‘Nearly all deep fertile soil’: Les Murray, His Son and Autism

Abstract

‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’ is one of Les Murray’s most well-known poems. It was written in 1993, first published in 1994, and featured in his 1996 book Subhuman Redneck Poems. The poem profiles, but does not name, Murray’s and his wife Valerie Murray’s second son (fourth child) Alexander, who, at three, was medically diagnosed as autistic. Both because the poem is Murray’s portrait of his son, and because it was Alexander’s autism diagnosis that prompted Murray’s full recognition of his own autism, this poem is also inherently as much about Murray as it is about Alexander. It explores not only their relationship as parent and child, but each of their relationships with autism, and how their shared autistic love of words, movies, and portraits deepens these relationships.

‘It Allows’ represents a midpoint in Murray’s understanding of, and writing about, autism. His first poem on this topic was 1974’s ‘Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver’, where he discusses autists as a group with a culture, history and future. It was another three decades before Murray explicitly described his own experience of autism in his 2006 poem ‘The Tune on Your Mind’. In between them ‘It Allows’ presents a period of profound discovery, for both Murray and his son. This close analysis of ‘It Allows’ attends to the difficulties and delights of those discoveries, contextualising them within Murray’s life and writing.