Author(s): Les Murray

Fiction

Fredy Neptune is a verse novel and is a major work that Murray wrote over five years. A vernacular epic, it involves the journeys of a man born on the north coast of New South Wales, a gentle, curious man of enormous physical strength who loses his ability to feel. His travels take him around the world, through Hitler's Germany, and cause him to witness some of the horrors of the Twentieth Century. The persistance of Fredy's decency is, among other things, a celebration of much that Les Murray associates with Australia.