Gerald Murnane

The Plains by Gerald Murnane

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February–March 1983, no. 48
Gerard Windsor reviews 'The Plains' by Gerald Murnane

The Plains is a book for the critic, not the mere reviewer. It is a strange creature, to be approached with care. Several omens made me cautious. My review copy reached me three months after the date of posting.

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A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane

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April 2019, no. 410
Paul Giles reviews 'A Season on Earth' by Gerald Murnane

A Season on Earth is the original version of Gerald Murnane’s second published novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, which appeared in 1976. The story behind this book’s publication is now well known, thanks to interviews Murnane has given and the author’s ‘foreword’ to this edition, where he relates how he reluctantly cut his ...

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Green Shadows and Other Poems by Gerald Murnane

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March 2019, no. 409
Geoff Page reviews 'Green Shadows and Other Poems' by Gerald Murnane

There has been a long and often troubled history of poets writing novels and novelists writing poetry. The skills needed are very different and equally hard to learn. Few writers have made equal careers in both. If they do, it’s usually the novels that receive most attention ...

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News from the Editor's Desk - January-February 2019

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January-February 2019, no. 408

News from the Editors Desk

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is open

Border Districts by Gerald Murnane

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December 2017, no. 397
Beejay Silcox reviews 'Border Districts' by Gerald Murnane

There is a whiff of mythology about Gerald Murnane. He is quietly infamous for who he isn’t: for the things he’s never done (travel by aeroplane); the things he’ll never do (live outside of Victoria, wear sunglasses); the things he’ll never do again (watch movies or a Shakespeare play); the books he won’t read (contemporary fiction); the books he won’t write ...

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Letters to the Editor - October 2015

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October 2015, no. 375

CHILDHOOD SEX!

Dear Editor,

Shannon Burns’s splendid ABR Patrons’ Fellowship essay, ‘The Scientist of His Own Experience: A Profile of Gerard Murnane’, is rich in insights and pithy observations, plus some rather fine photographs (August ...

Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf by Gerald Murnane

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October 2015, no. 375
Shannon Burns reviews 'Something for the Pain' by Gerald Murnane

Narrators in Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories have occasionally scorned autobiography. Near the beginning of A Million Windows (2014), for example, we find: ‘Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of ficti ...

'The scientist of his own experience: A Profile of Gerald Murnane' by Shannon Burns

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August 2015, no. 373

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 ...

A History of Books  by Gerald Murnane

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June 2012, no. 342

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 ...

Velvet Waters by Gerald Murnane

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December 1990–January 1991, no. 127
Dinny O’Hearn reviews 'Velvet Waters' by Gerald Murnane

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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