ABSTRACT
Tracing the idea of the plant soul from Aristotle to Aboriginal Australian cosmologies, this chapter examines the enlivened reclamation of vegetal being in the work of contemporary Australian poet, novelist, and critic Les Murray. Murray's botanically-inclined poetry interweaves the traditional knowledge of the Worimi and other Aboriginal groups of the mid-coastal areas of New South Wales with the Christian beliefs of Anglo-Australian settler culture. Murray's work demonstrates lyrical engagement with the possibility of plants as sentient, intelligent beings with souls rather than as passive automatons, aesthetic backdrops, or the mute foils of animality. A sacred ecology of plants — particularly in Murray's collection Translations from the Natural World — is grounded in an appreciation of Dreaming stories, as well as direct experience of NSW flora. The poems "Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn" and "The Gum Forest" link the potentialities of plant ensoulment to the transformations of eucalypt trees and their habitats.
