'The timber is to carry'

 'It's my mission,' wrote Les Murray, 'to irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people, by being a paradox that they can't assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems.' Murray was happy to play the part of unrepentant ocker*, fat, shorts-wearing, plain-spoken, born into absolute poverty, educated largely by his own efforts – and he was determined to created a new Australian poetry not from the offcuts of British or European culture but from what was uniquely and distinctively Australian: the Bush, Murray's own country. He was of course a highly cultivated poet, with a vast vocabulary, well versed in the British and European traditions – indeed he was for some years a professional translator – but that was just another element in the Murray paradox. Another, perhaps, was that he was a devout and observant Catholic (he converted when he married his Budapest-born wife). Last night, browsing in the Selected Poems, I came across this moving little poem, written to mark the conversion to Catholicism of the poet Kenneth Hart. (It begins by recalling an incident at the brutal Moreton Bay penal colony, and the overseer 'who later died' was probably the notoriously harsh commandant, Captain Patrick Logan, who was killed in a skirmish with Aborigines in 1830.)

New Moreton Bay

A grog-primed overseer, who later died,
Snapped at twenty convicts gasping in a line
That pole ain't heavy! Two men stand aside!
And then two more, and you, pop-eyes! And you!
– until the dozen left, with a terrible cry,
broke and were broken
beneath the tons of logs they had stemmed aloft desperately.

Because there is no peace in this world's peace
the timber is to carry. Many hands heave customarily,
some step aside, detained by the Happiness Police
or despair's boutiques; it is a continual sway – 
but when grace and intent
recruit a fresh shoulder, then we're in the other testament
and the innocent wood lifts line-long, with its leaves and libraries.

* An ocker is defined as 'a rough, uncultivated Australian man' – though of course Murray was very far from uncultivated.