"Never towing a line" : Les Murray, autism, and Australian literature

Abstract

Australian poet Les Murray regularly identified as autistic, and stated that his autism was a primary source of his poetry. However, Australian critics rarely consider his autism when discussing his work and, when they do, usually treat it negatively. By contrast, this thesis adopts a nuanced conception of autism, and examines its creative impact on Murray's writing. Through close analysis of a range of Murray's poems and his second verse novel Fredy Neptune, I demonstrate the centrality to Murray's writing of a number of poetic techniques which have been associated with autistic experience, and with the experience of disablement more generally. In particular, I utilise the characteristics of Jim Ferris's "crip poetics" and posit two others - "enhanced audience awareness" and "resisting erasure". I also make use of the autistic poetic techniques defined by Julia Rodas and suggest Murray's "line scan" and "cross resonance" as possible additions. Similarly, Murray's poetic topics resonate with common autistic and disabled considerations. Throughout his six-decade career he wrote of his own and his son Alexander's experiences of autism, as the cultural awareness of autism was transformed from negligible to ubiquitous. He also regularly referred to the Nazi genocide of disabled people, seeking to comprehend its implications and reverberations for his own kind. Surrounding and infusing his treatment of these concerns is a delight in disabled kinship, a simultaneously awkward and wondrous engagement with the world, and a life-long devotion to language. Murray's writing affirms the centrality of disabled authors to Australian literature, and exemplifies the importance of recognising disability as a critical category. Furthermore, since it is currently understood that the first autistic author was published in 1985, Murray's collections, beginning in 1965, extend autistic writing history by twenty years.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English