Tamarisk Row

Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s.

Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world centred on horse-racing, played in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia.

Out of the child's boredom and fear and fascination, Murnane's lyrical prose opens perspectives charged with yearning and illumination, offering in the process a truly original view of mid-twentieth-century Australia.

Based on Murnane's own early years growing up in the Victorian country town of Bendigo, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of an impoverished Catholic childhood in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, not only because of its rich social tapestry and its evocation of the Australian landscape, but because it does magical things with language, its long sinuous sentences capturing the movements of consciousness with a suppleness unmatched in our writing. For this reason, the novel remains as fresh and vital when read today, as when it first appeared.

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