Readings.com.au: Gerald Murnane

Barley Patch

Barley Patch is Gerald Murnane’s first published book of fiction since 1995. It is a meditation on fiction and Murnane’s own dedication to writing, and an examination of the relation between memory, image and lived experience. It is funny, self-deprecating, personal, as well as thoughtful and reflective, and enchanting in its clarity, detail and evocations of Australian life and landscape.

Tamarisk Row

Gerald Murnane is widely recognised as one of our country’s most significant literary figures – but only one of his novels, The Plains, is available. Until now. For the first time in 20 years, his masterful first novel is back in print. Based on Murnane’s own early years, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood of the 1940s. Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world centred on horse-racing, played in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia.

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

This collection of essays leads the reader into the curious and eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classic novel The Plains, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.

The Plains

On their vast estates, the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land.

A young film-maker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library he begins to take notes for a film, and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role.

Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains.