THE DAYLIGHT MOON A film about the poet Les Murray

A profile of Australia’s leading poet which takes a biographical route. The film opens in a small rural township 150 miles north of Sydney where Les Murray was born to a family of dairy farmers and timber cutters who arrived form Scotland in the 1840’s. It follows his journey to Sydney where he discovered a talent for verse, slept rough on Bondi golf course, married and produced a large family and eventually returned to the farm. The narrative is interspersed with dramatisations of Murray’s isolated childhood, family photographs and the poet reading his works. His poems record the journey at every stage enabling the footage of places and people to evocatively match Murray’s verse. Murray says poems often come to him like a tune and he tries to write them in his head first before settling into the typewriter and committing the words to paper with a single finger.