Leslie Allan Murray | Biography

The Australian Leslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was an outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.

Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as "Spring Hail":

...Fresh-minted hills

smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.

The paddocks were endless again, and all around

leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss.

His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that...
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