Short Black 10: Killing the Black Dog

On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later ... at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced. What I didn't know was that I was heading home in order to go mad. Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray's frank and courageous account of his struggle with depression. Since this essay first appeared, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family's history. Murray describes how patches of daylight now balance out those of darkness in his life. Les Murray lives in Bunyah, near Taree in New South Wales. He has published some thirty books. His work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into several foreign languages.