Book Review
Thames & Hudson, Fishermans Bend, Victoria, 2002
ISBN 0500 50 010X (hardcover)
In his foreword to Wimmera: The Work of Philip Hunter, the novelist Gerald Murnane speaks of a certain ‘winking’ of detail from the edges of vision, be it visual or imaginary. The author of The Plains, a novel written in 1982 about ‘an imaginary Wimmera’ (Wimmera 11), shares an understanding ‘wink’, a ‘secret knowledge’ (9), with the painter whose recent body of work is also called The Plains. Both reside in the state of Victoria, Murnane revealing that he has ‘found enough hints of strangeness in my native territory without having to look elsewhere’ (10).
Such ‘hints of strangeness’ oscillate in the nocturnal vistas of Hunter’s Wimmera. Murnane’s plainsmen found that what ‘at first seemed utterly flat and featureless eventually disclosed countless subtle variations of landscape and an abundance of furtive wildlife’ (90). And Hunter, through calligraphic trails over an abstracted landscape—sometimes defining a horizon—continues their journey by seeking ‘the vagaries of topography, shifting spatial orders, botanical and geological eccentricities’ (88). Camping in the Wimmera he would discover, as Ashley Crawford recounts, ‘a tapestry of time-based patterns’, including the flight paths of birds and the way that ‘in the darkness tractors would rotate over the fields, their lights picking up flecks of dust’ (111).
Hunter, unlike Murnane, grew up in the Wimmera in the town of Donald. The works of The Plains become, then, a personal voyage of memory and rekindled experience: ‘My landscapes are a metaphor for my knowledge, memory, traditions. I use them as a means of exploring, of journeying. Everyone has their own geography which needs to be mapped out’. (48).
After Murnane’s ‘less is more’ evocation of an imagined ‘level countryside in