Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane

I’d forgotten that horse racing and gambling on it were once such an endemic part of Australian life. My own upbringing, like the protagonist’s in this story, was RC and poor. Like his mother, mine was virulently anti-gambling. And like his father, mine was addicted to ‘the races’, as they were always called. In the case of my father, this was despite the stories he would tell of those around him, including his own brothers, being unable to afford warm coats in winter because all their money went on feeding the bookies. The difference, however, was that my mother wouldn’t let my father do it ‘for work’, in that way Augustine justifies his relentless losses, and so almost all my father’s bets were purely theoretical….in that way Augustine’s are when he ‘stops’.

Thank heavens my mother held her ground on this. She herself had experienced anguish at the hands of the ‘industry’. Her very decent father suddenly died when she was at the end of primary school, forcing my grandmother to make ends meet for her four daughters and herself by opening a fruit and veg shop. Unfortunately her very decent dead husband had a brother who was quite the opposite. He ran an SP booking racket using my grandma’s shop as the front. Eventually it was raided and there was a most upright, decent, God-fearing sort of woman up before the courts, taking the blame for her brother-in-law. Perhaps the memory of this was partly to account for my mother’s attitudes, but in any case, she would also have been well aware of what happens to the families of those who decide that they are brighter than the trainers and the bookies and the big punters with their scams.

I never lived in small town rural Australia, but every Australian has been through them, they have felt the glazed heat, understood what the local pool means, seen the still smallness of such places. The aloneness that creates the rich imaginary life of small children like Clement. Because others drink with the consequent brutal behaviour as well as bet, his father Augustine sees the extreme poverty through which he puts his family as somehow more acceptable, superior perhaps. However sorry we feel for Clement, we know there is far worse, within the walls of the story and without.

Murnane has both the knowledge that comes of his own fascination with the horses and the understanding, I suppose born from a capacity to stand outside himself, to see it for what it is. Again, it was incredibly evocative for me. There is a moment when Augustine is regretting not the amount he has lost – that is never a source of regret for compulsive gamblers – but the amount he has won. It brought to mine my friend B. with whom I was flatting. We were part of a community which saw itself as a group of pro betters, this was back before computers made ordinary people able to compete. My friends were all numbers people. Some of them were dedicated professional winners. But some, and B. was one, were mere addicts. B. always made sure he paid his rent and his health insurance, but other than that, it was all for the horses. Or rather, for the people who won from people like him. One work day (as the horse betters saw Saturdays) I heard he’d won a lot of money, it was around 30K. I called him and said the kind of things you say at such a moment. But he was sad, just like Augustine was sad with such a win. Addicts think not of what they did win, but of what they didn’t. It was the one they should have had the house on. It was the first time I really felt pity for B. He couldn’t win, even if he won.

This world of horse betting is dying in Australia. Partly this is because there are so many ways to part addicts with their money these days. But it’s also because horse racing is seen as bad for the animals involved. Gone is the culture of Melbourne Cup day, a day which unofficially served as a national holiday throughout the land. My mother, harking back to the period when this book was set, recalled the big hall at Wayville in which school and university exams were held. At the time the race started, pens were downed, the radio put on, and for ten minutes all in the hall were transported to a different place. Murnane has preserved an Australia which is dying, not only because of the horse races, but because drinking has changed, isolation has changed, attitudes have changed.

Some years back the NYT predicted a Nobel prize for him and I can understand why. By the time I was a few dozen pages into Tamarisk Row, I went back to Imprints and bought another eight by him that they had in stock. I haven’t started my next yet because I found this one deeply painful. Not only because of the horse racing, but also because it dragged up memories of the brutality of Roman Catholicism as we children experienced it in that period. Oh, and we can add gender relations into the mix as well. But above all its precise exquisiteness hurt like needles being placed in just the right positions.

Maybe it’s a book to love, rather than to like. But don’t let that put you off reading it.