AustLit

'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)

'This article takes account of the ‘spontaneity’ of the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane within the ‘dominating space’ of the philosophy of Spinoza. My use of Paul Carter’s terms here is strategic. The compact of fiction and philosophy in Murnane corresponds with the relationship of spontaneity to the dominating organization of desire in Carter’s rendering of an Aboriginal hunter. Carter’s phrase “‘a figure at once spontaneous and wholly dominated by the space of his desire’” worries Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, who suggest that it subjugates the formation of Aboriginal desire (incorporating spontaneity) to impulses of imperialism. The captivating immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy in Murnane’s fiction, which I will demonstrate with various examples, puts pressure on the fiction to occupy the same space as the space of the philosophy. Here is a clue to why Murnane’s post-colonial thematics have been little explored by critics with an interest in post-colonial politics. The desire of Spinoza’s philosophy creates a spatial textuality within which the spontaneity of Murnane’s fiction, to the degree that it maximizes or fills the philosophy, is minimized in its political effects. That is to say, the fiction shifts politics into an external space of what Roland Barthes calls “resistance or condemnation”. However, the different speeds (or timings) of Murnane and Spinoza, within the one space, mitigate this resistance of the outside, at least in respect of certain circumstances of post-coloniality. It is especially productive, I suggest, to engage Carter’s representation of an Aboriginal hunter through the compact of coincidental spaces and differential speeds created by Murnane’s fiction in Spinoza’s philosophy. This produces a ceaseless activation of desire and domination, evidenced in Murnane’s short story ‘Land Deal’, and indexed by a post-Romantic sublime. What limits the value of Murnane’s fiction in most contexts of post-colonial politics, is precisely what makes it useful in the matter of Carter’s Aboriginal hunter.' (Publication abstract)