The Les Murray of our imaginations: Darwin to Mumbai

This article sees paired Australian and Indian poets, Adelle Sefton-Rowston and Sunil Sharma, come together to compare their home cities from different locations and sensibilities. Adelle writes of Darwin – a small tropical city in Northern Australia – while Sunil captures the cultural context of developing Mumbai. The authors offer a discursive exchange, trying to locate similar struggles and concerns about the cities they each live in, and contrasting their different demographics and lifestyles as a common poetical province. Both Australia and India share a legacy of colonisation and its associated violences. Yet the experiences of coloniser and colonised are very different. How do two different poets from either country and positions of racial power find an interconnected space to openly share their contemporary experiences of place and belonging? What are the more nuanced survival tactics associated with belonging to each place? Darwin and Mumbai converge in this duoethnography, as poets explore the symmetries of life in this unique literary project pinned together through a global poet. Serendipitously the pair share a common transnational bond through Les Murray’s work, as Adelle creates a conceptual mosaic from the late author’s words, describing her home, while Sunil reflects on his own personal encounter with Murray some years ago.