Canonizing Murray: How 'The Broad Bean Sermon' Embodies Australia's Unresolved Literary Settlement
Original framing: “Australian poetry classics: Les Murray’s The Broad Bean Sermon is inexhaustible food for contemplation” — The Conversation - Global
The poem's speaker claims 'the ground's / own tongue' through the broad bean's growth, a classic settler move: the land speaks English, in iambics, through a European crop. Indigenous knowledge systems — where plants are kin, not commodities, and 'sermons' are delivered by Elders on Country, not by poets in study — are erased by this pastoral fantasy. The Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay peoples on whose lands Murray grew up (Bundjalung and Ngunnawal Country) have bean-like native legumes (glycine, hardenbergia) with their own songlines; the broad bean (Vicia faba) is a colonial import. Murray's 'inexhaustible' contemplation depends on the exhaustion of Indigenous foodways and the silencing of the languages that named this continent's flora for millennia.
Les Murray's 'The Broad Bean Sermon' functions as a sacramental title deed: through the mock-sermon's linguistic virtuosity, the poem performs the settler's conversion of stolen Country into 'Australian literature.
' The Conversation's uncritical celebration reproduces the institutional machinery — prizes, syllabi, 'classics' series — that anointed Murray as the continent's singular voice while First Nations song-poetry (65,000 years continuous) and migrant multilingual poetries were classified as 'special interest.' The trickster reading reveals the poem's own irony: it knows it's a fraud, a broad bean pretending to be the land's 'own tongue.' But the institution reads it straight, because the fraud *is* the foundation. A systemic correction doesn't cancel Murray; it contextualizes him as the Hermes of Australian letters — the god who stole the cattle, invented the lyre, and convinced the academy the music was always his. The solution pathways converge on one structural shift: transfer the power to curate 'the classic' from the gatekeepers who benefited from the theft to the communities from whom the land, the language, and the metaphor were taken.