Gerald Murnane SYDNEY STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

Robert Dixon, Series Editor

The Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series publishes original, peer-reviewed research in the field of Australian literary studies. It offers engagingly written evaluations of the nature and importance of Australian literature, and aims to reinvigorate its study both locally and internationally.

Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time Robert Dixon

Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s David Carter and Roger Osborne

Christina Stead and the Matter of America Fiona Morrison

Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead Nicholas Birns

Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays Ed. Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas

The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred Lyn McCredden

Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One Ed. Anthony Uhlmann

Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays Ed. Robert Dixon

Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays Ed. Brigitta Olubas

ii Gerald Murnane

Another World in This One

Edited by Anthony Uhlmann First published by Sydney University Press

© Individual authors 2020 © Sydney University Press 2020

Reproduction and communication for other purposes

Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below:

Sydney University Press Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA [email protected] sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN 9781743326404 paperback ISBN 9781743326411 epub

Gerald Murnane’s poem “Green Shadows”, from his collection Green Shadows and Other Poems (Sydney: Giramondo, 2019), is reproduced by kind permission.

Cover image by Zan Wimberley. Cover design by Miguel Yamin. Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii Gerald Murnane: A Chronology ix

Introduction 1 Anthony Uhlmann 1 Scenes from Gerald Murnane’s Golf Club 9 Tristan Foster 2 To the Eye Untrained 13 Luke Carman 3 Truth, Fiction and True Fiction 29 Shannon Burns 4 “Images and Feelings in a Sort of Eternity”: Gerald Murnane’s Ideal 37 Female Reader Samantha Trayhurn 5 Retrospective Intention: The Implied Author and the Coherence of the 45 Oeuvre in Border Districts and The Plains Emmett Stinson 6 Stream System, Salient Image and Feeling: Between Barley Patch and 63 Inland Brigid Rooney 7 Gerald Murnane’s Plain Style 85 Mark Byron

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8 Landscape within Landscape: The Intertwining of the Visible and the 107 Invisible in Gerald Murnane and Henry James Suzie Gibson 9 Memory, Image and Reading Traces of the Infinite: A History of Books 125 Arka Chattopadhyay 10 Reporting Meaning in Border Districts 141 Anthony Uhlmann 11 What Kind of Literary History Is A History of Books? 151 Ivor Indyk 12 The Still-Breathing Author 163 Gerald Murnane

Contributors 179 Index 181

vi Acknowledgements

This book was produced as part of a project funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Program, called “Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature” (DP170101002), and the ARC is gratefully acknowledged here. Further work related to this project can be found on the project website (formsofworldliterature.com). We would like to thank other members of the project who assisted with elements of this book, in particular the project manager Melinda Jewell, Ivor Indyk (and Giramondo Publishing), Alexis Wright and Samantha Trayhurn, who contributed to the conference “Another World in This One: Gerald Murnane’s Fiction” in Goroke in 2017. We would like to acknowledge the following: Gerald Murnane, who gave his blessing to the small conference in his home town of Goroke, and other members of the Goroke community who welcomed us on the day, fed us marvellous home-cooked cakes, and opened Goroke Golf Club to us; the support of the Writing and Society Research Centre and the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, and the Dean, Peter Hutchings, at Western Sydney University; Michael Heyward of Text Publishing (Murnane’s other publisher) who offered advice and encouragement and attended the day; Andre Sawenko, who filmed and took photos on the day; and Melinda Jewell, again, this time for the work she put into the production of the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Robert Dixon, Susan Murray, Agata Mrva-Montoya, Denise O’Dea and the team at Sydney University Press for overseeing the book and its design. We are grateful to The Paris Review for allowing us to reprint Tristan Foster’s article in this collection, and to the Sydney Review of Books and its editor, Catriona Menzies-Pike, who published a slightly different version of Gerald Murnane’s “The Still-Breathing Author”, which also reappears here.

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Gerald Murnane: A Chronology

This chronology draws upon and updates work done by Imre Salusinszky in his monograph Gerald Murnane (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Gerald Murnane: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Melbourne: Footprint, 1993).

1939 Birth of Gerald Murnane, Coburg, Melbourne, 25 February. His mother is Gwenneth Alberta Murnane (née Rooke) and his father is Reginald Thomas Murnane.

1944 Family moves to Bendigo.

1948 Family moves to the Western District.

1949 Family returns to Melbourne.

1956 Completes high school at De La Salle College, Malvern, a Catholic school founded in 1912 and run by the De La Salle Brothers, an order based on the teachings of Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651‒1719).

1957 February‒May, studies for the priesthood at St Pius X Memorial College among the Passionist Fathers, an order mixing spiritual contemplation with missionary work, in St Ives, Sydney. June, abandons his studies for the priesthood, returns to Melbourne and works as a temporary clerk in the Royal Mint.

1958 Attends Toorak Teachers’ College to begin training as a primary teacher.

1960 Begins work as a primary teacher. Teaches in eight Melbourne schools between 1960 and 1968.

1963 Begins annual duties as an honorary lecturer in General Education at the Victoria Racing Club’s Apprentice Jockeys’ School.

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1965 Begins a part-time BA (majoring in English and Arabic) at the University of Melbourne.

1966 Marriage to Catherine Mary Lancaster, 14 May.

1969 Graduates from the University of Melbourne. Family moves to the Melbourne suburb of Macleod. Begins work as Publications Officer, then Assistant Editor, in the Publications Branch of the Education Department of the Victorian government. Birth of the Murnanes’ first son, Giles Francis Murnane, 16 January.

1970 Birth of twin sons, Gavin Edric Murnane and Martin Bevis Murnane, 29 May.

1973 Resigns from the Education Department to concentrate on his writing with his wife’s support. Until he is employed full time again (in 1980) he works as a freelance editor, and receives some grants from the Australia Council for the Arts to support his writing.

1974 Tamarisk Row published by William Heinemann Australia.

1976 A Lifetime on Clouds published by William Heineman Australia.

1980 Begins work as a lecturer in fiction writing at Prahran College of Advanced Education (later Victoria College, later Deakin University).

1982 The Plains published by Norstrilia Press, Melbourne, a press that largely publishes in the genres of science fiction and speculative fiction.

1984 The Plains paperback edition published by Penguin Australia.

1985 The Plains published by George Braziller, New York. Landscape with Landscape published by Norstrilia Press, Melbourne.

1987 Made an honorary member of the Victoria Racing Club. Receives tenured position at Victoria College. Convenes the judging panel for the Fiction Award in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

1988 Inland published by Heinemann, Melbourne. Inland published by Faber, London. Is writer-in-residence at La Trobe University. Appointed fiction consultant for literary journal Meanjin.

1989 Documentary film, Words and Silk: The Imaginary and Real Worlds of Gerald Murnane, directed by Philip Tyndall, premieres at the State Film Theatre in Melbourne, 27 October. Broadcast on national Australian television (SBS), April 1992.

x Gerald Murnane: A Chronology

1990 Velvet Waters, a collection of short stories, published by McPhee Gribble (Penguin). Wins the Barbara Ramsden Award of the Victorian Fellowship of Australian Writers. Writer-in-residence, the University of Newcastle, NSW.

1991 Appointed to the Literature Advisory Panel of the Victorian Ministry for the Arts.

1993 Imre Salusinszky publishes Gerald Murnane, the first academic monograph on Murnane’s work, with Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Imre Salusinszky publishes Gerald Murnane: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, with Footprint Books, Melbourne.

1995 Retires from his position as lecturer in fiction at Deakin University. Emerald Blue, a collection of short stories, published by McPhee Gribble.

1999 Awarded the Patrick White Award for writers who have not necessarily received adequate recognition for their work.

2001 First major conference on Gerald Murnane’s work held at the University of Newcastle, NSW, organised by Imre Salusinszky. Murnane presents a paper entitled “The Breathing Author”. Ivor Indyk is present and asks to publish the essay in Heat magazine, leading to Murnane publishing with Indyk’s imprint, Giramondo Publishing, a few years later.

2005 Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, a collection of essays, is published by Giramondo Publishing, breaking a publishing silence of ten years.

2007 Special Award for Lifelong Achievement, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

2008 Tamarisk Row reissued in a revised edition by Giramondo Publishing.

2009 Barley Patch, a hybrid work of essayistic fiction confronting the question “Must I write?”, published by Giramondo Publishing. Barley Patch awarded the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation. Murnane awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature for lifetime achievement. Following the death of his wife Catherine, Murnane moves to Goroke in rural Victoria to be near one of his sons.

2011 Barley Patch published by Dalkey Archive Press in the United States.

2012 A History of Books, a work of fiction, published by Giramondo Publishing. The Plains reissued by Text Publishing, Melbourne, in the Text Classics series. Inland published by Dalkey Archive Press in the United States. J.M. Coetzee publishes an influential article in The New York Review of Books, “The Quest for the Girl from Bendigo Street”, on Murnane’s Barley Patch and Inland.

2013 A Lifetime on Clouds reissued by Text Publishing in the Text Classics series.

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Inland reissued in a new edition by Giramondo Publishing.

2014 A Million Windows, fiction, published by Giramondo Publishing.

2015 Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf, a non-fiction memoir related to Murnane’s interest in horseracing, published by Text Publishing.

2016 Landscape with Landscape republished by Giramondo Publishing. Awarded Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction for Something for the Pain. A Million Windows published in the United States by David R. Godine, Publisher.

2017 Border Districts, fiction, published by Giramondo Publishing. “Another World in This One”, a one-day symposium on Murnane’s work held in Goroke, Victoria, 7 December.

2018 Mark Binelli publishes the feature article “Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?” in the New York Times Magazine. Border Districts published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York. Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York. Wins Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction for Border Districts. Collected Short Fiction published by Giramondo Publishing. Grenzbezirke (Border Districts) published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Germany. Border Districts shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

2019 Green Shadows and Other Poems published by Giramondo Publishing. Border Districts published by And Other Stories in the UK. Tamarisk Row published by And Other Stories in the UK. A Season on Earth (the full version of Murnane’s second work of fiction, from which A Lifetime on Clouds was excerpted by his 1976 publisher) published by Text Publishing. Border Districts shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Fiction.

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