Bulletin

Issue: July 2006

News

Honour for Les Murray

'It is Les Murray's great achievement that, like Wordsworth, he has been able both to illuminate the conditions of common life and to convey the immanence of the sacred. In doing so, he has shown us the intricacies of what it can mean to be Australian at the turn of the twenty-first century.'

Chancellor Mrs Sylvia Walton presents
the award to Les Murray.

With those words by Mildura campus Head, Pro Vice- Chancellor Alan Frost, the University recently conferred the degree Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) on Australia's greatest living poet.

Professor Frost said the hallmarks of Les Murray's poetry 'are an arresting clarity of image and the everyday language in which the imagery is presented, as in this opening to his poem about Mildura'.

The ceremony was held on the Mildura campus as part of the Mildura Writers' Festival - not far from the banks of the river with which he shares his name. Dr Murray has been a regular participant in the Festival, of which La Trobe is a foundation sponsor.

Dr Murray's literary achievement has brought him wide distinction. He has many times been awarded State Premiers' literary prizes. He has three times won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry (1965, 1980, 1990), was awarded the Petrarch Prize in 1995, and the T S Eliot Prize in 1996.

In 1998, he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He is an Officer in the Order of Australia and has been elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

At the conclusion of the ceremony Dr Murray gave a public lecture, titled 'An Hour with Les Murray' as part of the Dean's Lecture Series.

He spoke about editing anthologies of Australian poets, from Ken Slessor and James McAuley to John Shaw Neilson, right back to Frank ('The Poet') McNamara, a convict at Port Arthur during the 1840s.

A highlight was Les Murray reading McNamara's best known work: The Convict's Tour to Hell, a satire on convict experiences. In this poem, he imagines his own death and descent into a Hell populated by those who tormented him on Earth - including a number of prominent NSW officials.

A section of the Festival is held on the La Trobe Mildura campus. Sessions this year, apart from the Les Murray main event, included the regional launch of the book Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays.

Ranging from the local to the global, the essays acknowledge the prominent role of members of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and display connections to place, from Bundoora to Mildura.

Associate Professor, Greg Kratzmann, led a session on another great Australian poet, the late Gwen Harwood. There was also a panel discussion about the possibility of publishing a journal or magazine dealing with the Mildura region and, more broadly, with the Murray Darling Basin. This was chaired by sociologists, Professor Peter Beilharz and Dr Trevor Hogan from the University's Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory and included Peter Rose, Ivor Indyk, and Stefano de Pieri.

Other Festival events on campus included readings by Helen Garner and Marion Halligan, and a panel session with Raimond Gaita, Barry Hill and Helen Garner dealing with Memoir: Fact and Fiction.