![]() ![]() Wealth is tied to the ownership of land, longstanding and rooted in the history of exploration. But this is an allegorical, alternative Australia. The landscape-definitive and incomprehensible-shapes the singular society that has evolved there. He has come prepared with a stack of folders bulging with notes relating to the script he is working on, confident that “no one has seen the view of the plains that I am soon to disclose.” And I whispered words that might have serve a character in a film at the moment when he realised he had found where he belonged. I composed my face to register a variety of powerful emotions. I leaned into the surges of air that rose up from the nearest miles of grassland. A breeze came in warm gusts from the north. ![]() I looked past the regular pattern of streetlights towards the dark country beyond. ![]() Late that night I stood at a third-storey window of the largest hotel in the town. Looking back, twenty years on, he recalls his first evening in the town he has chosen as a base: He is a filmmaker who originally traveled to the plains to gather research for a project titled The Interior. The narrator’s account of his arrival in the vast, open lands of the central region of Australia is measured, performative. An otherness is apparent from the earliest pages. ![]() Like the world in which it is set, it eludes concise description, or, rather, any attempt to contain it fails to capture its rare and strange beauty. There is a certain futility in setting out to write a review of Gerald Murnane’s classic novel, The Plains. ![]()
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