‘When I was a child in the foothills of the lower north coast of New South Wales,’ Murray writes, having dealt with our rites of spring, with King Summer and with autumn (which he thinks the best time to visit Melbourne),

winter came in on the night of the first frost. On a starry night in late May or early June, earlier some years, or later if the year was a wet one, you would feel the timbers of the house tighten and hear them creak, and you would smell the coming cold in the air. Next morning, the grass outside would be stiff and smoking, and the Last pumpkins you hoped might yet mature in time would lie forlorn, the Leaves on their vines all stricken and collapsed. Long shadows were picked out in a spectral skim milk, and a faint cobwebbing Lay over the woodheap. Splinters would now hurt more, in redder fingers, and Life would be sluggish until the sun got right up out of its Low clogged Lake of faraway trees.

There follows a page or so on frost – a sinuously cadenced reflection on what it is that makes our winter, the particulars of the season as we move up and down and across the country. Frost attended to for winter, obviously; the tracking of waters in summer, the heralding of flora in spring, and of flood and agricultural shifts in autumn – concrete details spotted as if from the air and netted up into the lap of the poet as he seems to chop chop chop his way across the continent in some loving helicopter.

But this is a little misleading. Murray comes to ground often. What I’m trying to suggest is his freedom of movement, on the one hand, and his successful application of a libertarian habit of mind which can so link everything to everything else; and his rootedness, at another level, to time and place. He has travelled a lot, and he has lived alertly in a few places. Thus -and being the kind of anecdotal poet that he is -he’s able to hone in. Here he is speaking of spring, having noted that ‘very many birds nest according to the extra-calendrical laws of the Rainbow Serpent.’ Then we are told:

One bird which definitely, noticeably nests in spring and only then is the Australian magpie. Come within fifty or even a hundred yards of the tree in which it is nesting, and it will come gliding towards you, usually from behind, and explode in a banking whoosh of feathers and a vicious snap of its large sharp beak short inches from your head. Ignore the warning and come closer, and you are likely to have your scalp split open. A single magpie can put a whole suburban park off limits to humans, dogs and hawks during the weeks it is raising its clumsy earthen-coloured young to the flight stage.

Every spring when I was working at the National University in Canberra, someone was struck by a magpie among the trees of the large campus; I remember one of our librarians distraught and weeping, her hair full of blood from a long slash to the scalp. Only one person is known to have died from the attack of a magpie. An eleven-year-old boy in 1946 was unlucky enough to get tetanus from a wound to the head, and could not be saved. The magpie is a bird to watch, but with admiration and respect. It has a dauntless presence, and its song is surely one of the most beautiful anywhere. When I am overseas for long, I find myself whistling it from memory to keep my spirits up. The only other Australian bird I know which swoops bloodily on humans in defence of its young is the spurwing plover, though it has a far more hysterical mode of attack than the magpie’s silent arrowy onslaught, and its breeding season isn’t confined to the spring.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have been waiting a hundred years for the perfect description of the magpie’s flight. And you should read Murray on the way we dress, or don’t dress, with the necessary distinctions to be made between Scunge, and Tat, and Flaunt. To the urbanite this is as necessary as passages on fire, and flies, and the seeding of pine trees – all seasonally determined too. About all that’s missing, if we want to worry Murray about detail, is attention to food, the national character of which is missing, he says. Wrong, I think; and it is odd, hearing this come from a poet who has written so self-devouringly as a fat man.

Anyway, Murray’s writing has its own splendidly arrowy flight towards detail: in prose he still uses the poet’s command of specifics and delights us with what we had hitherto – only in our bones – dimly registered. Fauna, flora, an encyclopaedic knowledge of land use, myth, modern trends, signs of all sorts, these give even the sections that sound as if he might be getting tired of his commission to tackle such a book an invigorating lift. He goes out of his way to honour everything by naming.

Human festivities are named especially. Flower festivals, agricultural shows, ethnic occasions, these are embraced as pithy comment is delivered upon Cup Day or Mothers’ Day or May Day – though the last is given rather short shrift. Actually, it is with such listings that Murray places himself most clearly on the cultural map.

As a practising Catholic, he is bound to say something about the way Christian ceremonies run counter, in their roots, to the pagan sense of things. So, he notes most patriotically, if not chauvinistically, that because our seasons are upside down, this has the advantage of freeing our faith from European paganisms which were seasonally tied. Thus, with Easter, and the resurrection which in Europe led to spring, we are faced with winter, which seems to Murray ‘quite realistic’:

It could be taken as a model of life renewed after the discomforts of summer, the relief of coolness after heat, of rain after drought. That is the Easter Flood. It could accord with the curious spring-in-autumn of many native birds, animals .and plants, and more particularly the great release of dusty long-suspended life when a rainstorm touches off the petrichor cycle. That might be called the Surprise, or the Rainbow. It mirrors the shock of hope, after indifference, despair and a sort of mournful Hanrahan knowingness (We’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan in the well-known ballad) had seemed to deaden everything. The awed discovery that there’s more to the cosmos than you had thought is likewise a model of the Resurrection. Finally, there is the earthy realism of being as it were across the Red Sea, but with wilderness still ahead. Life is still to be lived to its end in this world.

This is called preaching in the right place – according to one’s lights, and yet on the site of everyone’s occupation of the same place. The book abounds also with Murray’s poems, some new, some old: extracts from the great work ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’, other poems called ‘The Grassfire Stanzas’, ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’, ‘Louvres’, ‘The Sleepout’, and the rhapsodically spiritual poem which is plainly spoken and earthed to its core, ‘Flood Plains Along the Coast Facing Asia’. Anyone who knows Murray’s work should be pleased to find the poems in this setting; anyone looking for an introduction might start here, in this poem of a book.

What the whole work does, of course, is what I have by implication been suggesting: sing the landscape. Criss-crossing the country, rising to sky level often, and falling to the ground, sinking into earth also, it is a singing of our own Dreaming. Murray speaks frequently of ‘my place’, ‘my people’ – pointing to his Hunter Valley. In his poem ‘Escaping Out There’, the poet is going inland ‘over the crest’ where he drifts ‘vaguely down valleys’ and ‘into future lives’. ‘I will make good ancestors’, he concludes, calling us out and down and about as an Aboriginal might, to another Aboriginal.

A book, then, for all seasons, past, present and future, if we have one. So fertile is it (presumptuous, even, is how some might think of Murray’s fisherman’s sweep) that further comment might start in any number of places.

One question is: what constitutes a living heritage? A key question, surely, as we get book after book published in the National Trust manner, and mediocre texts more topographically focused by the minute (Lake Pedder, the Reef, the Rainforest …), and books made of enticements to artists to get together with the writer and photographer and of course the publisher and go NORTH – the Geoffrey Dutton big one on the Kimberleys the latest lush example. These days, what with Bicentennials, and multi-media packages, and with the Japanese looking for video kits based on books, or books on them, there are megabucks in national images, and in the Sydney rock oyster cultivation of images.

Only artists of the first rank can reanimate anything as potentially moribund as a national image. Murray’s unified vision is a vital one, and this book, bless its soul, is a unifying vitalising thing, whether you are a Christian or not (I’m not). A publishing lesson might be: small is not beautiful necessarily, big is New York and medium size is right, especially if the scale is met by one mature artist. Only connect, through one pair of eyes, on one set of shoulders. Collage avoid at all costs.