Hear from writer and academic Theodore Ell, enjoy refreshments and listen to a recital on the historic Bevington organ.
Theodore Ell presents Les Murray and the Heritage of Speech, based on his new authorised biography of the Australian poet.
More than any Australian author before or since, poet and once National Living Treasure Les Murray (1938-2019) explored the imaginative richness and asserted the essential dignity of Australian English. The Australia of Murray’s mind, built from vignettes of folk memories, anecdotes, animal encounters and quirks of character, was a ‘Vernacular Republic’ that arose from everyday speech, beyond the reach of officialdom.
This talk will address Murray’s lifelong delight in ‘prospecting on the property,’ a constant search for new possibilities in Australian idioms that produced dozens of entries in the Macquarie Dictionary and literary usages of dazzling originality. The talk will also compare Murray’s work in retrieving, conserving and celebrating Australian idioms and their meanings to similar efforts by Seamus Heaney in Ireland and Derek Walcott in the Caribbean, to highlight the international resonance of Murray’s local concerns.
Afterwards, enjoy refreshments and hear a delightful recital on the historic Bevington organ.
Speaker
Theodore Ell is an Honorary Lecturer in literature at the ANU, at work on a new authorised biography of Les Murray. His essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’, about witnessing the Lebanese revolution and surviving the Beirut port explosion, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. His memoir of that period, Lebanon Days, was published in August 2024 and was Highly Commended for the 2025 ACT Book of the Year. His poetry collection Beginning in Sight shared the 2022 Anne Elder Award.
