With a group of his students at Victoria College, 1980. All photographs courtesy of Gerald Murnane.

Gerald Murnane lives in Goroke, a town of three hundred people in Australia’s West Wimmera plains. A five-hour drive from Melbourne, the West Wimmera is a sequestered, rural world, but it’s not really the outback. The bushland here has been cleared for wheat cultivation, and venerable gum trees stand alone in the grasslands, as if positioned to emphasize the landscape’s flatness and expanse. It’s a place that has striking affinities with Murnane’s fiction: his narrators always seem to be looking out on “an image-landscape comprising mostly level grassy countryside” with “scattered image-trees.”

For a time, it seemed that Murnane’s career had begun late and ended early. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, when he was thirty-five years old. Written in long, precise, and often extravagantly intricate sentences, its depiction of the imagined world of a country schoolchild won him some modest acclaim. But in those years, Murnane harbored the sense that he was close to failure—misunderstood by critics and neglected by major publishers. What is now his most celebrated novel, The Plains (1982), was originally put out by a small science-fiction press. It concerns the struggles of a young filmmaker to find “some elaborate meaning behind appearances” in the Australian interior, and concludes with the striking image of him turning his camera on his own eye. After Inland (1988), Murnane didn’t publish another full-length work of fiction until 2009, though there were various short stories and essays. Critics have made much of this “hiatus”—the final sentence of the short-story collection Emerald Blue (1995), for instance, seemed to announce his early retirement from writing (“The text ends at this point”). Murnane’s reputation today owes chiefly to his return with Barley Patch (2009), which was followed swiftly by a series of interlinked works: A History of Books (2012), A Million Windows (2014), and Border Districts (2017). Barley Patch, like all these later works, is full of delightful paradoxes—an essayistic elegy for a book its author never managed to write, reveling in the complexities of patterns and images, narrated by a man who avers that fiction is the truest form of reality. In the past fifteen years, Murnane’s work has been celebrated by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Ben Lerner, and he has been a perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize. Several independent publishers in Australia and the United Kingdom have been reissuing his early fiction, most of which had been out of print for years.

Murnane was born in 1939 in Coburg, a working-class suburb of Melbourne. His childhood was shaped by the fortunes and misfortunes of his father, Reginald, a habitual gambler who bet on horse races. In 1964, Murnane began dating his late wife, Catherine, a psychologist; they had three sons, Giles, Gavin, and Martin, and spent most of their lives in Macleod in Melbourne. Giles, their eldest, settled in Goroke before Murnane did. Murnane’s home is essentially a shed located behind Giles’s house—a single rectangular room built out of massive slabs of Mount Gambier limestone, accessible from a gravel alleyway that is strewn with loose sheets of corrugated iron.

Inside, virtually all the available space is occupied by steel filing cabinets, which are where he stores his enormous archives. There are so many filing cabinets that there isn’t room for a bed. He sleeps on a camping stretcher, which he folds away each morning. The archives are divided into three categories: a “Chronological Archive” of personal effects, including a cabinet devoted to what he ominously calls titkos dolgok (Hungarian for “secret matters”); his “Literary Archive,” of manuscripts, unpublished works, and papers relating to his books; and his “Antipodean Archive,” established in 1985, of maps, charts, and records describing, as he has written, “the organisation, administration, and day-to-day running of horse-racing in two imaginary countries by name New Eden and New Arcady and called collectively the Antipodes.” In the drawers are also more than fifty hours of tapes dictated for the benefit of a future scholar who might need help decrypting the archive’s private codes, along with a spare tape player in case the machine has by then become obsolete. Murnane wanted me to know that even the text messages I sent to his mobile phone would be dutifully transcribed and filed away. He evidently enjoys the effect that this unusually scrupulous recordkeeping has on others. Librarians blandish him with estimates of how much the archive will fetch at auction, but there are others whom he suspects of plotting to erase their own traces from the cabinets, which he now keeps under lock and key. “I’ll be better known in fifty years as the author of the archives than I am as the author of my books,” he told me.

Murnane had a detailed itinerary set out for the three days we spent together in July. It began with a drive to the local golf club, which is where he takes all his interviewers and “pilgrims” (his term for the many writers who make the journey to Goroke to see him). The next day, he drove us out into the bushland just south of the Little Desert, which he referred to as “true border district.” During this drive, as often in our conversations, Murnane reported directly to the voice recorder between us (“My interviewer and I have been driving for six or seven minutes … We’ve seen one car, a number of roadside birds …”). Most of our time was spent in his room, where he preferred to act as a patient archivist who happened to be offering me an exclusive tour of the collection. He tended to resist questions about his biography, his opinions, or his writing practice. If I asked him a question about one of his books, he would search the relevant drawer until he found a handwritten note he had once addressed to himself, and then proceed to read this aloud. By the end of the first day, we had barely made it through more than one steel filing cabinet. Murnane would sometimes take a break to make some instant coffee or share some gossip, and at lunch on the second day, he insisted on dropping me off at the Goroke men’s shed, where local retirees occupy themselves with handiwork. The men’s shed was closed that day, but Murnane had a key. I ate my sandwiches alone in the boardroom, like a child waiting for his parents.

INTERVIEWER

When did you move to Goroke?

GERALD MURNANE

The first time I came here was in 1997. My son was living here alone—he’s a hermit, has been for most of his adult life. My wife and I visited regularly till she became ill in 2008. After she died in early 2009, I moved here from Melbourne. The landscape around is utterly silent. You occasionally hear a truck go past, and early in the morning, when not much is happening, you hear planes go over from Melbourne to Adelaide or from Adelaide to Melbourne. Most of my time is spent in this room, which is silent except for when I play the fiddle or sing to myself. And yet I’m busy and active during the day in the men’s shed or on the golf courses of Goroke or Edenhope, and I’m certainly not any sort of recluse or hermit.

INTERVIEWER

What do you like about golfing?

MURNANE

One of the attractions of golf for me is the landscape of the golf course itself. It has to do with my lifelong love or quest of getting myself lost in familiar places. I don’t know at what stage in my life I became interested in this. When I visited other people’s houses as a small child, I’d go in search of rooms that didn’t have windows. I had the hope that I’d find a secret room inside that wasn’t apparent from outside. I can very readily get myself lost in strange country towns or on back roads, knowing all the time where I am, that there’s no threat to my safety, that I can navigate myself home eventually, but enjoying the bewildering and at the same time satisfying feeling that I’m lost in familiar territory.

On most golf courses, unless they’re densely forested, from any one hole you’re able to see an adjoining hole or a hole on the farther side of the adjoining hole or a hole in the distance. I’m sure I’m the only person in the world who’s ever done this—I try to see how many of the eighteen holes I can see from one position. About half the course is visible, in a kind of labyrinthine way. I didn’t create the golf course or lay it out, of course, but being a member of the Goroke Golf Club, and the secretary and the bar manager, I can say that I’m in some ways the proprietor of this course, and I delight in the fact that I could literally walk out there, turn myself around a few times, and, just by confining myself to the view immediately around me, not know where I am.

Murnane, at left, with his brothers, Peter and Denis, in Bendigo, 1945.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that getting lost is a feeling you try to evoke when writing—when carefully constructing a very long sentence, say?

MURNANE

The final section of Tamarisk Row, which results from the putting-together of five gigantic sentences, would be a perfect example. A part of the first sentence proceeds, then stops, and then the first part of the second sentence follows, followed by the first part of the third sentence, and so on. Once the first part of each sentence has been put on the page, we go back to do the second part of each sentence … Now, this might sound a bit of artificial trickery on my part, but it was meant to somehow suggest the confused understanding that a boy could have while listening to the broadcast of a horse race from outside the house, in a backyard. My first knowledge of horse racing came to me as I was playing in the backyard at the age of four or five. I’d hear scattered bits of sound coming to me through the window, so I’d just get these little sequences of the broadcast of a horse race. Once again, part of the pleasure was in knowing that I was listening to a perceptible, rationally founded entity, but at the same time, I was lost.