'This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.' (Publication abstract)
'Gerald Murnane is the pre-eminent chronicler of Irish-Australian Catholic male youth: its spiritual curiosity, onanistic fantasies and inevitable guilt, and the irresistible attraction to the arcane and the ceremonial. The specifically Irish-Catholic content in his early novels – principally Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), both set in the drought-stricken plains of rural Victoria – turns on Murnane’s deliberate approximations between narrative and autobiography, sufficiently non-identical to bear plausible deniability and which lend the narration a sardonic and amused tone. His later novel Inland (1988) also has its protagonist meditating copiously on his Irish Catholic upbringing and its effects on his understanding of faith, his capacity to enter into romantic relationships, and his sense of the world. The narrative is channelled through a geography of the grasslands of Melbourne County, refracted by meditations on the Hungarian Alföld (an exclave of the great Eurasian steppe) and the North American prairie. This displacement of Irish-Australia by way of Hungary and the United States comprises a deft method by which to examine masculine Australian Irish Catholicity out in plain sight, where geomorphology, ecology, and matters of national identity illuminate the meridians of the Irish-Australian Catholic diaspora.'
Source: Abstract.
'In 1988, the year that saw publication of Inland, Gerald Murnane gave a talk to an audience at La Trobe University that was subsequently published as “Stream System”.² The talk opened with a seemingly factual account of its author’s morning walk from his nearby suburban home to the Bundoora campus:
'This morning, in order to reach the place where I am now, I went a little out of my way. I took the shortest route from my house to the place that you people probably know as SOUTH ENTRY. That is to say, I walked from the front gate of of my house due west and downhill to Salt Creek then uphill and still due west from Salt Creek to the watershed between Salt Creek and a nameless creek that runs into Darebin Creek. When I reached the high ground that drains into the nameless creek, I walked north-west until I was standing about thirty metres south-east of the place that is denoted on Page 66A of Edition 18 of the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne by the words STREAM SYSTEM.' (Introduction)
