Les Murray has been known as the Bard of Bunyah for ages and it's a label he's not particularly keen on. "It's just a place," he says. "I might have been born anywhere."

But the fact that he has just published a collection of mainly old poems, the odd new one, the odd reworked one, and some photographs and called it On Bunyah suggests that he's not going to shed the title anytime soon. And that it's not just any old place.

Murrays have been in those parts of central New South Wales since the poet's great-great-grandfather Hugh migrated from Scotland in the middle of the 19th century. It was John Murray, the son born on the journey from Scotland – in the middle of the Bay of Biscay – who first bought land around Bunyah in 1870 and began the settlement.

If you visit Murray there, he'll tell you plenty of stories – he knows the area, he knows the people, he knows the words and he knows the yarns.

Take that of Ena Bennett, whose picture is one of the several black and white ones dotted through the book. She was the youngest sister of Murray's father, Cecil. She married a bloke back from the Second World War "who was an absolute brute … he had a fairly distinguished war career because he liked killing people".

Eventually she got fed up with his violence and left him, taking their daughter with her. "He won the lottery about two months after she left him and she never got a penny. He was an absolute bastard. He treated her abominably when he had her."

The poem next to the picture is called Letters to the Winner. 

Murray describes his Bunyah house as a kit home, built on land he bought from a cousin in 1975. There is another one adjacent to it where he and his wife, Valerie, have their bedroom, he has his study and there is a sitting room distinguished by a fireplace and chimney breast clad with a patchwork of tiles that he writes about in The Year of the Kiln Portraits. 

It's where he does the intense, concentrated thinking and intense, concentrated daydreaming that bring forth his poems.

Bunyah is his refuge and the area in general has provided "essential material" in his poetry for the past 50 years. (The first poem he wrote – in 1956 – was "about the shine of light and water on the railway tracks at Gloucester station".) In his foreword to On Bunyah he points out there is little or no fiction in the book.  When he is away – as he was for  nigh on 30 years, he feels "displaced".

Although this book is his second this year – Waiting for the Past, a collection of new poems, was published in April – he says On Bunyah has taken 50 years to produce.

"You go back to things. There are cases there where I wrote  a poem 40 years ago and only the other day – a year or so ago – rewrote it and refitted and made it better than it had before. I thought 'well, I grew up to that one, didn't I?'."

Some of the poems are extracts from earlier ones, which were "far too long … I was learning how to write at the time and didn't know what to leave out and put in". So while many of the poems will be familiar to Murray readers – The Cows on Killing Days, say, or The Tin Wash Dish – others are not as well known.

And there is the odd new one such as The Invention of Pigs, which includes an imaginative if not immediately obvious typographical representation of porkers' footprints after a fire in three consecutives "B's". He is still debating whether there should be a comma before the "footprints" appear.

"Everyone who mentions that bushfire tends to come out with the sentence somewhere or other 'oh yeh, did you hear about the pigs that wouldn't leave their  sties when it came through'. It's become folklore."

Murray doesn't usually reread his work but this time he has looked at stuff that went back to the beginning. He would find poems that he had forgotten about and that impressed him. It's a sort of poetic director's cut although "in some cases the director's cut was yesterday". "There was one about kids riding on buses. I think it was three years old when it went into the book."

On Bunyah emerged from a project for his German publisher that would see his work presented side by side in German and English, along with photographs. It gave him the idea for a "much better book".

He figured if he dropped the German, he'd have a lot more space "to be able to tell the whole story properly". But he says he doesn't really know why he wanted to put the collection together at this time. "Why now? I've no idea. Maybe I thought to myself I'll start to understand it a bit. One of things I was scared of was the great rows that used to happen between my father and his father."

Getting Murray to articulate exactly what it is about Bunyah is not easy. It doesn't provide novelty – "it doesn't change much from year to year"; it's not remarkable – "even in the Aboriginal world I'm sure Bunyah was just a place name on the way to somewhere, it happened to be a hole in the hills through which Aborigines walked up to the mountains, a useful passage though"; and its importance, such as it is, is limited to "me and about a hundred people".

So what makes it Murray's own dream place? It comes down to the question of home and the tragedy of his father's brother, Archie, who was killed by a falling tree that Cecil refused to deal with because he didn't think it needed felling but his father insisted on. The guilt on both sides was destructive and was the cause of the rows between them.

"That's at the heart of it. That's the sad and dark side. Also the fact that my parents had lots of good reasons to be happy but were not entirely happy. They were happy with each other, but there were things hanging over them. They were kept deliberately poor. That's a vile thing to do, to keep somebody poor who doesn't need to be poor. Grandfather was their paymaster and he made sure that anything they wanted to do, he would frustrate it. And he wanted them to be unhappy."

He was never going to be a dairy farmer like his father. "It is a dreadful bloody occupation. And I wasn't going to do it one minute longer than I had to. My parents let me off as much as possible. They saw that I found it horribly oppressive."

Murray spent 30 years in Sydney beginning university in the company of Clive James, Bob Ellis and Germaine Greer, with sporadic visits back to Bunyah.  I wondered whether it had been a relief to get out of the area.

"You get the weight of tradition off your back," he says, adding that he didn't think he was ever really tied to Bunyah. "I never felt it a burden; I must have worked out early in life how to take it off and put it on."

Murray, a perennial tip for the Nobel Prize in literature,  says he has never had a year when he has published two books. "They ran along together. They threw poems back and forth to each other. There are poems that occur in both books. I think there are poems that occur in neither ..." Cue one  of his regular guffaws.

But the early part of the year has not been easy, "a real bugger to be precise". He has had three spells in hospital. The first came after his appearance in February at the Wheeler Centre fifth birthday gala when he fell and was carted off to St Vincent's. Then while Murray was doing his regular stint at The Macquarie Dictionary he fell and broke four ribs that led to  a spell in  the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Finally, at home in Bunyah he fell and hit his head  – that resulted in a stay in Taree Base Hospital.

But the year has improved.

Earlier this month he embarked on his first reading trip to Britain in four years, which saw him last weekend discussing  both Waiting for the Past and the life and work of his friend Clive James at the Cheltenham  Literature Festival. He was planning to see James in Cambridge while doing a reading at Magdalene College, of which Murray is a fellow. "As I said the other day, Clive is retarding his death."

On Bunyah is published by Black Inc at $32.99. Buy now on Booktopia.