Hello, I'm Cresti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolli.

My castaway this week is a poet born 60 years ago in the Australian Outback.

He's the only son of a farmer who forgot how to read and a mother who died when he was a boy because the doctor refused an ambulance to get her to hospital.

After university and a few years drifting he became a full-time poet and has earned his living ever since with his poems about nature.

The aborigines, spacemen, broad beans, everything in fact he says that models the way we really think.

Deeply Catholic, prone to depression but above all an Australian deeply rooted in his native land he is today regarded as one of the greatest living exponents of the poetic strength of the English language.

He is Les Murray.

The facts which altogether Les make you sound like a very serious person, a VSP, when in fact you're also full of humour.

I was ordered to be so, I stood there beside myself, watching myself.

But let's, you know, I think we should start by asking you to read a poem that displays that kind of humour and you've written one called the Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever.

So just for flavour, give us a sample.

I'll give you a sample from that.

To go home and wear shorts forever in the enormous paddocks in that warm climate, adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass.

To camp out along the river bends for good, wearing shorts with a pocket knife, a fishing line and matches.

Or there where the hills are all down below the plain, to sit around in shorts at evening on the plank veranda.

If the cardinal points of costume are robes, tat, rig and scunge, we're assured in this compass.

They are never robes as other bare leg outfits have been, the toga, the kilt, the lava lava, the Mahatmas cotton doti.

Archbishops and field marshals that their ceremonies never wear shorts.

The very word means underpants in North America.

So it goes on for another eleven stanzas. But scunge, it's a great word.

What does it mean? It means that kind of clothes that are so casual you don't notice you got them on.

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