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Gerald Murnane

The town of Goroke (population six hundred) stands almost exactly between Melbourne and Adelaide, in the Wimmera region of Victoria. It is, in many ways, a typical small country town. If you drive there in the morning during late spring or early summer, you’ll need to slow the car to avoid kangaroos on the road. Magpies are everywhere. Horses and other livestock m ...

What makes a story compelling? When I was an undergraduate student at Deakin University, I was fortunate enough to be instructed in fiction writing by Gerald Murnane. His key criterion for the worth of a story was its capacity to mark his memory with an enduring image. Over time he used to cull books from his shelves that failed to impress him in this way.

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Since the publication of Tamarisk Row (1974), Gerald Murnane has continued to shape his own peculiar literary landscape. With The Plains (1982), he perfected the novelistic expression of his style; since then Murnane has concentrated on hybrid forms better suited to his purposes. Landscape with Landscape (1985), Velvet Waters (1990), and A History of Books (2012) are high points of this phase, but his newest fiction, A Million Windows, is in every part their equal.

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The autobiography, that seemingly inevitable act of self-revelation, is frequently a work tricked out with very little art. For the novelist, unlike the anecdote-disposing musician or painter, the problem is doubled: they are making a home with the same tools. Rare is the autobiography that, like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) or Martin Amis’s Experience (2001), speaks in the voice of the working artist, similarly lush or distinctive – the same register, that same unmistakable snap and hum. Too often a plainer style is attempted: the unadorned truth, as it were, after so many convincing lies. But what happens when, at some crucial point in a writer’s oeuvre, the distinction between fact and fiction – or, to use the market’s terms, fiction and non-fiction – becomes a useless one? Gerald Murnane has always been a deeply autobiographical writer – he once famously claimed to possess no imagination, which would seem to make memoir of any kind a default position – and his latest work of fiction, A History of Books, renders the distinction more useless than ever.

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Twinings has recently introduced a new tea flavour called ‘Australian Afternoon Tea’. On the box is an image of kangaroos silhouetted against a red rocky background, which is a sort of amalgam, or perhaps amalgum, of Uluru and Kata Tjuta. This book is like that tea – more Australian than Australia, in a packaged, labelled form that relies heavily on recognition, stereotype, and sentiment. I have to admit that when I started reading the Introduction I thought it might be a parody, but perhaps that just shows jaded sensibilities. Nevertheless, I am not convinced that as ‘Australians we carry a certain vague longing for the bush’. Perhaps I am not drinking the right tea.

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Eighteen years ago, Gerald Murnane gave up writing fiction. At least, that is what the unnamed narrator of Barley Patch says happened to him in this new work of fiction, the first to be published by Murnane in fourteen years. It is tempting to think that this book might offer some kind of insight into what led to this hiatus in Murnane’s career. After all, if Murnane is Australia’s most innovative writer of fiction, as the book’s blurb tells us, this period of silence is an absence that should interest careful readers.

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The Choir of the Just

Peter Craven’s review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature has generated much comment, some of it favourable, some not. Much of the latter was concentrated on the Internet, with the kind of reflexive, personality-driven, bien-pensant umbrage that often passes for literary discourse in the blogosphere. James Joyce’s phrase ‘the choir of the just’ springs to mind. What comes through is a shrill note of intolerance, the implication that because certain people disagree with other people’s views, the latter should not be aired. So much for liberal values.

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Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane & Literati by James Phelan

by
October 2005, no. 275

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

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In the mid-1980s, Paul Carter and I used to meet and talk from time to time. On a hot day just before the Ash Wednesday fires, I mentioned to Paul that I was becoming disappointed with the book of fiction that I was then writing. Paul said much in reply to this, but all I remembered afterwards was his opening sentence: ‘The only material any writer has is his thoughts and feelings.’ What Paul Carter said was not new to me, but I have often felt grateful to him for having said it to me just at that time.

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I have walked long and often with this writer man, travelled with him on trains, listened to him give exact references on the Melways map, noted him noting his whereabouts and those places about and abutting his whereabouts, and I am still uncertain why his work interests me so much, unless it be that the geography of the imagination is the first and the last landscape of grasslands to be explored and that the inland of an island such as ours will always be an ambiguous place which may display a real sea and a centre or mirages of either.

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