We Visited Gerald Murnane at the Goroke Golf Course

member of the community. He's the long standing secretary of the local golf club, hardly a hermit. When The New York Times published a profile, they called it is the next Nobel laureate in literature tending bar in a dusty Australian town, to which the answers are maybe yes, but also he only tends bar on special occasions. But you get the picture. Next Nobel laureate, giant of Australian letters. These are the kind of terms in which Gerald Manane

gets discussed. Another one that gets thrown around is strain but brigiant. He doesn't have readers. He has acolytes people around the world who read him and then devote their lives to writing about him and reading them again and trying to persuade other people to read him. He's this massive figure in the literary landscape, but also an elusive one, not always easy to read and even less easy to describe.

The first year of the name book I read was The Plaines, which is the novel for which is arguably best known. I loved it, I've reread it, and yet I still struggle to describe what it's actually about. The best I can come up with is it's a book that's about itself, but that makes it seem like some kind of metal wank and completely fails to capture the

delicacy and the gentle, probing beauty of the book. He's written ten novels, collections of short stories, essays, a memoir about horse racing called Something for the Pain, and all of this represents one of the most formidable, powerful, singular body of work in literature. So I decided I need to go and visit him, and go and see how Gerald Manine talks about Gerald manatue.

On first approach, I completely missed the dirt track up to the clubhouse. Google Maps has given up the ghost and it's just me and the scrub in 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 fibro building, nestled in the trees, lazy cockies strolling around an overgrown garden.

It's not exactly clear where the golf course itself is, but Gerald is there, unmistakable, ready to talk.

we both lived. He's funny, and this disarming mix of very considered and deliberate on the one hand, and 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 Windows. 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 Kyleaton, 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, Katherine who comes to the foreground first. It was in two thousand nine, following her death, that Gerald moved to Garague, 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.

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 people say, the three 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. I was 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 parlance 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 made me 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 in 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 this survived. 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 that's maybe just a wonderful coincidence. The strange thing is that what I I won't say I yearned for it, but what I felt with a sense of grievance that I deserved but didn't have in all those years I now have. I

don't really take the trouble to appreciate it. I played golf at garage and rasing them, erasing archives and stuff. I hear the sounds of distance thunder and the applause of distant crowds, and things like the poor guy dying at the end of the Duy 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 deserve. 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 Dural the name. Yeah, a bloke was playing golf with me to tournament at Eden Hope. A bloke come up from somewhere in the western district and he said, oh, you're from Baraque. We just finished playing shook heads. He said, you're from Garagua. Said there's somebody there's some sort of famous painter or

somebody visited it. And I said, I think so. And I got out of the phone and I said, will this be heare? He should not be playing golf with you? And people do. I mean, it's not a welcome thing because of the storekeeper and the post office dady 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 answered them, it's happened occasionally.

piece of short fiction. And I wrote the beginning, and I thought for a couple of days I thought, you know, I could go on with that, and then as overcame me, I thought, no, 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 w I get started or I have got started in the past, the last,

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 advanced age. 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 Grog, I didn't think i'd write anymore. I'd finished Barley Patch in the history of books, and I don't often take notice of dreams that I dreamed about colored glass. And I noticed a church, a 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 darce and I realized that colored glass was a strange thing to understand what colored Dace, the true appearance of colored Dace.

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. No, I've

given up writing for publication. The same with the mean 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 cast, and 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 tax me notice, and I should speak in

the past. And something took my eye, and a statement that I've made to the effect that no more books would emerge from me had to be negated.

a line of trees in the distance. I think that's what my mind really is. I know, you know, to something 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? Is my mind just an infinite part of infinitu?

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 reach with my feet.

not literally a human wink. It's a kind of the sort of way that the roof of a house in the very far distance will 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. But 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, 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.

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. In 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. Gerrealmanane is it's fair to say singular. So one comes much of a surprise that the accountentamrisk Row 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, well, we moved to Bendigo in January nineteen forty four, and the third house we lived in.

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 is 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 middle 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. And 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 of a pulf like Australia, at half like New Zealand. She said, where did you find the time? She didn't say you stupid man, or how

silly or how childish? She said where did you find the time?

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 Blyth. When I was a teacher of writing, I was always looking for little maxims and little pieces of guidance that I could pass on to my students because I didn't want to be telling my views. And I've searched through the Paris interviews and books and things, and Robert Lawyer found once made this to me amazing statement. A writer should always and he used the PRONEU and 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, and the books are one result of my trust.

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

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'd 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 you have existed after all.

of stuff. But I 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 look finished and polished, and most of them only looked that way because they went through an enormous amount of rewriting and

re polishing. The 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 ashamed to write long, complicated sentences, but I do feel that I've made some very hard demands on the tamors grow.

There are some passages that I almost I can almost feel my hand that are reaching for a pen or get the typewritter 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 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 wrote. So there's a few various directions. There are some, of course, there are moments that you sort of, you know, you revel in where you think, you know, did I really write that? Like it's too almost, too profound and 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. This'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 weeps. 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 wore, 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 a map. I think that's a good ending for it.

a bit of memoir good luck. Before we go, just to mention that this episode marks the one year anniversary for Read This. Back in July of last year, we shared with you a visit to Helen Garner's house, and now a whole year later, it's a trip to the Garoque golf course. What a treat. It's been an utter privilege to share these conversations with you week in, week out. A huge thank you to you are listeners and the

support we've had from publishers, booksellers and readers alike. And a special thanks to the now more than fifty writers who have given their time, their generosity and the stories behind the books we love. Couldn't be prouder of what we've made. Go and troll through the archive for any episodes you might have missed and buy the writer's books at your local independent bookshop and rate review us, share links to your favorite episodes, even start a book club

about what you've read. Next week on the show, I'm joined by writer Dylan Hartcastle to discuss their new novel, A Language of Limbs, which was inspired by their late great uncle Douglas, who had one of the most moving and affirming responses to Dylan coming out.