Gerald Murnane - Tamarisk Row

Gerald Murnane - Tamarisk Row

The memories of childhood are, for some, an opportunity to study the self in a manner that both allows and requires reflection, distance, empathy and the sadness of passed time. Nothing is ever more deeply felt than the first spray of emotions, and so often the cores of our selves are created in the fleeting imagines, thoughts and sensations of puberty, school, the muddled arguments of our parents, loneliness and friendship. Gerald Murnane’s first novel, Tamarisk Row is a sensitive examination of Clement Killeaton’s childhood years, told through an immediate present tense that creates the sensation both of timeless discovery – the unraveling of adult mysteries by a child about to become an adult himself – and of the specificity of time and place, that being rural Victoria, Australia, in the 1940s after the war is won and the country has yet to discover its new identity following vast political and social upheaval.

The novel is structured as a series of named sections that come every few pages, and bear names such as “Augustine remembers his forefathers” and “Clement fights the son of a bookmaker's clerk”. Aside from these breaks in the text, the entire three hundred page novel is a single paragraph. Most of these pages are written from the perspective of Clement, an intelligent young boy obsessed with horse racing (his father’s obsession) and sex. Clement observes and observes and observes, his mouth closed and his eyes and ears open. Clement is the sort of quiet boy nobody ever notices until suddenly, as if by magic (but of course through hard work), he becomes a great painter or writer. Clement’s observations have the well-worked smoothness of a polished stone, as though the adult Clement, looking back, is writing a story well-told inside his own mind and now finally put on to paper.

But to understand the child you must first understand the father. Murnane begins his novel with sections taken from the young Augustine Killeaton’s life as he leaves his father’s farm to seek fortune in Melbourne. His passion is horse racing, and it seems that his eye for gambling is strong. He falls in with a group of well-groomed men led by Len Goodchild, a group engaged in complex systems of bets across the state in order to capitalise on the slowness of 1940s technology to update odds quick enough. If the plan works (and if the horse wins), everyone walks away with a great deal of money. If not, not. Augustine makes a great deal of money, enough to return home with his head held high. He marries and has a child, and, away from Melbourne now, his gambling takes on a sour note. He chases lost money and bothers Goodchild with frequent phone calls asking for tips on horses and, sometimes, money. But the family never really notices this, or at least not at first. No, Augustine is (he tells himself) a good father, solid and dependable. Augustine, like many gamblers, justifies his behaviour by his supposed superiority over the other punters at the racetracks. He does not drink, never smokes, and stays away from easy women and expensive presents when he does come into some winnings. He wastes none of his money, and indeed, except for gambling, spends little. All of these combine to make Augustine a proud man, one who doesn't have a problem because – people with problems look like they have problems, they act in certain unsavoury ways. But Augustine never does, and all is fine, even if, after losing his money over the weekend, he must now ride his bicycle to work, and, though he has nothing in his pockets now except for the silver coins required to call his gambling friend in Melbourne, pay-day is not too far away. All, again, is fine.

So much for the father. Augustine’s obsession, which is rarely dealt with openly within the family, and hardly spoken of at all, is transferred to Clement. He, too, believes that what his father does is something noble, though that can be understood better as a lonely child hero-worshipping an unworthy father, than any real personal interest in racing himself. Clement builds a miniature racing track, where he races marbles and pretends they are horses. His father, when he learns of this, is touched, frightened, and a little angry, for he believes that surely he has taught Clement more than simply racing. But no, he hasn’t. Consider this lengthy extract, during one of the few outings father and son share together:

On the way home Augustine tells his son that far away to the south beyond the dark bulges of the central Victorian hills in a certain unremarkable square of light within a pattern of square and rows of lights too vast and complex for any one mind to comprehend, a little band of men sits up until almost midnight talking in subdued voices of their daring schemes...Some of them have jobs or businesses that keep them busy on weekdays. Others, the most dedicated and courageous, rely entirely on their cunning and their years of experience and their banks of perhaps a thousand pounds to live for year after year from racing. One or two of these look forward to a series of brilliantly-planned plunges that will earn them so much money that they will never again have to bet for a living, but the others are content to spend the rest of their lives as professional punters, devoted to the game and looking forward to the continual challenge of the Friday night racing papers with their lists of names and predictions of odds that are mostly to tempt mugs but may yield just one or two value bets.

Here we have the essence of the father and the way it affects the son. Clements is, as much as any child but, one suspects, even more than ordinary, a sponge, and he soaks up the lessons he is given. This is the father he knows and thus, the father he has.

The other major aspect of Clement’s life during Tamarisk Row revolves around school and sex. Clement has few friends, none really, though at different times he is friendly with one boy or another. He is Catholic in a town where it matters whether you are Catholic or Protestant, and he is erotic and curious in a town where it really matters. Clement experiments with another young boy, where he lies down on the ground naked while the other boy lies on top of him the way parents do it, and he becomes obsessed with discovering the colour of girl’s ‘pants’. One day after school,

[w]hen he reaches home he clears a space in a paddock of a remote stud farm and writes in the dust the names of all the clean and pretty girls whose pants he has seen. In an unfenced place on the edge of the desert country he starts a list of girls who may soon agree to take down their pants for him.

He has a girlfriend he loves very much whom he has never spoken to, and who he imagines will understand his love simply because it is strongly felt. His eroticism is sensual rather than physical (though there is that element to it as well), and curious females, probably for this reason, seem at least willing to humour him a small amount, for aren’t they curious too?

The schoolyard is tangled up with sexuality, but it is the school that provides the weakest aspect of the novel. Mostly it is interesting, though the too-lengthy middle part of the novel concerning bullies and results weighs down its momentum. This is a slow novel to be sure, but it builds steadily, increasing the pressure of a family weighed down by gambling debts, and a libido weighed down by Clement’s ignorance on how to achieve release. These aspects, particularly Augustine’s gambling, are the strongest, and best, aspects of the novel, and it really does seem that when the school sections arrive, the whole thing falters.

That said, the vast majority of this novel is exceptional, written with a keen eye for both natural landscapes and the comforting contours of inner dialogue. Murnane seems to write effortlessly beautifully, which of course means that there was significant effort behind achieving this work. In the introduction to Giramondo’s Classic Reprints version of the text (which, incidentally, marks the first time in decades that this novel was back in print in Australia), Murnane writes that:

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.

Murnane’s turmoil as a young man (and remember, this was his debut) makes sense considering the absence of anything quite like it in Australian fiction of the time, or indeed from anything written during the 1970s. It is typical to read sentences such as this,

He enters a fernery with walls of damp logs and searches for a hidden doorway among the trembling fronds and the rigid pale green spikes as dense as sheaves and behind the cascades of dark feathery stuff that spill down from hanging wire baskets. Outside the fernery he discovers behind a palisade of tall irises a fishpond overlaid with water-lillies.

And Murnane’s novel is all the more extraordinary because such evocative language really is ‘typical’. Here is a man who has deeply felt, and exhaustively examine, his own memory to create Clement’s. The novel seems written in an eternal present, the actions of Clement and others impressing upon Clement’s mind in a tactile and permanent manner.

As noted above, Giramondo Publishing have republished Murnane’s debut under their ‘Classic Reprints’ label, and they have also, to their credit, published a number of his other works. Ten years ago an Australian reader could be forgiven for remaining unaware of Murnane, and his impact on Australian literature has not been as large as is warranted from the strength and beauty of his work, but now, happily, there is no longer an excuse. If you can read it, you should. Tamarisk Row is wonderful.

See Also

List of Australian authors under review