The best author you’ve never heard of

Victorian author and mad punter Gerald Murnane has been dubbed “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of”. Here’s why.

Gerald Murnane is the best author you’ve probably never heard of. Picture: Aaron Francis

Gerald Murnane is no recluse. Of all the myths and legends that have grown around the Victorian author tipped for a Nobel prize in Literature, it’s the one easiest to dismiss.

For more than a decade, the 80-year-old has chosen to live in a room at the back of his eldest son’s property in the small town of Goroke at the western end of the Wimmera.

It has a population of less than 300 and Murnane seems to know them all.

He’s an active member of the town’s Men’s Shed and secretary of the Goroke Golf Club, where he also runs the bar, all while welcoming visitors from around the world.

His small room is dominated by an archive, started more than 50 years ago, that will be fought over by libraries after his death. It’s an astonishing collection of cuttings, letters (he doesn’t own a computer), manuscripts and all the paraphernalia of life, including his childhood marble collection.

He’s been called a recluse because of his refusal to attend writers’ festivals, his infrequent visits to Melbourne and the fact that throughout his life he has rarely left Victoria.

But there has probably never been a more sustained bout of honesty in literature, which led The New York Times last year to describe him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of”.

And he’s proven to be a stayer, rather than one of the sprinters he started alongside in the 1970s. There was a period when he was rested (out of print) in the 1990s, but he came back all the better for the spell.

The reason for the racing parlance, other than it is spring in Victoria, is that Murnane is famously obsessed with horseracing and has been since childhood.

In his short story The Angel’s Son, he says: “ … I have got from horseracing during my lifetime more meaning than I have from literature or music or any other branch of what is generally called culture”.

He explores his lifelong love of the track most fully in 2015’s Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf.

Murnane at his home in Melbourne.

‘The Plains' by Gerald Murnane.

His favoured subject in fiction is finding what happens in his own mind when he reads a book.

“That’s why I hated university,” he says during our long talk at the golf club that boasts 24 members. My wife played nine holes while we talked, with Murnane inviting her to take a cup of tea after the sixth, which passes close to the clubhouse.

None of his welcome, talk or concern about our travel and accommodation spoke of someone who wanted to be left alone. His natural demeanour may be stern but when he smiles it takes over his whole face.

“To get away from university (straight from secondary school), I thought God was calling me to be a priest, and I got out of it that way. My future wife, the first real girlfriend I had, said if you don’t go to university you won’t see much of me in the future.

“So I went to university, did my degree and hated every minute of it, particularly academic English. They just seemed to be talking a completely different language.

“Books have kept me alive (but) I will not engage in dry-as-dust talk about the meaning … I know what books mean to me, they mean everything.

“Not all books — most books are crap.”

Murnane was more than happy to spend time with us, as long as it was a Friday, the day he sets aside for curious journalists.

A couple of hours after our arrival and after many words were recorded, I broached the subject of the Nobel prize for Literature, thinking that he may have become tired of the speculation.

Would he travel to Sweden to pick up the gong at a gala if he was to become Australia’s second only winner behind Patrick White in 1973?

(Murnane told a University of Newcastle audience once that he had never been farther north than Murwillumbah in NSW, farther south than Kettering, Tasmania, farther east than Bemm River in Victoria, or farther west than Streaky Bay in South Australia. And he had never travelled on a plane.)

“Last year, (my book) Border Districts won the biggest award I’d ever won, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. It was to be presented in Canberra. The organisers of the award were insistent that I should go. I arranged with a friend of mine to come down from Queensland. We set out for Canberra and I had every intention of going there.

“Our first night, we were in adjoining rooms in St Arnaud and running behind time for nobody’s fault, and I could not sleep.

“I’m usually a fairly sound sleeper but that night I couldn’t sleep for the fear and apprehension of what lay ahead — a huge road trip from St Arnaud to Canberra in one day, finding my way around Canberra where neither of us had ever been, facing up to the presentation the next day and all the fuss, interviews and lunch and stuff that followed. And, the worst of all, having to meet a tight schedule.

“In order to calm myself and get some sleep, I arrived at the decision that we would not go to Canberra — and we did not. We went sightseeing at Bendigo.

“People who were my fans and admirers in Canberra, instead of seeing me take the prize from the Prime Minister, they saw my publisher and they heard him read out a prepared statement that I’d given him over the phone.

“Apparently the prevailing opinion was that they would have been disappointed if I had turned up. They thought it was more in keeping with the legends that surround me that I didn’t make it.

“Canberra is far enough and at least I tried to get to Canberra. No, I wouldn’t try to go to the northern hemisphere.”

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Murnane began his working life as a primary school teacher before becoming a secondary teacher and then a teacher of creative writing from 1980 to 1995. His writing life started in 1974 with the publication of Tamarisk Row, the name — no surprise — of a racehorse featured in the book. But it wasn’t until 1982’s The Plains, his third book, that critics and readers started to really take notice.

Murnane is unafraid in his writing to revisit various themes, observations and images, most from his childhood. One of them is a stone house with return verandas.

The marbles Murnane has carried with him since childhood.

“As a child, like all children, I longed to be somewhere else. Ours was a pretty drab environment. I had a rich imaginary life but not much of an actual life, and my father’s father lived in a stone house right on the coast. They had bulky timber furniture, a piano, a shelf-full of books and this wonderful return veranda. And I don’t know why but the return veranda became for me a symbol of opulence. More importantly still, on my bus trips from Bendigo to Ballarat to Warrnambool … I would look out at the western plains, somewhere between, say Skipton and Darlington, and I wouldn’t even see the houses they’d be so far back from the road, but I formed in my mind a kind of ideal setting, or an ideal landscape, which consisted of mostly level grazing land and these magnificent, sometimes two-storey homes — the homes of the great squatting age in the Western District. I never actually saw them except in pictures.”

Before moving to Goroke, Murnane lived in the same house in the northern suburbs of Melbourne for more than 40 years, where he and wife Catherine (who died in 2009 and is buried at Goroke cemetery) brought up their three sons. But both sides of his family came originally from Warrnambool, Mortlake and surrounding areas.

“There are lots of reasons why I’ve never travelled, but the one I most commonly give is that even at my age I still find enough mystery in just the western part of Victoria that is basically my native country — and the southwest and up to Bendigo. And it still fascinates me.

“I’ve been six or seven times to Sydney, and the first few times when I had time I’d go for a look around. I walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1964 — I can’t believe I did that now. The last time I was in Sydney was in 2007 when I went up to get an award. They put me in a little boutique hotel and the last day in Sydney was free, and I thought about what I might do, but I had no reason to pretend any more about my true preferences so I sat in my hotel room and read a book.

“I’m centred and grounded and at home, particularly in this part of Victoria. I’m quite content.”

Yet Murnane’s works feature such disparate places as Tristan da Cunha (a remote group of islands in the south Atlantic Ocean) and West Virginia, seemingly strange choices for someone who’s not travelled.

Gerald Murnane looks through his archive.

“As kids we were starved of things to read,” he says. “(My father) used to visit schools in Bendigo (where the family lived) and when they were throwing out library books and magazines he’d scoop them up and bring them home for us to read. And he brought home about four old National Geographics, and in one of them was an article about Tristan da Cunha. I’m about seven years of age reading about it and, of course, you’d read it once and then a couple of weeks later you’d look around for something to read and you’d read it again.

“So I became a sort of childhood expert on Tristan da Cunha, Finland, Malta, West Virginia. I knew more about Tristan da Cunha than I did about Melbourne.”

During his writing life, Murnane has speculated about how he would be received in the future, and whether he would even be remembered. A character in his short story Precious Bane imagines looking at his bookshelves in 2020 and wondering if anyone is still reading him.

“My proudest achievement is to hear from some young person who wasn’t even born when that book came out that they can’t get enough of my books,” he says.

“There were authors who were regarded as our leading writers of the day who are not in print now — I won’t say they’re forgotten — and all of my books are in print, which I find incredible. They were all out of print in 1999 when I won the Patrick White Award, which is for a writer who has not received their due recognition. I was 60 years of age and hadn’t had anything published for five years.

“Now look at me. The reason is, I think, and it’s not really for me to say but I’ll say it, is that I didn’t write about what was in the newspaper headlines. I wrote about things that seemed to matter no matter what’s in the news.”

Unfortunately, Murnane doesn’t get to many race meetings these days, particularly if they fall on a Sunday, the golf club’s competition day.

“In my lifetime, I’ve seen the closure of probably 40 racing clubs in Victoria. We’re lucky up here, we still have a Boxing Day meeting at Nhill, a wonderful atmosphere. We have two annual meetings at Edenhope and about four meetings a year at Horsham.”

Murnane rarely makes it to city meetings, but when golf allows he can be seen at Horsham, Naracoorte and Penola races as well as the steeple chases at Casterton.

“I get enough of racing but my racing now is more of memories — and having the pleasure of a lifetime of racing memories to dwell on.”