim for the poetic imagination as a source of wonder in itself.
Weathered blond as a grass tree, a huge Beatles haircut
raises an alert periscope and stares out
over scrub. Her large olivine eggs click
oilily together: her lips of noble plastic
clamped in their expression, her head-fluff a stripe
worn Mohawk style, she bubbles her pale-blue windpipe
the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae…
There is always something comical or awkward about Murray’s depiction of wonder, as here, with the emu’s extendable neck emerging first, like a periscope, from its nest, and then the proliferation of metaphors building up the details and heightening their incongruity, until at last the bird emerges, in a dramatic climax, in all its strangeness – wait for the climax – ‘the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae’.
Then, from the otherworld of Murray’s imagination, there is this wonderful image, created when one of the metaphors paraded in the poem suddenly turns literal:
Rubberneck, stepped sister, I see your eye on our jeep’s load.
I think your story is, when you were offered
the hand of evolution, you gulped it. Forefinger and thumb
project from your face, but the weighing palm is inside you
collecting the bottletops, nails, wet cement that you famously swallow,
your passing muffled show, your serially private museum.
I imagine the private museum evoked by association here is a country museum, thus confirming the emu’s status as a vernacular icon, though this is implicit anyway in its accretive habits, that mastery of the makeshift and the improvised, which is a characteristic of the Australian provincial outlook, and indeed Murray’s own poetic craft.
It is worth stressing the provincial nature of Murray’s portrayal of wonder – he was happy to characterise himself as the subhuman redneck poet after all – not only in the nature of his subjects and their comic elaborations, but in his portrayal of the poet himself – not foolish or ignorant (the opposite in fact, he does not miss an opportunity to parade his knowledge), but clumsy, innocent, awkward in his enthusiasms. Indeed we usually think of the capacity for wonder as one of the defining characteristics of the provincial outlook, especially when set against the metropolitan – that picaresque moment, when the country person is caught speechless and wide-eyed at the busyness of the city, amazed at the strange behaviour of its inhabitants, fascinated by appearances. This is ‘the gaze of wonderment’, lit by the blue glare of the tram wires, that absorbed Murray on his first visits to Newcastle, ‘big smoke to a four-year-old from the green sticks’.
‘Today, out walking, I considered stones’, Murray announces in ‘Evening Alone at Bunyah’, a poem which celebrates his return home from the cities of the world, ‘It used to be said that I must know each one/ on the road by its first name, I was such a dawdler,/ such a head-down starer.’ Along with the self-deprecating comic aspect of wonder, there goes another expansive aspect, which builds out from the closely observed local detail to the wider world beyond. This expansion is integral to our understanding of wonder, as not just an attentive state, but one which is absorbed by the immense perspectives opened by the detail which has captured its attention. Murray has many poems that begin with an ordinary object and build from there a large statement of cultural value, or an expanded vision – shorts, louvres, broad beans, cattle, the bed, the shower, the ferry, fishermen, mudflats, a piece of farm equipment. In ‘The Quality of Sprawl’ Murray has a phrase which really captures the paradoxical focus and expansion of the provincial point of view: ‘It is the rococo of being your own still centre.’
In ‘Second Essay on Interest’, as across his whole oeuvre, it is Murray’s use of metaphor which transforms one thing into many things, pushing the expansion to encyclopaedic proportions. In ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’ the stalks that bear the beans become a congregation of sceptics, a parade of air force recruits, a party of drunks, then a forest, where the beans themselves multiply alarmingly – ‘ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,/ thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,/ beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,// beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers…’; and multiply again, ‘like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,// like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string/ and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,/ the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers’; until, just when you think there can’t be more, there is yet another metaphor, ‘you vow to pick them all/ even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.’
In ‘The Craze Field’, the pads of cracked mud left behind in the dried-up watercourse as the legacy of drought offer up eighteen analogies in the first eighteen lines, and as many again in the second half of the poem. This is an extraordinary proliferation for something that is, to all appearances, devoid of life. Murray’s metaphors invoke hell and the underworld, go way back to the origins of civilisation and the primal conditions of creation, and then forward, from ‘palates of drought-stilled assonance’ to ‘the invention of networks’, from ‘shrivelled viscose’ to ‘mineral matzoh’, from ‘primal tissue’ to ‘palimpsest’…
