Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001

The Prodigal Prodigy

By Al Alvarez
Learning Human: Selected Poems
Les Murray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 230 pp., $27.00

There was a time when Australian artists with something new to say packed their bags, left the country, and didn't return until they had made their reputations in more sympathetic surroundings. During the early Sixties, for example, most of Australia's best painters were working in London: Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, Colin Lanceley, Brett Whitely, Lawrence Daws, John Perceval. Also in town were the young Robert Hughes, the poet Peter Porter, and Barry Humphries, Australia's own megastar in the making.



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