For his part, Murnane moved there after Catherine, his wife of more than forty years, died in February 2009. ‘For me it was a natural decision, a family decision,’ he says. ‘My son owned this house in Goroke when my wife died. I was in our four-bedroom house in Melbourne, walking around pacing the floor. After Catherine’s death, Melbourne didn’t feel like home anymore, and I thought, “I can live anywhere now. I don’t have to live here.” Anyway, I leased the place to one of my sons and here I am. And Giles, my older son, came with me.’

Murnane hasn’t been short of visitors since he left the family home in Macleod, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. ‘It seems that my living here exerts a kind of fascination on people and they’ve got to come and see what it is that got me here,’ he says. Much of that curiosity has to do with Murnane’s fiction, and its repeated images and themes: flat grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance; large rural estates inhabited by intensely solitary narrators and personages; confined spaces occupied by writers. It seems to many, at first glance, that Murnane has come to Goroke to embrace aspects of his ideal fictional landscapes and to turn his back on the wider world.

‘Goroke is an unusual place for a much-admired Australian writer to live, especially one who is regularly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature’

In an interview with Imre Salusinszky, his most devoted literary advocate, Murnane said, ‘I think I will spend my declining years being a scientist of my own experience, observing the moment when something comes from nothingness into being a perception in my mind; finding out where it came from and what it resembles; trying to speculate as to whether it is a gift from somewhere; and writing about it and observing myself as I write about it.’ And this is, in part, what Murnane has done for the last two decades, after retiring from his job as a university lecturer in the mid-1990s. But it isn’t the whole story.

A shop in Goroke (photograph by Shannon Burns)

In his eulogy for Catherine, Murnane told mourners that she and he were to be buried in ‘the peaceful cemetery at Goroke’, before adding: ‘What drew us to our burial-plot was a striking image on a fairly new headstone nearby. The image was of a racehorse at full gallop. The headstone, so we later learned, marked the grave of a man who had groomed a stable of racehorses owned by a farmer from near Goroke.’ With Murnane, everything comes back to horse racing – his most sustained passion – just as all of his fiction has its roots in childhood experiences in Bendigo, the Western District of Victoria, and the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Murnane’s forthcoming book, Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf, re-emphasises the centrality of horse racing in his life.

When I pull into the small, gravel road behind the modest house that he shares with his eldest son, Murnane is just getting out of his car. He greets me with a handshake and shows me to a self-contained room at the back of the house. The room is lined with steel filing cabinets, which contain his extensive ‘Chronological’ and ‘Literary’ archives. A small desk faces the wall, next to a window in the corner of the room, opposite the entrance. Two large blue cabinets occupy the centre of the room; on the back of the cabinets are maps of Victoria and South Australia, and a large, illustrated list of Melbourne Cup winners from 1861 (Archer) to 1998 (Jezabeel). Inside the cabinets are copies of Murnane’s published fiction, in their many editions and translations. On the top of one cabinet he keeps his bedding, neatly tucked away. At the rear of the room there is a kitchen sink and fridge. Above the sink a couple of shelves hold a curious assortment of cassettes and compact discs, ranging from Mahler’s symphonies to 1950s rock’n’roll and the soundtrack for the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? On the top shelf, at the left, he displays a trophy with the inscription: Goroke Golf Club 2014, B Grade Champion, GERALD MURNANE. On the right, a Noel McKenna plate, featuring a racehorse and jockey, leans against the wall; and a picture of Murnane’s favourite racehorse, Bernborough, stands in a small, oval, gold-coloured frame on the Chronological Archive, like a personal icon. Next to his desk, on the right-hand side, Murnane’s ‘racing game’ is stored in a two-drawer filing cabinet. Above that he keeps a box of business files. Peeking out from the front is a yellow folder, with the heading ‘After I’ve died’.

Murnane is known, among his friends and colleagues, to be a great raconteur, and there are periods during our interviews when he seems to barely draw breath. Over both days he surprises me with his energy and sheer endurance. His ability to recall specific events from the distant past is remarkable. When he wants to recall more than one event or thought he holds onto a finger, or a piece of paper, as a reminder. More often than not, however, he circles back to the topic with surprising neatness, and the many detours combine to achieve an exhaustive totality. As he speaks with me in his room, Murnane rarely makes eye contact; he often looks around while recalling events, or gestures toward the archives, where more fulsome, written answers to my queries can be found. Every so often he opens their drawers to refresh his memory or to show me a particular document. Throughout our time together he is hospitable and expansive in his answers. For a writer who has often been called reclusive and difficult, Murnane is far more generous and candid than I had expected.

Gerald Murnane was born in Coburg, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, on 25 February 1939, to Reginald Thomas Murnane and Gwenneth Alberta Murnane (née Rooke). His background is English–Catholic working class, despite the common view of him as Irish. ‘I hate people thinking that my name stands for a sort of boozy brawly Irish type,’ he says. ‘My Murnane ancestors were almost Catholic wowsers.’

‘It seems to many, at first glance, that Murnane has come to Goroke to embrace aspects of his ideal fictional landscapes and to turn his back on the wider world’

The original draft of his first novel, Tamarisk Row (1974),featured a large section in which its protagonist, the Murnane-like Clement Killeaton, traces his family history. ‘Clement,’ says Murnane, ‘was astonished to find that he wasn’t Irish at all. And this is true of me. Only one great-great grandparent, out of the eight, is Irish, and that was the one that gave my father his name.’ Bruce Gillespie, who read the draft version of the novel, remembers, ‘Tamarisk Row had a prelude of about forty manuscript pages. It covered the history of the family before they arrived in Australia. This was dropped by Heinemann in order to cut the length of the book.’

Murnane’s maternal side – the Rookes – were all from Devon and Cumberland in England. They were industrious, working-class people; many were respectable tradesmen. Murnane’s paternal grandmother was a Mansbridge; her father came from Sussex, and Gerald suspects that the talkativeness and wittiness of his father’s siblings comes from there, instead of their dour half-Irish father.

The Irish Murnanes settled in the Mepunga district, near the coast, just west of Warrnambool, and they were still there when Murnane’s father, Reginald, suffered a burst appendix as a young man, which nearly killed him. While recovering, Reginald started to travel, and during those travels he developed an obsession with horse racing. He ultimately decided to turn his back on his family’s lifestyle, and the security and prosperity that went with it.

Reginald held modest employment of various kinds throughout his life. He was a prison guard when Gerald was born; later he was a groundsman at a psychiatric hospital; and he was a minor public servant for a time. He was a compulsive gambler, and when creditors sought to recover their losses, Reginald would scoop up his wife and children and move them far enough away to avoid total ruin.

Murnane’s immediate family history is not without complication. His mother, Gwenneth, was the youngest of nine children. Her surname, Rooke, came from her father, who died before she was born in Mildura. After her father’s death, Gwenneth’s mother, Eleanor, married a man called Albert Mansbridge, who happened to be Murnane’s father’s uncle. As Murnane explains, ‘The reason my father even got to know my mother was he would’ve gone to visit uncle Bert and his new wife. But Mum would’ve only been a kid. Dad was quite a bit older than her.’ Murnane’s parents were, therefore, step-cousins.

Late in life, Murnane discovered that he was conceived out of wedlock. Later still he found out that he was, in fact, Gwenneth’s second son, the first having been given up for adoption in the year before her marriage to Reginald, and only a few months before Gerald was conceived.

Murnane at home (photograph by Shannon Burns)

One of the several authors in the many rooms of the large estate in Murnane’s most recently published novel, A Million Windows (2014), seems to be writing about his mother’s rape, at the hands of her stepfather, after which she gave a child up for adoption. When I asked Murnane about his half-brother and those scenes in A Million Windows he said, ‘The fictionalised version of that will do. It happened more or less as it’s reported. Any reader of good will and moderate astuteness would understand from the way that’s reported that the narrator of the work of fiction is speculating about another writer in the building, who could be at work right now. I don’t feel any embarrassment … it’s one example where the facts of my own experience are very close to the fictional details in the final pages of A Million Windows.’ Murnane believes – without knowing for certain – that his mother’s stepfather and his father’s uncle, the man Gerald knew as his grandfather, raped Gwenneth when she was in his care. Her marriage to Reginald may, therefore, have been an escape from abuse as much as it was a romantic union.

Murnane’s relationship to his mother seems to have been fraught indeed. While we were sitting at the Goroke Golf Club on the second day of our interviews, he said firmly, ‘I felt from early on that it would be no great loss to not have a mother. Not that I felt that my mother was in any way cruel or harsh, but that’s what I felt. I’ve mentioned, in Tamarisk Row, how Clement was always astonished to see boys and grown men, particularly in American movies, running home to embrace their mothers.’

Imre Salusinszky says he ‘couldn’t help deriving the impression that Gerald’s mother was not capable of showing great affection to him. And I’ve even speculated that his own emotional scepticism and difficulty with normal kinds of intimacy and affection derive from his mother’s attitude.’

‘Murnane felt distant from his mother, and that distance has made its mark on his fiction’

Murnane made this link himself in my interviews with him, but in a more inchoate and tentative way. He was, no doubt, reluctant to give the impression that his various idiosyncrasies and obsessions – reclusiveness, list-making, systematising, gaming, archiving, mapping, reluctance to travel, sexual unease, fear of water – are all the result of maternal coldness. They aren’t. But it remains the case that Murnane felt distant from his mother, and that distance has made its mark on his fiction, in the form of remote or silent or unapproachable women or girls; and, inasmuch as his fiction re-frames and combines and configures Murnane’s true experiences, it gives some insight into his apparent difficulties relating to women later in life (as he confessed to me) combined, of course, with a Catholic upbringing that typically served to separate him from members of the opposite sex. Murnane even claims that there was a two-year period in his middle teens when the only females he spoke to were relations. By the time he matriculated, he was as terrified by members of the opposite sex as he was drawn to them.

One of the more striking features of Murnane’s fiction throughout the last four decades is what J.M. Coetzee calls its ‘radical idealism’, whereby the fictional world is presented as purer and more real than the material world. Murnane admits that his belief in an invisible world, which surrounds the material world, has its roots in his early Catholicism, but his fervent anti-materialism can also be traced to his father’s hostility to modern Europe. In the essay ‘Meetings with Adam Lindsay Gordon’ (2005), Murnane notes that his father ‘whose forebears arrived in Victoria in the 1830s, scorned all more recent migrants’. Reginald Murnane was a firm nationalist who favoured the rural Australian ethos. ‘Dad loved the outback,’ says Murnane. ‘He was very pro-Australian, and he hated the idea of English nobility and people with Sir in front of their name. He was a libertarian and voted ALP. He was pro-union, and he genuinely believed that the further away from the cities you travelled, the more decent and brave and hardworking the people became.’

In ‘Birds of the Puszta’ (2005), Murnane writes, ‘My father sometimes reminded his sons that their forebears had left England and Ireland as early as the 1830s. Our blood was almost certainly free, my father would say, from the taints of old Europe.’ One of those taints was the materialist world view.

‘Materialists and Marxists who think that all we are is just a mass of guts and brains and stuff are just fucking dolts,’ Murnane tells me, as we drink beer in the dining room of the Goroke Hotel. ‘The world is ten times richer than we imagine and you can discover that richness by writing about it and reading about it, and not just in an imitative sort of way, but through writing about your own insights.’

A recent, unpublished poem neatly summarises the broader anti-materialist stances throughout Murnane’s fiction and essays:

Pinkish Wrinkled Rock

Pinkish wrinkled rock in the railway cutting
north of Darebin on the Hurstbridge line,
whenever I pass reminds me of nothing
so much as my old, old problem: to find

in the visible world one single trace
of whatever it is that we call the mind.
I think thus: if that rock were brain –
my brain, exposed for experiment or trial –

supposedly, in the pinkish-grey?
The train travels on; I’m none the wiser
for my staring at mere rock yet again,
but tomorrow I’ll fall again to surmising;
I’ll stare at the pink-grey cliffs and defend
my claim; I’ll see it as hardly more absurd
that a mass of stone should master the feat
of thinking than that every word
of this poem came out of a lump of meat.                                                                       
(June 2002–November 2014)

Murnane’s anti-materialism seems to spring, partly at least, from his extended family history. His forebears left Europe before the end of the Industrial Revolution, right at the beginning of the modern period in Europe. They landed in Australia before the end of the Spanish Inquisition; before Dickens published Oliver Twist; before Darwin’s journeys on the HMS Beagle; before, in particular, that period of rapid scientific discovery and the shift towards a materialist culture, and a materialist conception of the world, during the mid-late nineteenth century – and certainly before Marxism.

Reginald Murnane believed that Europe subsequently polluted colonised Australia with its modern sensibility. This view has continuing significance for Gerald, despite his lifelong interest in modern, and modernist European literature, much of which goes against the grain of mainstream European cultural trends, in any case. In a letter to me (13 January 2015) he says:

I’m not someone who has striven to shake himself free of the prejudices of the people who bred and reared him. I’ve done so when it suited me. The superstitious Catholic faith of my childhood has no part in my life now, of course. But in some respects I’ve never bothered to step clear of the world view of a sort of composite ancestor of mine – an upper-working-class English migrant who worked on the stations and squatters’ runs in the Western District of Victoria in the last part of the nineteenth century.

Murnane was forced to move from school to school and town to town throughout his early childhood. In Barley Patch (2009), he writes ‘my father’s losses from his betting on racehorses caused us to move from one rented house to another almost every year, so that I always felt myself transient and likely to be soon snatched away from any friend I might make.’ In the same book he adds, ‘My family moved house twelve times between the mid-1940s and the last year of the 1950s, when I left home …’

Murnane’s deep affection for his father is apparent in Tamarisk Row and was confirmed during my interviews with him, but so is his retrospective resentment. The fictional Bassett, where the novel is set, stands in for Murnane’s experiences in Bendigo, where he moved when he was five. Murnane’s Bassett is a kind of childhood paradise, and his family’s flight from there, due to the extremity of his father’s gambling debts, is registered as an intense loss in the novel and in Murnane’s subsequent fiction.

In the essay ‘On the Road to Bendigo’, Murnane reveals two important events from early in his youth. First he walked into a darkened cinema on a bright day and realised that he could perceive the whole of Bendigo, from where he stood, as if from the inside. His description of this event is spellbinding:

I was somehow within the city, equidistant from every point in it, as though each place I had admired or guessed at when I saw it in the sunlight was now pressing against the outer wall of the theatre; or as though the map I had lately thought of as outspread was now shaped like one of the rings of Saturn and encircling me in the darkness. I was in the best possible position for inspecting any point I chose in the city. And for as long as I stayed in the darkness, the city would strain to press even more closely around me.

This may well be an idealised version of the experience, but it is significant that Murnane’s most intense feeling of immersion in the world, during his childhood, took place in a dark room, at a remove from the outside world’s ‘real’ physical impressions. This was to be a running theme in his fiction, where narrators and personages speculate about the qualities of the world surrounding them from an isolated space.

(photograph by Shannon Burns)

The other significant event of Murnane’s childhood, he says, was reading the Sporting Globe for the first time in Bendigo. He recalls hearing race calls from his backyard and studying the pictures in the Globe:

I began to see each race as a complex pattern unfolding. Then I thought of the spectators, each hoping for the pattern to unfold in a certain way. When I stared at a picture of a field at the turn and pretended not to have seen the same field at the finish, I could imagine many possible unfoldings of the pattern. And each race was only an item in a much larger pattern, for each horse had raced in other races in past weeks, and would add more strands to the pattern in weeks to come.

According to Murnane, this was the beginning of his lifelong obsession with horse racing, and – just as importantly – of his lifelong habit of constructing model racetracks and running imaginary horse races, which he continues even now.

The Murnanes’ eventual relocation from Bendigo to Mepunga East, near Warrnambool, attested to Reginald’s stark failings as a financial provider. This makes its way into Barley Patch unaltered. Murnane writes:

In the farming district, my family paid a token rent for a house that had no bathroom, no laundry, and no sink or running water in the kitchen. We were one of only two families in the district that had no motor-car; my father rode a push-bike for three miles each day to and from the farm where he milked the cows and did labouring jobs.

Given that Reginald was the son of a farmer with deep, landowning roots in the region, his return as a labourer and share-farmer – which, Murnane says, was seen as one of the lowest means of employment at the time – must have strained his pride. It might also explain his son’s abiding fascination, in his fiction, with wealthy landowners and self-sufficient estates.

The narrator’s admiration of the cultivated, leisured class in Murnane’s most widely read novel, The Plains (1982), is not wholly satirical. The plainsmen’s intellectual pursuits are unfailingly absurd, but their author’s interest seems as authentic as it is mocking. Far better to own an estate on the plains with your own large library and to lose yourself in speculation than to live in a bare, weatherboard house with no books to speak of; and far better to live a life of contemplation than to move from town to town or cycle from place to place in an effort to avoid creditors. Unlike Reginald, Murnane’s estate owners and gypsy scholars can indulge their obsessions without fear of ruin.

Murnane’s paternal uncles and aunts retained their status as landowners and farmers, as per family tradition. They were important to him in his early life, particularly his unmarried aunts and his youngest, bachelor uncle, Louis. Because they were relatively well off, they had time for leisure, which included reading or listening to music or talking, and were firm Catholics, all of which appealed to the young Murnane. His maternal relations, by contrast, were poorer and irreligious, or Protestant when it suited them, and they rarely had time to indulge the boy’s interests.

In his late teens, the maternal side would come to seem more appealing, however, and the significance of this shift is registered in the landscape of his fiction. ‘My mother’s side of the family actually lived on the plains,’ he says. ‘The plains of Victoria, in my estimation, are from Ballarat to Coleraine on the East–West Axis, and from the Grampians down to the coast virtually on the North–South Axis. It’s referred to as the Western Districts, often referred to as the Western Plains, or the Volcanic Plains, and like my plains in The Plains they’re not all plains. There are hills and vales and things. And the theme of my life, of standing on the coast and wanting to turn from the coast to face inland, was expanded to include the theme of wanting to turn away from my stern Catholic family, on the coast, towards the more easy-going, and very different sort of people, very humorous but also hypochondriacs and worriers, on my mother’s side. And the fact that they lived on the plains was important to me. I drew inspiration from that. I said to myself, I’m not a Catholic coastman; I’m a Protestant plainsman.’

In late November 1950, when he was eleven, Murnane’s essay ‘How I Can Help New Australians to Be Good Catholics’ was published in The Tribune in Melbourne, after it was awarded honourable mention in the under-fourteen category of the Paraclete Arts Group’s essay competition. Five years later his poem describing early morning in a monastery, ‘Before the Dawn’, won the De La Salle College Literary Prize and was published in The Advocate, a Catholic weekly. Soon after, Murnane spent several months studying for the priesthood at St Pius X Memorial College, in St Ives, Sydney, before deciding against the priesthood and returning home to work as a clerk at the Royal Mint. Two more poems, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Cicadas’, were published in the small magazine, Stonnington, in 1959, while Murnane was training to be a primary school teacher. They present a stark contrast to the sensitive religiosity of the earlier poem. As Salusinszky notes, they ‘suggest that Murnane had been reading D.H. Lawrence’.

The final lines of ‘Gospel’ declare:

If it’s the truth about life that you’re after
Remember your blood is older than your brain
Remember the throbbing sea where your life began
Listen to the dark swell pulsing in your flesh
It’s so easy to go wrong in your mind
But the voice of the blood is never wrong.

Aside from the focus on subjective knowledge, it is hard to imagine a less Murnane-like poem than this one, with its interest in sensual instead of mental experience, and its emphasis on ‘the throbbing sea where your life began’. The mature Murnane claims to fear the sea and any large body of water and to live much of his life in his mind. His preference is for contained natural environments.

‘I love coming across little swamps,’ he says. ‘I don’t wade into them but I know that if I wade into them I’d be safe. Water surrounded by land, or a little river that I can see the bottom of, like a clear stream or a trout stream, if I can get across it safely. Water tamed. I’ve always had a fear of the sea and of deep water. When the kids were little I wouldn’t even let them walk out onto jetties. They taught themselves how to swim in the end but none of them are beachgoers. I wouldn’t walk on a jetty for fear that some idiot would run past and push me in for a joke or the wind would blow me in or something. But I love the idea of streams that had been captured or rivers that I could almost jump across or wade across.’

‘The mature Murnane claims to fear the sea and any large body of water and to live much of his life in his mind’

Murnane’s late teens and early twenties were weighed down with confusion and misdirection. After giving up his faith, he enrolled in teacher’s college, then taught in primary schools between 1960 and 1968. For a while he moved from bedsit to flat to boarding house, rarely staying in one place for an extended period. At one point in 1960 he was homeless (or, as he put it to me, ‘between places’).

‘I became very distressed sometimes in my twenties,’ he explains, ‘trying to write poems and trying to get Tamarisk Row started, and I thought there must be some lack in me that meant I couldn’t bring projects to fruition or couldn’t persist in large projects, and there probably was at the time. I was a restless, unstable sort of person. But looking back through my journals, I found lots of strangely simple essays about problems that I would now include in the theory of narration.’

Murnane struggled to accept literary conventions even as a young man. ‘When I think of myself as a gormless, drunken, idiotic, half-formed bloke in my twenties, I also see an alternative view of myself, which is a bloke who was possessed of enough perception, at that early age, to question the theoretical foundation of realistic fiction, or screenplays, or film scripts – god help us. For instance, how does a man dare to write, in a novel, Rupert was insanely jealous of Allan? What does that mean? Does it mean anything? And if it does, who is Rupert? So basically, at a very early age – because I know I’m an intelligent person in some ways even if I’m a moron in others – I was using this intelligence to question the foundations of literature. It led me here in the end and I’m very glad that it did, and relieved that I can look back now and see that it wasn’t all just a hopeless muddle. There was some sense and coherence behind it, because I didn’t take things for granted. But at times I felt as though I lacked a basic understanding that everyone else had.’

Goroke (photograph by Shannon Burns)

In his mid-twenties, Murnane abandoned poetry in favour of prose. According to David Walton, ‘He burnt the manuscript of his great poetic work, which was called the “Orange and Green Mattress”, in the fireplace at our house in Lygon Street in the early 1960s.’ Murnane’s courtship and subsequent marriage to Catherine Lancaster in 1966 seems to have settled him down somewhat. They had three children in quick succession, while Murnane completed a tertiary degree, majoring in Middle Eastern language and culture, and began working for the Publications Branch of the Education Department of Victoria. He wrote several articles for Education Department publications during this period, and a piece on the Melbourne Cup for The Sunday Australian in 1971. More importantly, however, he was working on the ever-lengthening manuscript that became his first published novel, Tamarisk Row.

As Murnane tells it, he showed the manuscript of Tamarisk Row to the writer Barry Oakley, who was a friend during this time, and Oakley had it placed on Hilary McPhee’s desk at William Heinemann. McPhee hadn’t edited any fiction up until that point, but she thought the manuscript was ‘extraordinary’ and quickly agreed to publish it: ‘I remember sitting in Hilary’s office,’ Murnane recalls, ‘and in the corner was this pile of stuff. It spilled out, and fanned its way out. It was the slush pile. And I thought, “There I am but for Barry Oakley’s kind words: forever unread, probably.’’’ Tamarisk Row took many years to complete, but the fact that Murnane managed to complete it at all impressed McPhee. ‘My memory of him is that he worked in extraordinary isolation,’ she says. ‘Most writers then were much more gregarious and social and I don’t think Gerald was. For him life involved working, the races, writing, and bringing up his kids. So the ferocity of his determination to write absolutely impressed itself on me.’

Murnane explains the genesis of his early prose style in ‘The Breathing Author’ (2005): ‘At about the time when I was writing the first drafts of the first pages of Tamarisk Row, I came to understand that I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences.’ The prevalence of long, complex sentences in Tamarisk Row attests to the scale of Murnane’s ambition; in no other work has he managed to cram so many images and sensations into segment after segment of text with such coherence and intensity; it is still Murnane’s richest, most intensely patterned novel.

Murnane’s other important discovery – which, he says, made it possible to write Tamarisk Row after several false starts – had to do with narrative point of view. He explains, ‘Something snapped in me when I read Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. It was hard to distinguish in the text of The Tin Drum between what was actually happening in the world of The Tin Drum and what was happening in the mind of the narrator, Oskar Matzerath. It seems obvious now, but that was when I realised that the contents of people’s minds can be reported on the same level as the things that people see with their eyes. That hit me like a thunderclap. And I used that at the beginning of Tamarisk Row, in the dream sequence when Clement looks into coloured glass and sees creatures going back. I thought, that’s it, that’s the way to do it.’ Freedom to ignore the boundaries between internal and external experience gave Tamarisk Row its impetus (in Murnane’s words, ‘It liberated me. It set me free’) and the realisation that long, complex sentences could represent the most intricate patterns of images and events gave the book its style.

‘‘‘At about the time when I was writing the first drafts of the first pages of Tamarisk Row, I came to understand that I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences.’’’

Tamarisk Row is one of the great début novels of the twentieth century. While Murnane’s teenage poetry is clearly the work of a writer-in-the-making, his first novel, published fifteen years later, represents mature artistry. As Peter Craven notes, ‘He appeared fully formed. The sentences in Tamarisk Row are completely amazing.’ Murnane originally intended to compose short, half-page sections but instead, he says, ‘I wrote and wrote and wrote and some of the sections extended to several pages. I still kept to my rule of only one paragraph per section, which is why they’re so long.’ McPhee thought that these lengthy sections, combined with complex sentences, were too daunting for readers. A compromise was needed. McPhee suggested headings for each section; Murnane agreed and wrote them in.

In terms of content, three things stand out in Tamarisk Row: the intensity of Clement’s and Augustine’s obsessions with horse racing; Clement’s remarkably rich but solitary games; and the erotic aspects of each of these, combined with Clement’s sexual imagination. Given the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel, and the contemporary wariness about the sexualisation of children, the latter part might seem shocking to some readers today, but when it was published it was viewed as a selling point. Murnane recalls, ‘You have to publicise, but I remember Hilary McPhee putting on the dust jacket: Childhood sex! Most of that was invented.’ In one scene, which occurs near an aviary that Clement has long admired, Clement tries to force a young girl, Margaret Wallace, to show him what is underneath her underpants. ‘The Margaret Wallace sections are virtually written out of my imagination,’ Murnane says. ‘It was the sort of thing that I would have liked to do as a boy. There wasn’t even a Margaret Wallace, and there was no aviary. Or the version of the aviary is only what Clement imagines, or wishes: it goes back to what I said about Günter Grass.’ Events that actually happened in the young Murnane’s imagination reappear as possible events in the world of Tamarisk Row. This confirms the broader autobiographical tendencies of Murnane’s fiction to date: they faithfully record his inner experiences and desires, but distort the fact of his life.

If the publication of Tamarisk Row proved to be fortuitous and largely painless for Murnane, his second novel had a difficult genesis. A Lifetime on Clouds (1976) was half of a larger manuscript. After Hilary McPhee left Heinemann to co-found McPhee Gribble, Murnane showed a large manuscript called A Season on Earth to his publisher. His new editor wanted to turn the novel into two books. Murnane eventually agreed but says, ‘I knew even then that it wouldn’t work.’ The first half became A Lifetime on Clouds and the second volume was never published. Murnane’s friend and work colleague during the early seventies, Bruce Gillespie, read the original manuscript. In his view, Heinemann’s treatment of the novel was ‘barbaric’. ‘The book gained weight, to add to the humour, as it proceeded, and the last section was the most interesting.’

‘Anyway,’ says Murnane, ‘it didn’t lack for readers, but a lot of people dismissed it as a book about wanking.’ To make matters worse, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was published a few years before Murnane’s novel. ‘That really upset me,’ says Murnane. The coincidence made his novel seem derivative instead of singular; in the eyes of some, it was just another book about masturbation. After this, no one at Heinemann mentioned the second volume, and he lost faith in his first publisher.

Several difficulties emerged for Murnane during this time. On the personal side, he was running out of money, and Catherine began to show signs of a mental illness that would put a great strain on their home life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Murnane says, ‘I was having a lot of trouble getting grants from the Literature Board.’ True to form, he keeps a list of writers who received large grants while he struggled to get by. ‘When you look back now,’ he says, ‘at the names of people who got three-year grants when I got one-year grants, not many of them wrote or published anything of note.’

An early draft of Tamarisk Row (photograph by Shannon Burns)

Finding a new publisher for his next, bulky novel proved to be more difficult than he anticipated. Once again, the short fiction that became The Plains was originally part of a much larger manuscript called The Only Adam. Unlike A Lifetime on Clouds, however, Murnane harbours no regrets about the fate of the larger version. ‘I’m glad that I didn’t let them publish it because it’s a pretty ordinary book, but The Plains was a section of it. It was a kind of background music to a fairly crude narrative about a boy growing into manhood.’

He finished The Only Adam in 1978–79 and showed the manuscript to William Heinemann. They offered to publish it, but Murnane was still reeling from their treatment of A Season on Earth and decided to send the manuscript elsewhere. He explains: ‘I didn’t trust their judgment. I wanted someone to have a good hard look at this book, and in the end I wouldn’t let Heinemann publish it. I was in a state of dull shock for a long time. My wife was sick. I could see clear signs that she was deteriorating. She had to go into hospital on a number of occasions and I had to take care of the kids by myself, and this affected my writing. I was losing confidence, but I had enough sense to ask other people to look at The Only Adam.’Two publishers rejected the manuscript, and Murnane began to despair.

Enter Bruce Gillespie, Carey Handfield, and Rob Gerrand, from the small science fiction publisher, Norstrilia Press. Bruce Gillespie, who is a well-known science fiction fan and critic, worked with Murnane in the early 1970s at the Publications Branch while Murnane was editor of The Educational Magazine. Murnane, who was still handwriting his manuscripts, asked Gillespie to type up The Only Adam. ‘I suggested that one section of the book stood out as a piece of fiction that could appear in its own right,’ says Gillespie. According to him, ‘This offered a way out of an impasse for Gerald, because he seemed to feel by the late 1970s that his career as a novelist might be over.’

‘It was quite an easy thing to separate that part from the rest of the book,’ says Murnane, so he extracted the final section of The Only Adam, originally titled ‘Landscape with Darkness and Mirage’, and Norstrilia published it as The Plains in 1982.

The Plains met with considerable critical success and affirmed Murnane’s standing as the most original Australian writer of his generation. ‘After The Plains was praised I felt that I’d suddenly redefined myself,’ he says. ‘Suddenly I’d validated the funny parts of me, which are the daydreams and the imaginative side.’ But the book also served to rebuild his confidence as a writer. ‘The Plains changed my life,’ he says, ‘because people started to pay attention.’

Yet Murnane retains a sense of grievance about the process that led him to publish the novel with Norstrilia, and the dark days leading up to its release.He says: ‘I wish I could get across to the various readers and critics who have questioned me about my writing career that the fiction didn’t come about as they think. Many seem to believe that I had a program, and that it was all laid out in front of me. His first book would be the childhood novel; then the adolescent novel; then he would turn in a different direction and he would explore the mythology of Australia; and following that. But it doesn’t happen like that!

‘‘‘After The Plains was praised I felt that I’d suddenly redefined myself’’’

‘It should be evident to anyone who has ever tried to string a series of thoughts or achievements together that you never know where you’re going to start; you change course on a number of occasions; you go in a direction that seems fruitless; you get lost; and finally you look back and you think Oh so that’s what I was doing. I didn’t realise that. But worse than that, even if a publisher had said, Gerald, I swear on bended knee that as long as I’m in the publishing industry you bring any book you like to me and I’ll publish it, even then it wouldn’t have happened that way. And it’s ten times less likely to be so deliberate because of the problem of getting publishers.

‘You take A Season on Earth to the idiots at Heinemann and they mess it up for you, and they render you more or less unpublishable for five years, indirectly; then you go on your knees to a little obscure group of boys ten, fifteen years younger than you, and they put out The Plains with a horrible cover on it. It would be nice to be able to write and say what you think according to a plan, but you’re restricted by your own inadequacies and the struggle to be published.’

Murnane harboured doubts about Norstrilia’s capacity to market his work effectively, but he went back to them for Landscape with Landscape (1985) to show his appreciation and loyalty. The novel sold poorly in its first edition, but did better when Penguin reissued it as a paperback two years later. (Giramondo is due to release it again later this year.)

The critical reception for Landscape with Landscape was almost universally admiring, save for one scathing review by Gerard Windsor, who had also disliked The Plains. Windsor’s review still nettles Murnane, but worse followed when the book was shortlisted for an award and his inexperienced publishers sent Murnane to the ceremony, anticipating a win.

‘The first visit I made to Adelaide was a terrible mistake,’ Murnane says. ‘They always tell you when you’ve won the prize, and I was in my forties at the time so I should have known, but I didn’t. One of the boys at Norstrilia rang me, excited, saying “Landscape with Landscape has been short-listed for the South Australian Fiction Award, and we’re going to pay for you to go over.” So they gave me the bus fare.

‘Fancy me doing this at the age of forty-five! Even then I was a kind of strange, incompetent traveller. I remember saying to the young woman behind the counter, I’ve never travelled on an interstate bus before. How do I buy a ticket? Anyway, I got on the bus and drove all night. I barely got any sleep. I had just fallen asleep when the bus driver woke us all up to show us the lights of Adelaide from the top of Mount Lofty. I thought, Fuck the lights of Adelaide! I just want to get some sleep! They gave me a nice hotel room and I still thought I might win the prize! I didn’t. Helen Garner won it.’

McPhee Gribble had published Garner’s winning novel, The Children’s Bach, and Hilary was there to witness the gruesome spectacle. ‘Gerald never travelled anywhere,’ she says, ‘except for one mortifying visit to Adelaide, when he thought he’d won the fiction prize. That was a shocking, shocking event. It was humiliating that he hadn’t been told. He’d always prided himself on not crossing the border! I doubt that I even managed to speak to him. It was too terrible.’

The people at Norstrilia weren’t to blame – they had no experience of the conventions surrounding literary publishing and awards – but a larger publisher would certainly have known better and saved Murnane the disappointment and embarrassment.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons for his return to William Heinemann for his next novel, Inland (1988). Murnane was pleased to attract the interest of their new editor, Teresa Pitt, who liked the book and saw to its publication with little editorial intervention. Yet Inland, which is now recognised as one of Murnane’s best novels, received comparatively mixed reviews, and when Pitt left Heinemann soon afterwards, Murnane was cut adrift once again. ‘I was wise enough to see that I wasn’t a Heinemann author anymore,’ he says, ‘so I didn’t trouble them with Velvet Waters.’

Instead, Murnane again turned to his first editor, Hilary McPhee, who was glad to publish the collection of stories in 1990, despite modest prospective sales. McPhee blames the poor sales figures for Murnane’s fiction throughout his career on its perceived ‘difficulty’ for readers. She also feels that his reluctance to travel and promote his work, combined with his eccentric style and concerns, are responsible for Murnane’s relatively low profile in this country. ‘We have such a limited literary media,’ she says, implying that other literary cultures might have embraced Murnane’s achievements more emphatically. ‘I would not claim to have marketed Gerald,’ she continues, ‘but I managed to get the books published.’

‘McPhee blames the poor sales figures for Murnane’s fiction throughout his career on its perceived ‘‘difficulty’’ for readers’

McPhee Gribble had been sold to Penguin in 1989, and McPhee was on her way out the door before Murnane’s next collection of stories, Emerald Blue was published in 1995. ‘With Emerald Blue,’ says Murnane, ‘I was coming to the end of the first chapter of my career. I was lucky to get it published because there was only one bloke at Penguin who stood up for it. Penguin wanted to reject it and didn’t spend any money on marketing it. Not many copies were sold.’ McPhee confirms Murnane’s impressions. ‘It was a horrible time at Penguin. I was lucky to move across to Picador and I hoped that Gerald would follow, but of course he had that book in the pipeline.’

For the third time in his career, and after publishing some of the most original and compelling Australian fiction of the last two decades, Murnane was without a publisher, and without a major literary project to sustain him. Additionally, his job as a lecturer became more demanding after Victoria College was taken over by Deakin University.

According to Chris Gregory, who was Murnane’s student during this period and maintained a friendship with him afterwards, ‘The early–mid nineties were the low point of Gerald’s career, because he’d been writing for a long time, but received very little attention. Gerald was basically marginalised. He was seen as a bit of a trophy author, but he’s never been paid. He was an outsider who was seen as pretentious and difficult and problematic.’

It is true that Murnane has rarely received meaningful financial reward for his fiction, but critics, with a few minor exceptions, have reviewed his work enthusiastically. As Peter Craven notes, ‘What Gerald had was runaway prestige success, without that translating into particularly significant sales, and he was badly handled. Inland was shockingly published in hardback, with a cover that you might have put on a Frank Hardy novel, but it received good reviews. The highbrow critics have always been complimentary, but the difficulty is that, if you’re talking honestly as a critic, you can’t say, This is a jolly good read. Give it to your mum and dad.’

Gregory’s comments seem to derive from Murnane’s sense of his own marginality, which was no doubt magnified in the early 1990s by his surroundings. His background and world view set him apart from his fellow academics, who were, typically, left-leaning middle-class people, whereas Murnane is wary of adopting political positions and prefers not to comment on contemporary events or issues. Nor does he have much in common with other literary figures, as he sees them: he doesn’t travel; he doesn’t drink wine; and he isn’t particularly interested in arts-related conversations. Murnane says that his wariness of literary people and cultural life in general springs from the assumptions that are typically made about writers. ‘Thoughtless people believe there is a kind of community,’ he says. ‘The intelligentsia – painters, writers, ABC compères, that sort of person – tend to assume that we all share the same core beliefs: that the Freudian theory is more or less correct; the theory of evolution is exactly correct; left-wing governments are superior to right-wing; and a few other core beliefs like that, whereas I don’t believe any of those things. I’m not necessarily hostile to them, but they’re not my core beliefs.’ When I probed him further about his political views, he said, ‘I’m only interested in politics for the human interest side – who gets dismissed as a result of a sex scandal or a money scandal, that sort of thing. At some time in my life I’ve voted for all the major parties and may well again – although never again for the Greens after I learned that their policies include the abolition of horse racing!’

‘‘‘At some time in my life I’ve voted for all the major parties and may well again – although never again for the Greens after I learned that their policies include the abolition of horse racing!’’’

Murnane’s early isolation, while writing Tamarisk Row, had much to do with personal circumstances, but his later sense of alienation spoke of a more fundamental difficulty: he simply didn’t fit in with artistic or intellectual groups (at least in Melbourne), and he had lost interest in trying to do so. Peter Craven and Michael Heyward, the editors of Scripsi, ardently supported Murnane and his fiction throughout the 1980s, but when the magazine disbanded in 1994, Murnane was left largely to his own devices.

This, combined with a steady increase in administrative and teaching duties at the university, and a lack of interest on behalf of publishers, had a serious impact on Murnane’s desire to write. He had been working on a large manuscript, called O Dem Golden Slippers, but the book became too expansive and the material ran away from him. He couldn’t fit all of the pieces of the manuscript into a manageable shape and he was too exhausted and discouraged to persevere. Murnane gave up on the novel before publishing Emerald Blue, and, in his words, ‘gave up writing’ as well.

In 1995, after suffering a serious leg injury the year before, Murnane retired from his lecturing position at Deakin University. He explains: ‘I fell off the chair. I wasn’t drunk but I wasn’t sober. I was moving all of my books into my room, standing on a bedroom chair, which wasn’t a very good idea. Some began to fall and I tried to catch them but fell on the point of my knee. It was nearly irreparable. I was very lucky to be able to walk. But a surgeon fixed it. That was the end of October 1994. I lay in hospital and thought, Now how did it come to this? And that’s when I planned to retire. I retired at the end of 1995, and I’d also given up writing by then, so I had quite a few years when I was just enjoying retirement.’

Murnane writes about his decision to give up writing extensively in Barley Patch, offering a near-mystical reason for abandoning his work. There he says that he chose to join the ‘lost-seeming wayfarers’ on the other side of fiction, those who ‘pleaded with the writer of fiction to put away his writing and to join up with them: to become an inhabitant of their far-reaching countries and continents’. This is partly true, in the ideal sense. In ‘The Breathing Author’, Murnane adds, ‘I drew back partly because what I was about to write might have seemed to certain readers to have revealed more than was seemly for a man of my years, a husband and a father, to have revealed.’ This also seems credible, in the more mundane sense (Murnane is ever-wary of embarrassing or exploiting family members in his fiction). When I interviewed him, however, Murnane gave less enigmatic reasons: ‘The fact of not having an interested publisher played a big part in my giving up writing,’ he says, ‘That was about sixty or seventy per cent. And the complete mess I made of O Dem Golden Slippers. Feeling tired and exhausted by the last ten or fifteen years also played a part.’

During those first years of retirement, Murnane enjoyed a relaxed way of life. He went to the races every Saturday; he socialised; he occasionally went to country race meetings with Catherine; he wrapped newspapers in the early hours of the morning for a local newsagent, for extra cash; and he worked intensively on his archives.

‘I couldn’t stop writing,’ he says. ‘I was filling the archives with a tremendous amount of writing. I wrote about eighty thousand words of autobiography dealing with my childhood and early adolescence. Not for publication. Just for the archives. The horse racing archive, Antipodean Archive as I call it, took shape in the nineties. I’d spend hours, days on that.’

‘Murnane writes about his decision to give up writing extensively in Barley Patch, offering a near-mystical reason for abandoning his work’

‘It’s hard to remember whether I felt genuinely relieved that I wasn’t writing. It was mixed with disappointment, which my wife felt very keenly. She would often say, what a pity you’re almost forgotten by now. But at the time I didn’t want to have anything to do with writing again.’ Murnane also had very little to do with the broader literary world during this time, although he continued to write in spurts. Then, in 1999, he was informed that he had won the Patrick White Award. ‘That was the slow beginning of my comeback,’ he says.

Ivor Indyk, from Giramondo, is reluctant to take credit for Murnane’s re-emergence as a writer. ‘He says I’m entirely responsible for his second career,’ says Indyk, ‘and that if left to his own devices he was happy with the archive and his horse racing game. I don’t think that’s entirely true.’

‘I owe a great deal to Ivor,’ Murnane says. ‘He has done more than any publisher for me, but it’s not so much what he’s done. From the time we talked about publishing my first book with Giramondo I felt confident that I had a publisher. It mightn’t sound like much, but for the first time, with preparation of my eighth book, it became apparent to me that I had now had someone who was going to publish, within reason, whatever I wrote.’

Murnane used material from his failed novel O Dem Golden Slippers in his luminous ‘comeback’ novel, Barley Patch. ‘When I sat down to write Barley Patch,’ he says, ‘it was only meant to be a story, which would go into a collection of stories. It was meant to be about twenty thousand words long, but it grew, and I allowed it to grow, knowing that Ivor would publish it. So then I had to write yet another story to complete the intended volume of stories, which became A History of Books.’

Writing came fairly easily to Murnane during this period, despite Catherine’s illness. ‘Those were harrowing times,’ he says. ‘I was writing Barley Patch while she was alive and before we knew she was sick. I finished it before she died, in February 2009.’ After checking the dates in his literary archive, Murnane recalled that he was drafting both Barley Patch and A History of Books while Catherine was dying. ‘So I must have been a pretty cool customer to be writing them then. A History of Books was begun not long before my wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And it was written at intervals while I was nursing her. I nursed her full time at home, with help from visiting nurses, and still managed to go on with it, and finished it after she died. It seems strange to me now that I managed to do that, but I did.’

Murnane has often insisted that he has no imagination, but Barley Patch goes some way toward contradicting his claims. He may not have created any character or imagined a conventional plot, but he does recall, project, and extend images in surprising – and surprisingly cohesive – ways. The connections that Murnane draws between one image and another, and the web or cluster of images that he is able to mine from this process, brings to mind Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. This is not free-associative play; it is, instead, a kind of detective work, where the process of discovery involves exploring his internal perceptions – through meditation and association – instead of finding objective or material clues. Murnane pieces together and configures memories in order to represent his own inner workings, or interior landscapes, cultivating an immeasurably complex consciousness that sees itself as one cluster of images in a much vaster network.

Despite the common criticism that Murnane’s fiction is inward-looking and thus disconnected from the ‘real world’, there is an implication, in his conception of fiction, that you can cross from one cluster of images to another – and therefore from one consciousness to another, or one world to another – simply by following those images to outer regions of your mind. As with the darkened cinema in Bendigo, Murnane looks inward in order to connect, in a mystical way, with larger realities surrounding him.

Barley Patch was well received, on the whole, even if some reviewers were puzzled or annoyed by the scrupulosity of Murnane’s style. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it stands as a major and surprising literary achievement; it was the first of a series of ‘late’ works that are equal to anything that Murnane published before the long silence.

Murnane has finished three books since he moved to Goroke – two of them forthcoming – and many poems. The town has clearly reinvigorated him. In addition to writing and the attention he gives to his archives, he has taken on numerous responsibilities. He is a member of the Goroke Men’s Shed; he is the secretary of the Anzac Day committee. In his role as ‘Tale Twister’ for the local Lions Club, Murnane provides comic relief at their regular gatherings. He is also a member of the Goroke Hall Club; he meets with the senior citizens group once a month; and he is even said to judge the local yabby competition. Everyone I spoke with in the town knew him in some way, or knew about him, and although none had read any of his books, they valued his presence and contribution to the community.

In Goroke, Murnane has revealed a side of himself that was latent during his decades in Melbourne, where he was known to be very private. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, ‘I have a new life here. I’m in voluntary organisations, playing golf and busy, and I woke up one morning in 2010 or 2011 and started writing Border Districts.’

Murnane at Goroke golf course (photograph by Shannon Burns)

Because Murnane wants Border Districts to be his last published book, it hasn’t yet been released, but he has since gone on to write A Million Windows and the forthcoming Something for the Pain. He says: ‘The three books I wrote at Goroke were all written faster, in a shorter time, than anything else I’d written before-hand.’

Murnane’s life in Goroke is partly severe, and partly ideal. He lives in austere conditions, and I suspected that his circumstances were far more difficult than he let on. I asked his friends, publishers, former students, and literary critics about the seeming severity of his current circumstances, but they tended to think that, on balance, he was happy and flourishing.

Imre Salusinszky, a former academic and conservative journalist who is now the media guru for New South Wales Premier Mike Baird, enjoyed a long, ‘intense, almost obsessive’ correspondence with Murnane during the 1980s and 1990s. He met with me at the Premier’s office, in a high-rise off Martin Place, Sydney, overlooking the Lindt Café. ‘I was struck, when I visited Goroke, by the severe limits that Gerald seemed to be putting on himself,’ he said. ‘Most people couldn’t live the way he’s living.’ But for Salusinszky this is outweighed by the connection between Murnane’s circumstances and his fiction. Salusinszky feels that, ‘The way he’s living now realises some of the key scenes in his work. The monastery, the cell, the monk, the scribe, the man in the room above the fruit shop. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s retreated to a cell. Because one of the recurrent images in the fiction is the cave, the cell.’

In the golf clubhouse, back in Goroke, Murnane spoke to me candidly about the circumstances that brought him to the town. ‘One of the main reasons I came to Goroke was so that I could look after my son, at the age of seventy. I’m his father and I can’t avoid helping him.’

Murnane is unlikely to tell many people about the challenges he endures as a father. It is a personal family matter, and he is that type of Australian male who prefers to seem in control of his circumstances, even when he is under tremendous duress, instead of petitioning for help or sympathy. Few people knew about the difficulties his family faced during Catherine’s period of mental illness, and few were permitted to help Murnane with the very difficult task of caring for Catherine when she was dying. To my final query on the subject he said: ‘My living conditions here suit me admirably. Remember, though, that my living here is as much the result of my wanting to help my son Giles as of my choosing monastic simplicity.’

Murnane feels most at home at the Goroke Golf Club, where he acts as secretary and bar manager. The golf course is just outside of town, on state forest. It has eighteen holes, with sandscrapes instead of greens. The clubhouse was built in the 1980s, at a time when locals believed that Goroke would only get bigger and better. It once serviced over a hundred members, but patronage has since dwindled radically. ‘In the good old days,’ says Murnane, ‘it would have been full on an afternoon after the golf. I’ve only missed one Sunday in four and a half years, and I’ve never seen more than about ten or twelve people. It’s sort of lonely now.’

Murnane spends Saturday mornings at the club by himself, reading a newspaper before playing a few holes on his own. He has a deep connection to the place. ‘I used to think Macleod was the centre of the universe,’ he says, ‘but these days, when I’m out on the golf course or even at the golf clubhouse I feel that I’m absolutely right in the centre of where I should be. It’s a funny, contented feeling that comes over me. Not just because of my liking for golf, but because of the surroundings. It’s a lonely place; very quiet; bird noises all around.’

Melbourne is still important to him, but he feels intimidated by its size now. ‘During my working life I couldn’t have left Melbourne,’ he says, ‘but now that I’m free to live anywhere, I feel that this is where I belong or where I ought to be.’

My sincerest thanks to Gerald Murnane, for giving up his time and being such a generous, hospitable, and forthright subject. Many thanks are also due to those who agreed to be interviewed and who offered guidance along the way, particularly: Imre Salusinszky, Ivor Indyk, David Walton, Peter Craven, Hilary McPhee, Chris Gregory, Kate James, Michael Heyward, and Bruce Gillespie. Thanks to Maria Takolander, John Thawley, Lars Ahlström, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Deborah Golvan, and Håkan Anderson for responding to queries via email and letters. Thank to Andrew Fuhrmann, David Winter, Ian Donaldson, and Lisa Gorton for their early encouragement and feedback (at Boyd Community Hub). I am grateful to Kelli Rowe – a true Murnane aficionado – for looking over the first draft with a discerning eye. I am extremely grateful to Peter Rose and everyone at ABR, including its Patrons, for the extraordinary support they have given to this project.

The ABR Fellowships, funded by private patrons and philanthropic foundations, are intended to generate incisive literary journalism and to broaden the magazine’s content. Each Fellowship is worth $5,000. This particular Fellowship was funded by the ABR Patrons, whose generosity we warmly acknowledge.