Over half a century’s writing, Les Murray has become not only the major poet in Australian culture, but also one of the most distinctive poets writing in the English language. Translated now into several other languages, he holds an international reputation. Yet his work is deeply rooted in the locality where he has always lived and worked, a poet of the “vernacular republic”, the title of his 1985 selection.

It was on a dairy farm in Bunyah in a forestry and farming district of New South Wales that Murray was brought up, where he learned about the natural world and, even at his local school, about the unnaturalness of a wider world, about harshness and vulnerability — not least his own. When his poems get declarative, polemical, he’s urging recognition of those vulnerabilities, calling up the particularity and dignity of an individual.

In 1992 he edited a selection of the popular Australian AB “Banjo” Paterson’s verse, and his introduction discerns there “a presentation of the pastoral spirit at its most generous [and] a sharp repudiation of injustice and meanness, but this sharpness never becomes dominant. We are more conscious nowadays of how every human spirit has its dark and hidden sides, but Paterson rarely stresses these and never lets them defeat us.” What Murray sees in Paterson is getting close to home, as it is when he suggests that Paterson’s verse can “step at times across even the grimmest of class-barriers of all: that which divides educated Australia from everything rural or pastoral”.

• Tags: Australia, Issue 15, Les Murray, Michael Freeman