Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane

Widely studied in Australian literature departments in the late 1970s and 1980s, Gerald Murnane was touted as an important new voice in our national literature, perhaps even someone with the right highbrow credentials to one day win the country’s second Nobel prize. This early success never broadened into popular appeal or international recognition, and by the late 1990s most of his books were out of print. Recently, however, there’s been a resurgence of interest in his work. In 2008 he won two major literary awards for his service to Australian letters, and his first novel, Tamarisk Row, which had not been in shops for nearly twenty years, was reissued by Giramondo. The press like to depict the now 69-years-old Murnane as “obsessive” and “eccentric,” focusing on his unusual habits: collecting marbles, studying Hungarian (although he has never left Australia) and maintaining a vast archive of his private writing and artwork. But it is precisely this obsessive quality that gives his work its thematic unity. Included somewhere in the juvenilia section of Murnane’s archive is a 10,000 word list of “poetic topics,” composed when he was 16 or 17:
‘Really it’s just a summary of what I’ve written about in the last 50 years,’ Murnane told Ramona Koval on the Radio National book show last year. ‘Landscapes and geography, looking at things from a distance, desiring objects of love from far off.’ He is a writer, then, who returns to and inventively reexamines the same preoccupations, rather than one who constantly moves onto new material. Nobody would expect a 9/11 novel from Murnane, or a reflection on Australia’s refugee policy.
‘The things I write about tend to be private matters’ he says (Koval 1). This disinterest in topical material may be one the factors that has hampered his commercial appeal, even as it has given his work a certain timelessness. He has always been a determinedly personal writer, fixated on questions of time, memory, and the self. At times Murnane, like the Borges character Funes, seems incapable of forgetting anything at all. In a short, uncharacteristically misanthropic memoir on his school days for The Age in 2007, he wrote ‘I was taught by 31 persons, each of whom I remember clearly… a good number of them were grossly incompetent.’ In his fiction Murnane’s unerring memory serves him well.

His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is a story of a Catholic boyhood in small town Victoria in the 1940s. It begins with a typically precise image:
‘On one of the last days of December 1947, a nine-year-old boy named Clement Killeaton and his father, Augustine, look up for the first time at a calendar published by St Columban’s Missionary Society.’ (3). This calendar, which depicts the holy family on the road from Palestine to Egypt, provides both an overview of the plot – the Killeatons are forced into exile by Augustine’s gambling debts – and a condensed vision of some of the novel’s central preoccupations: families, the Catholic faith, but above all time and perception. It is at this moment that young Clement becomes explicitly aware of what Paul Eakin refers to in Storied Selves as “the extended self,” that is, the self in time, the self capable of narrating its experiences.
‘Each of the squares is a day all over the plains of northern Victoria and over the city of Basset where Clement and his parents set out’ (3). The moment when Clement and his parents flee Basset, is also the moment in the boy’s development when he gains the perceptiveness that will later allow him to retell the story.


It does not seem to have been easy for Murnane to tell it. Originally published in 1974, Tamarisk Row took ten years to complete. In the foreword to the new edition, the author discusses this process:
‘I sometimes thought about myself as dithering or as needlessly agonizing over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so’ (ix). The result is a masterpiece, indebted to Joyce, and many of the other masters of high modernism, but with a down to earth charm, and idiosyncratic voice all of its own. In this 1940s Australian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as in the original, form and content are perfectly matched. Memorable descriptions of horse racing canter across the page in long breathless sentences. Although the third person is used, the narrator totally inhabits the child protagonist’s point of view; the novel’s short, dreamlike chapters in the present simple tense sliding constantly between the ‘real world’ and that of Clement’s feverish imagination. Tamarisk Row’s great achievement is to plausibly recreate the lost world of a child’s consciousness, and to do so from the inside and outside simultaneously:


‘The boy buys groceries for his mother and then asks politely may he look at Mr Wallace’s aviary…Behind the wire the dense shrubs and trees are planted in the shape of landscapes from every part of Australia. Hidden among the grasslands and scrub and forests and swamps and deserts are the nests of nearly every species of Australian bird. Somewhere past the dangling black and yellow of regent honey-eaters and the elusive crimson and turquoise of paradise parrots Margaret Wallace, a girl no older than Clement, is building a bower like the satin bowerbirds” (4-5).

Imre Salusinszky, arguably Murnane’s canonical critic and the author of the only book length study of his work, argues that the author’s oeuvre as a whole can be read as an exploration of “the adventure of consciousness” (2), concerned with what is inside and what is outside the mind. Tamarisk Row is clearly interested in such questions, but it remains an accessible novel, a moving portrait of a family in distress. The relationship between Clement and his father provides a strong emotional core and ensures it never veers too far into philosophical abstraction. Although Murnane insists that he does not do melodrama: ‘I don’t write books where people shout at each other’ (Koval 3), he can be quietly devastating. Aware that his father cannot acknowledge his gambling debts in front of horse racing friends, Clement is in the habit of asking for money to buy sweets every time they come around. When Clement’s elaborate horse racing games are discovered, the depth of his obsession apparent, his father snaps ‘I’m sick to death of hearing you talk about racing as though I’d never taught you anything else’ (168). But of course it is Augustine’s own fixation on the sport, his frequent absence at track meetings, and Clement’s need for closeness with his father, that drives the lonely boy to such play in the first place.

Not the least of Tamarisk Row’s virtues is its claim to one of the greatest closing sentences in Australian writing, a stirring unpunctuated three and a half page summation of the entire novel that reads like Molly Bloom calling the trots. Here all Clement’s imaginary horses compete to win the Gold Cup and the infinitely protracted race, drawn out over the course of the nearly 300 pages, seems finally to be drawing towards its close. Will it be Lost Streamlet, Passage of North Winds, Hills of Idaho? Or will Tamarisk Row, the little known horse at the back of the pack, who in classic Aussie battler style always leaves his run until too late, storm home when its all over? You’ll need to read this classic Australian novel to find out. It is a rich and serious work of literature that deserves the attention of a new generation of readers.

Tamarisk Row
(2008)
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-39-6
286pp AUS $27.95