In his author’s foreword to Landscape with Landscape, first published forty years ago, following his breakthrough novel The Plains, the Australian writer Gerald Murnane reveals that he is ‘sometimes dismayed to hear my body of work described as some sort of orderly programme that I devised early in my career and followed faithfully afterwards’. And yet the book he is introducing suggests that the accusation is fair. Towards the end, the narrator (who resembles the author) sets out, late at night, to ‘devise a new form of prose fiction – neither short story nor novel – with a shape to match the pattern of my life. After that I went on drinking calmly in the kitchen and reading and looking at maps.’

The six interlocking stories in Landscape with Landscape involve a lot of drinking – beer mostly, rum with lime cordial on occasion – and, above all, looking at maps. But then maps are never just maps to Murnane; they are, he writes, ‘a sort of dream’. The tales, full of