Read This: We Visited Gerald Murnane at the Goroke Golf Course

readers so much as acolytes. Described by The New Yorker as the reclusive giant of Australian letters, He's written ten novels, several short story and essay collections, and a memoir about horse racing, all of which represents one of the most formidable and singular bodies of work in literature. Michael Williams is the host of Read This and Here's with Me Now. Hi,

Michael Ruby Jones. Hello, So this feels like quite a special episode, not only because Gerald is sort of famously a bit of a recluse, but also because you actually met him on his home turf of grog. Can you tell me a bit about it?

go to his house though. Gerald lives in a town called Garoque, out in the western district of Victoria, and I met him at the Garoque golf course, where he is club secretary and has been for many years. If you think there's a disconnect between someone being a recluse and being club secretary at their local golf club, you're right. The man is relentlessly sociable, but a little bit off the grid.

that was called Something for the Pain. That sounds prolific, although he's been added for decades and decades now, and he writes these singular someone say, even postmodern books that are as much about the imagination and about the process of writing as they are about anything else. He's probably most famous for a novel called The Plaines, which was the first one of his I read, which is this terrific novel about Sorry I can't.

dirt track up to the clubhouse. Google Maps has given up the ghost and it's just me and the scrub and a quickly disappearing gap in the trees before I find myself lost on some random back road between the paddocks. I circle back, retrace my steps and there it is a squat fibrobuilding, nestled in the trees, lazy cockies strolling around an overgrown garden. It's not exactly clear where the golf course it's a elf is, but Gerald is there, unmistakable, ready to talk. Now.

and places we both lived. He's funny, and this disarming mix are very considered and deliberate on the one hand, an idiosyncratic and completely free range. On the other I keep looking at the spread of books on the tabletop, the beautiful abstract covers and titles like Invisible yet Enduring

Lilacs and a million Windo tamarisk Row is there. It's fifty years since it was first published, and I still remember the little boy at the heart of it, Clement Killaton, sitting on a mat and building an imaginary life, pushing marbles around through which he builds an entire reality. I want to ask Gerald about that boy, about those marbles and stained glass and horse racing, and about perfect sentences.

But when the microphones are on and we start talking, it's his late wife, Catherine who comes to the foreground first. It was in two thousand and nine, following her death, that Gerald moved to Garogue, and it's clear that she remains a significant ongoing presence, not just in his daily consciousness, but in how he regards the world of writing. In the mind, we.

strange well, I don't know really what she had. I suspect that she was puzzled and intrigued to read what I'd written, because it was not often what I talked about. We were very close. We had no hesitation in talking about the most difficult matters or what's it with controversial things that people say, the three those difficult things to talk about on a deep level, of sex, the afterlife,

and money. We managed to talk about those with a few differences, but we didn't ever, very seldom talked about my books. Sometimes I would read to her just a paragraph and she would make a comment, but not often. And then when I stopped writing for publication, I've never

stopped writing. When I stopped writing for publication after the publication of Emerald Blue in nineteen ninety five, and I didn't tell her straight away, And when she found out that I wasn't writing anything for publication, I was very much affected by the disappointment she displayed, and I thought, well, my writing must mean more to you than you've ever

told me. And I've ever suspected, and then after a year or two she began to well in common pilance, niggle at me and say when are you going to start writing again? And when I didn't show any evidence that I was writing again, then she went into a different mode and started to say it's a tragic or yes, she might have used that word, it's a very tragic thing that you haven't got the recognition that you've got

for your books. And that's all she said. I'd had seven books published up till then, and of course the planes have may be almost famous for a few years, but it wasn't enough for her, and she regretted it. And then she lived to see well, she just lived to see the finishing balley patch. And I wouldn't have been so bold as to say this outright in earlier years, but my age, I can say anything and get away

with it. I have an unquenchable, absolutely utterly confident belief that we live on as parts of the survived death. And it's just spooky to me to see that she'd only been dead a few months and I won the Melbourne Prize, and then all the rest has happened in the last few years. I don't say any more than

that it's maybe just a wonderful coincidence. The strange thing is that what I won't say I yearned for it, but what I felt, with a sense of grievance that I deserve that didn't have in all those years I now have, I don't really take the trouble to appreciate it. I played golf at garaagu andsing at them, erasing archives and stuff. I hear the sounds of distant thunder and the applause of distant crowds and things, and like the poor guy dying at the end of the duty obscure

there's a festival in the street or something. He's dying upstairs, and it's not quite like that. But yes, I've got it. All that I won't say yearned for, felt that I deserved. I could have done without. I could have survived without it, but would have been a tough life. And now, if I want to just suppose I was feeling a bit miserable one night, I just go google Jeralm the name her bloke was playing golf as me at a tournament

at Eden Hope. A bloke come up from somewhere in the Western district and he said, oh, you're from Garaque. We just finished playing shook heads. He said, you're from garagu He said there's somebody, there's some sort of famous painter or somebody visit. And I said, I think so. And I got out of the phone and I said, would this be heare? It should not be playing off

for the idea and people do. I mean, it's not a welcome thing because the storekeeper and the post office lady and the people in the town know not to direct people to my house, tell them to put a note in the post office. And if I want to answer them or answer them, it's happened occasionally.

overcame me. I thought, you know, but I'll tell you that because it's it's it's my stating that I won't write again, has been always an honest thing. And then out of the blue comes a possibility and a few words with it, a mental image, a few scenes, and and I get started, or I have got started in the past the very last book was written. The explanation is simple. I was writing these essays for the archive, and not writing them with elaborate care, just writing them

as you write a diary entry. And then I was writing about my own books, what they meant to me at my advand stage, and I let my publisher know of this, and he urged me and succeeded in persuading me to write them for publication. So that's one example of how a book came about that I never intended to write, but the others genuinely came. See. When I

came to Gark, I didn't think i'd write anymore. I'd finished Balley Patch in the History of Books, and I had I don't often take notice of dreams, but I dreamed about colored Glass. And I noticed a church of little Old Wesleyan Church around the corner from the house where I'm living at my son's house, and I looked at the colored glass, and I realized that colored glass was a strange thing. To understand what colored duce the true appearance of colored das you didn't stand outside in

the light, you stood inside in the darkness. I couldn't see what these windows represented in the church because I was out in the bright sunlight. And to understand I had to go into the dark the gloomy church, which I eventually did and saw what they were. And just that mystery of vision and the appearances fascinate me. So the book Border Districts came from there, although as I said, i'd announced the people. Now I've given up writing for publication.

The same with a million windows. Once upon a time, I got a lot of my just background knowledge from reading good Old Time, not Time, Australia, Time, International, way back in the sixties and seventies. And I also used to admire when I went to films, which I've stopped doing a long time ago, I used to admire some of the films or scenes in the films of Ingemar Bergman and looking through the I was looking through some old time magazines from about the eighties and I noticed it.

In his last years Bergmann decided to make a film I don't know if he ever succeeded, and it was to be set in a castle, and in every room of the castle was one of the characters from one of his other films. And I thought straight away it just came to with that I could write a book about a house. And I thought of Henry James's words that the house of fiction has a million windows. All the books that I've admired, or the writers that I've admired,

are all living in this castle. I'm there among them, nameless and anonymous, and we're all writing, and we have a few drinks together at night and talk about our writing methods and such things. And out of those daydreams almost came the book A Million Windows. So once again a chance happening, something catches my eye takes me notice, and I should speak in the past, And something took my eye, and a statement that I'd made to the effect that no more books would emerge from me had to be negated.

the distance. I think that's what my mind really is. I know to some it would seem a childish thing, too bad. And the next question is what's behind the line of trees. Well, if you go through the trees, you're in another sort of bare landscape, and ten kilometers further over is another line of trees. And that gets me going on the business of infinity is time, infinite is space? Infinite is my mind? And is my mind just an infinite part of infinitud Now I don't think

in those words, but I think visually. And the thing that might lead me to write the next book or in the past when I was writing, might be beyond the third or fourth line of trees, which might take me some time to reach in my mind or rich with my feet.

not literally a human wink. It's a kind of the sort of way that the roof of a house us in the very far distance will wink at you when the sun catches it as you're driving on a distant road. And so these images that wink at me. And if I wink at somebody or I don't. But in the old agement people wink at each other, it was often it was to signify that a bit of shared knowledge You and I know better than that, don't we wink? Wink, nudge, nudge,

wink wink. So when these things wink at me, they're saying, gerald, I know something that you ought to know, or we really share something that we ought to talk over and elaborate on. And it's that feeling that this utterly ordinary looking image has something to tell. Well, what it has to tell is that I've come to understand this after years of experiencing it. It's connected with another image, which

I didn't know it was connected with beforehand. And then when you get to that image and write about it, or when I get to write about it, I find that three other images are appearing in the further background, and they're all connected to Hey, presto, I've got a book of fiction.

never voluntarily immersed myself in any sea or stream. I've never touched any button or switch or working part of any computer or fax machine or mobile telephone. I've never learned to operate any sort of camera. Nineteen seventy nine, I taught myself to type using the index finger of my right hand alone. Since then, I've composed all my fiction and other writing using the finger just mentioned, and

one or another of my three manual typewriters. It's a fabulous list and well worth reading that essay, Geraldmnane is it's fair to say singular. So one come as much of a surprise that the account in tamersk Grow of a little boy playing imagined horse races with marbles on a mat provides an insight into a key passion of Gerald's, a lifelong obsession and an underpinning philosophy for his life. Talk to me about imagined race horses.

repeat some of the names of the horses. And I didn't do this as a parrot might do it. I've see now that I did it because I was almost destined to do it, and it fulfilled a deep need in me to have at the far end of my vision, and Melbourne was about as far away as I could imagine, there was an endless horse not an endless horse race, an endless series of horse races taking place. Now we both, my interviewer and I smile at each other then, and it is a child childlike and the sort of thing

that you'd smile at. But eighty years later, I still insist that one of my deepest needs is to be confident that in the background of my mind there was a horse race going on, and I could elaborate a lot on that. What were the names of the jockeys, what was the name of the race course, what were the names of the horses, what colors were the jockeys wearing, what were the odds? How was the race going to end?

And this series of questions can occur to me at any time of the day, I'll be driving somewhere, or walking on the golf course, doing any number of things, and suddenly one of these invisible horse races will take place. Now, when I stopped writing for publication in the mid nineties, I had already devised the beginnings of a collection of pages and notebooks and files which would finally And it wasn't the first time in my life I tried this. I tried it at the ages of fifteen and sixteen.

I tried to draw the race courses and name the horses that were performing invisibly at the outskirts of my mind. I first concealed it from people. The first person I told was my wife. I said, I've got this archive starting up with just fictitious horses. That doesn't it No one knows where they are well, sort of half like Australia and half like New Zealand. She said, where did you find the time? She didn't say you stupid men, or how silly or how childish? She said where did

you find the time? She said, you brought up three kids, you worked at two jobs, you wrote all, one job being the writing job. Where did you find the time? And I don't know where I found the time, but the archive is grown, it's potentially infinite, as most such things are, and it gives me enormous satisfaction to know that I've documented some of these said far, far reaching or distant entities. So it's something that developed in me from an early age, and I thought it was something

I ought to keep quiet about. But I never thought it was anything symptomatic of some fault in me or failing. It's the most difficult thing to explain, and the thing, that one thing that's kept me balanced and secure about this when I reflect on this. An American poet who went a bit funny in his old age, and his

name was Robert Blyer. When I was a teacher of writing, I was always looking for little maxims and little pieces of guidance that I could pass over my students because I didn't want to be telling my views all the time. And I searched through the Paris interviews and books and things, and Robert Bleier, I found once made this to me amazing statement A writer should always and he used the

pronoun his, a writer should always trust his obsessions. And thank goodness for me, I trusted my obsessions, my horse racing obsessions, my landscape sessions, my daydreams about the Western District and the plains and so on. Books are one result of my trust.

I can't go too big, or I can't be obsessive or passionate or and I like that you don't have any inhibition about that, your obsess on, your passionate.

those books and never have. But now I realize I was perhaps lucky not to because it might have persuaded me that the only way to be a writer was to be Henry Lawson or a Mary Grandbrews, whereas I was just locked away with hardly any books to read until I joined libraries, only my glass marbles and the games in the backyard with my brothers, making mud roads and building, imagining farmhouses, putting little people in the little

tweag people in the farmhouses. That was my substitution for reading. And I think I'm lucky. It's a pity that I didn't get that background in one way, but I don't think it's hardly in anyway. I think I was lucky in the end. It happened as it did.

but her appearances is very hard to discern. And my ideal reader I've only discovered in recent years is a supreme importance to me, and I get a sense of justification for having thought about her all these years. Every now and then, when somebody in Duluth, Minnesota, or Cape Town, South Africa and will write to me, it needn't be a woman, and I'll just say, look, I've been reading your books for fifteen years, and if I lost all my other books and I kept hold of yours, that

would be all I'd want to keep. And this only happens once every year or so. And I'm not making this up for sentimental reasons or striking a pose. It is an enormous reward for all the effort that I put into. And there were years when I wondered whether these people existed, and they turned out to be They didn't. They only existed in potentiality in those days. Then I wrote the books. Then they read the books, and they proved to have existed. After all.

tried again in the COVID years to read them. I can read them in parts. I have reread Tamaris Grow. And then I got into a second book, I thought, no, I can't do this. It's it wasn't revolting or hurtful. It actually made me feel tired, tired of just remembering the huge amount of work that went into them, because that's something that they looked finished and polished, And most of them only looked that way because they went through

an enormous amount of rewriting and re polishing. But later books I got smarter, and I could write sometimes in one or two drafts. There's another feeling I've had. It's it's a multiple thing that the other feeling I've had was that I could have done it better or differently. There are sentences. Now I'm not a sha aim to write long complicated sentences, but I do feel that I've

made some very hard demands on the tamras grow. There are some passages that I almost I can almost feel my hand that are reaching for a pen or get the typewriter over and rewrite them, just break them up a little. They're all grammatical sentences, they all make sense, but they almost need to be sort of set out on cards and flashcards, and we put it around the

table to put them back where they naturally belong. There's a few books, and I can't think of an example of this, but I've had the feeling where I felt that I could have said more, revealed more, perhaps about gone more deeply into something I hesitated because in my earlier years I thought, no, no one writes like that. But of course when you think that thought, you really should write that, because that's what you were meant to write, not the way other people write. So there's a few

various directions. There are some, of course, there are moments that you sort of you know, you revel him where you think, you know, did I really write that? Like it's too almost too profound and to too marvelous for me who have written. There's a sentence on early in a Million Windows. It's mentioned in the essay on a Million Windows. I remember the day I wrote it at the desk, all in one draft, and after I'd written it, I wrote in pencil beside it, this may be the

best sentence I've ever written. And over in Adelaide a few years later, when the book was published, a man called Shannon burns pencil beside the same sentence, this may be the best sentence I've ever read. There's an extraordinary occurrence. And he told me about it, and I said, I think I know the sentence you mean. And I took him to the he was in my room. I took him to the sentence. So you get these moments as well. Look,

I'm one of the lucky ones. You know. If there's any guiding light through this mad jungle of publication and writing and thwarted ambition, it's that you don't imitate to think that of all the things I could have written about in the late sixties, the Vietnam War, the rising of the feminist Jermaine Greer and stuff, what did I start at? A boy in a shabby little weatherboard house pushing glass marbles around the map. I think that's a good ending for it. Yeah, where do you go?