The Harleys - Analysis

Noise as a kind of conquest

Les Murray opens by making sound feel physical and aggressive: Blats booted turn into blatant / dubbing that makes the avenue dire. The bikes don’t simply pass through the street; they overwrite it, as if volume were a way of owning public space. That verb dubbing is telling: the riders lay a new soundtrack over the city’s ordinary life, and the poem’s first mood is both comic and threatening, like a parade that doesn’t ask permission.

Beards, sagas, and the joke of masculinity

The biker pack is mythologized, but in an oddly childish way. Murray names leaders like Sveinn Forkbeard, and adds Moe Snow-Whitebeard and Possum Brushbeard—a mash-up of Viking saga, fairy-tale dwarf, and backyard Australia. The effect is double-edged: the riders are inflated into raiders leading a black squall, yet the beard-nicknames also shrink them into costume. The poem’s central tension starts here: it can’t decide whether these men are genuinely formidable or simply playing at menace.

Santas from Hell: festivity turned predatory

That tension sharpens when the group becomes Santas from Hell. Santa suggests generosity, ritual, and cheer; hell suggests punishment and threat. The women appear as their ladies, and later as woman-clung, which makes the scene feel both erotic and possessive, as if the riders are performing not just speed but dominance. Even faces become clenched: sphincter-lipped is a brutally comic detail, a way of saying the riders are tightly sealed, emotionally and physically, while gunning implies constant readiness to escalate.

A shoal of bodies: menace that is also grace

Midway, the poem surprises by giving the pack a kind of beauty. They are massed in leather muscle, but also tautness stable / in fluency. Murray compares them to a whole shoal leaning, a fish-image that turns this gang into coordinated nature, something instinctive and seamless. The phrase fast streetscape dwindling makes the city recede like scenery in a film: the riders become the true subject, the street merely a backdrop. So the poem doesn’t just mock; it also watches, almost impressed, as the group holds a dangerous elegance.

Outside the law, outside the self

Repeatedly, the riders are positioned on edges: all riding astride, on the outside. That outside suggests outlaw identity, but it also hints at emptiness—being outside ordinary feeling, outside community, outside any interior life the poem can access. Even the bikes are described as sleek grunt vehicles: polished machines that nevertheless speak in animal exertion rather than language. The riders communicate by noise, posture, mass, and motion; their masculinity is presented as a public display that doesn’t need words, perhaps can’t use them.

Forty years on from Marlon: the afterlife of a pose

The closing line, forty years on from Marlon, pins the whole scene to inherited myth—Marlon Brando’s biker cool, still echoing decades later. The poem’s final bite is that these men may be riding less for freedom than for a tradition of looking like freedom. Murray lets us feel the thrill of the run and the roll, but he also suggests a kind of cultural reenactment: a pack performing an old screen-image with enough horsepower to make it temporarily real.

If they’re still chasing Brando, what are they running from? The poem keeps returning to contraction and hardness—sphincter-lipped, tautness, leather muscle—as though speed and noise are defenses against softness, age, or ordinariness. In that light, the black squall isn’t only a threat to the avenue; it’s a storm the riders need in order to keep a certain self-image alive.