Displaced Homelands in Gerald Murnane’s Inland

Abstract

Gerald Murnane is the pre-eminent chronicler of Irish-Australian Catholic male youth: its spiritual curiosity, onanistic fantasies and inevitable guilt, and the irresistible attraction to the arcane and the ceremonial. The specifically Irish-Catholic content in his early novels – principally Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), both set in the drought-stricken plains of rural Victoria – turns on Murnane’s deliberate approximations between narrative and autobiography, sufficiently non-identical to bear plausible deniability and which lend the narration a sardonic and amused tone. His later novel Inland (1988) also has its protagonist meditating copiously on his Irish Catholic upbringing and its effects on his understanding of faith, his capacity to enter into romantic relationships, and his sense of the world. The narrative is channelled through a geography of the grasslands of Melbourne County, refracted by meditations on the Hungarian Alföld (an exclave of the great Eurasian steppe) and the North American prairie. This displacement of Irish-Australia by way of Hungary and the United States comprises a deft method by which to examine masculine Australian Irish Catholicity out in plain sight, where geomorphology, ecology, and matters of national identity illuminate the meridians of the Irish-Australian Catholic diaspora.