AustLit

'I have been delivered of my books.'

These words hang in the air as Gerald Murnane confirms his retirement during a rare address to around thirty academics, writers, publishers and fans at the Goroke Golf Club. The one-day symposium, 'Another World in This One : Gerald Murnane's Fiction, is part of the Western Sydney University's 'Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature' project. On first glance it is a curious connection: how can the life work of an author who has rarely left the small pockets of Victoria, suburban Melbourne and a few regional villages and towns that he has called home for eighty years inform us about a literature of the 'world'?' (Introduction)

'[...]the uncanny is from its beginning linked to a confusion between the recognizable and unrecognizable, as well the narrator's confusion over the true state of the world. If an attempt to "see properly" is signaled in the beginning and end, then the contents of the novel drives the filmmaker from searching the landscape for a "meaning behind appearances" to the final scene, where the filmmaker offers this image: "my finger poised as if to expose the film in its dark chamber that was the only visible sign of what I saw beyond myself' (Plains 174). Murnane's return to publishing fiction began with Barley Patch (2009), in which the unnamed narrator says that it would suit his purpose to report learning while young that "a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory" (71). Gelder and Jacobs use the idea of the uncanny as a means to explore a history of disquiet happenings in postcolonial society, and a feeling of disquiet does seem to exist in The Plains, in its examinations of exploration and changing landscapes.'  (Publication abstract)