Les Murray: A Friendship

A Friendship

i.m. Robert Ellis 1942–2016

Thrown out of another suburban house

in the Boarding age, I gloomily stood

reading the Vacancies pinned up in the Quad

Wanted: a roommate, alas must be male—

That had spirit, so we met in North Bondi’s

Raffles Hotel. Lismore teenager and scrag

in a twelve-hour argument, Bible Adventist

vs apprentice Catholic, we hit it off well.

The Raffles was Dutch, KLM crew layoff,

the owner, widely feared in Sydney, was one

Abe Saffron, who kept us incorrupt

in the year we spent there at movies and pool.

When his manageress evicted us for grot

he, returning from Hollywood, cast her out

in turn, and sent men to invite us back

but we had moved on to The Midnight Cowboy

(then yet to be filmed) (it’s how we lived, Murray)

back from Jedda-land, and a culture called the Push

which wasn’t a film, I dared to marry—

he declared this would destroy art in me.

A month later, the Cuba crisis, he and two friends

fled to the mountains, and came back not nuked,

all related years after in a wonderful film

called The Nostradamus Kid, spurned in Australia.

Long before, he’d scripted The Life and Times

of King O’Malley, who sold twenty years

of his soul to Parliament and Nation,

capital and rail line, then slumped in silence.

Newsfront followed, whose hero kept his soul:

masterpieces all three; his career followed on

through film and prose, as mine through rough metre

but we were friends for friendship, not rivalry.

We made an arch biopic for TV

which many loved but the ABC lost

we made a kids’ film I Own the Racecourse.

He married adorably well, and out-ventured

a Kiplingite friend on behalf of Bangla Desh

while I moved quietly home to the bush.

He was loyal to tin roofs among hosts who were not

and brought me friends among the filmed and the shot

but now our barely political yarns

are finished, even in the Jewish café

down Bondi, where last summer saw us

praising our fathers and Bill O’Reilly.

You are gone. And I had dared think

it was like when my liver went to the brink—

Low slung and wooden, you pass on your way

as I prefer all our years to one dressy day.

                                   Les Murray