Les Murray, poet, friend and mentor

-  I will miss him, his poetry, his unique outlook on life.
There will be others who will write about his life and poetry in highly academic style. They will pull his poetry apart. They will ask whether he was worthy of the TS Eliot prize, the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry and how he felt about those things. (The answer is that he never thought much about them. They weren't the poems and it was poetry that was important.) There will be doctoral theses on aspects of his work and papers written to ensure some poor academic has published something - anything - that year. Some of it will be useful perhaps. Most of it won't.  It is the poetry that matters. 
I know that because Les and I have a history. To understand that you need to go back a long way. 
I am in my mid-teens. I am with that other poet I knew so well, Judith Wright.  In age Les comes between us. He's getting a little known then - and, Judith tells me, rightly so. She's taking great pleasure in his early achievements. We are at Writers' Week. He has wandered over from another state and is not yet the literary giant he will one day be.
    "Cat, there's someone you need to meet," Judith tells me. She has been saying this on and off for the last couple of days. My head is reeling with the people she has said I need to meet. There have been the literary greats, names I knew but never expected to meet. There are people with a little writing under their belts that Judith thinks might get there one day. And there is Les. She knows he is going to get there.
     "Now this is Cat," Judith tells him. I don't expect him to be very interested - which is completely wrong of me.
     "You're Cat? I wanted to meet you. Judith gave me some of your work to read. I like it."
And that is how it started. It wasn't his writing he wanted to talk about - it was mine.
He was like that. He had no time for people who ignored those coming up behind him. That I was being mentored by Judith told him, or so he said, that I had something to say too. 
And we hit it off. I am not sure why. Our writing was very different and he achieved things I could only dream of. We sat on the steps of the tiny lecture theatre of the State Library and talked about all manner of things. At that time he wasn't important enough for us to be constantly interrupted.We parted with mutual addresses - long before email. I didn't expect to hear from him but he did send something once. I replied but briefly. There were no more letters that time. 
He went off to Europe with his family. I went off to do my teacher training and didn't see him for several years. He was back again just before I went off to London. We picked up where we had left off.
It was like that over the years.
He was a religious man and his politics didn't suit everyone. More than once I observed a heated discussion as others tried to impose their beliefs on what they thought he was saying. No, you didn't do that. Judith understood that even while she disagreed with him and, many years later, she told me, "You needed to meet each other back then. I think you still understand one another in a way I don't."
And yes, perhaps she was right. I think I know where he was coming from and where he was trying to go. Most people would have thought we had nothing in common but that first time, sitting on the steps, we shared a whole library of experience of the way  the world was for us.
He's gone but he's still there in the words - it isn't goodbye it is saying the last hello. I'll leave you with this -
  https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/murray-les/the-last-hellos-0617132