Read the opening story of Collected Short Fiction by Gerald Murnane, a volume published by Giramondo in 2018. In 2026, Murnane was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the General Division for distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, and to tertiary education.

One afternoon in one of the years when I used to stay at home to mind my son and my daughter and to do the housework while my wife was away at her job, my son was caught in a thunderstorm. The storm broke over my suburb at half past three, which is the time when schools are dismissed.

I had been alone in the house since half past eight that morning, when my children had left for school. All afternoon I had watched from my windows while the clouds gathered. I had thought of the storms that broke every few days in summer over the city where I had lived from my fifth year to my tenth year. That city was a hundred miles inland from the suburb of Melbourne where I lived with my wife and my two children. In the thirty-three years since I had left the inland city, whenever I had seen the sky darkening by day I had remembered the storms that gathered outside my schoolroom window in the 1940s.

The storms of those years had always arrived at mid-afternoon. When a storm was overhead the teacher would have to switch on the lights in the darkened schoolroom. Before the first lightning flashed, I moved as far away as I could move from the schoolroom windows. At home I used to hide from lightning by lying on the floor under my bed. At school I could only press my face against the desk-top and ask God not to let the lightning strike me through the windows. I never thought of lightning as striking a group of children. I saw in my mind the zig-zag of gold stabbing down from the black clouds and piercing the heart or the brain of the one child who had been marked out for dying on that afternoon.

When I thought of myself being killed by lightning, I dreaded the confusion this would cause. After I had failed to arrive home at the usual time, my father would search for me along the streets that I had promised I would follow every afternoon. (Before my first day at school I had promised I would never turn aside from McCrae Street, Baxter Street, and McIvor Road. On the very few afternoons when I left those streets and walked for a little way along the creek, I supposed as I walked that my father was hurrying along McIvor Road while I was down among the bulrushes. My father had set out from home to meet me, I supposed. He had come to tell me that our house had been burned down or that my mother had been killed, but we had passed one another without knowing. On those afternoons I had almost turned back from the creek to make sure that my father was not somewhere behind me and walking away from me. And even while I wondered whether I ought to turn back, I thought of my father’s arriving at the school and then turning back towards home but this time leaving the streets and walking along the creek for a little way because he thought I might have been loitering there whereas I was just then going back towards the school by way of the streets and passing my father again unseen.) When my father could not find me in my usual streets, he would think at first that I had turned aside to watch the water in the creek flowing swiftly after the storm. He would go down to the bank of the creek, and while he was looking for me among the bulrushes a priest from the presbytery next to my school would ride his bicycle along McCrae Street and Baxter Street and McIvor Road on his way to my father’s house to tell my father, who was not at home, that his only son had been killed by lightning.

I prayed that I would not be killed by the storm and that my father would not be lost and confused during the hour when the clouds had passed suddenly away to the east, and when the twilight that had seemed about to turn into darkness had turned instead into a bright afternoon with wet leaves flashing in the sun and steam rising from roofs. I prayed, and I was always spared, and I walked home while the gutters were flowing and the last of the black clouds were rumbling above the eastern horizon.

While the gutters flowed and the wet leaves flashed and the steam rose from iron roofs, I understood that I had been spared, but perhaps only for two or three days. The lightning that could have killed me was stabbing at the dark-green treetops far away past Axedale and Heathcote. By midnight the gold zig-zags would be shooting harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean. Days or even weeks later the clouds would settle quietly among the mountains of New Zealand or of South America. But somewhere behind me while I walked eastwards towards my home, another storm would soon arise.

Gerald Murnane has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, and to tertiary education.

‘This is an expression…of recognition from the only country I’ve ever known,’ Murnane, now 87, told the Australian. ‘I’m an extraordinarily lucky person. I’ve had, let’s say, 16 books published; I enjoy my life.’

Murnane is a writer of fiction, memoir, essays and poetry. His books, which have been published in many territories worldwide, include Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows, Border Districts, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Green Shadows and Other Poems, and Last Letter to a Reader. He is a recipient of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation, and various other awards. In 2018, the NYTimes published a feature story with the headline ‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?’

Last year, Giramondo Publisher Ivor Indyk was recognised on the King’s Birthday Honours List, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his service to Australian literature.