Happily, though we’re only two years shy of his imagined dystopia, the Goroke symposium took place in the context of a belated surge of interest in Murnane’s work. Here in the United States, Murnane’s publishing history was spotty to nonexistent until Dalkey Archive, a small literary press, released his novel “Barley Patch” in 2011. This month, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish “Stream System,” Murnane’s collected short fiction, and a new novel, “Border Districts.”

The trickiness of categorizing Murnane’s work goes some way toward explaining why he’s not a household name, even among households with lots of books. Is he an outsider artist or a postmodern master? Both? Neither? As much as Murnane reveres Proust, his own elaborate memory palaces remain a genre unto themselves. On a sentence level, Murnane adheres to a militant grammatical precision and engages in repetition that verges on the incantatory (and that privileges the noun over the pronoun). It’s a hypnotic style, dryly funny, or at least aware of the ways in which its fussiness might be amusing. In 1990, The London Review of Books published a cranky letter from Murnane that read, in full: “Dear Editors, Frank Kermode quotes what he calls a very long sentence from Thomas Pynchon (LRB, 8 Feb, 90). The passage quoted is not a sentence. The passage consists of a sentence of 66 words followed by a comma and then a sequence of clauses and phrases that is neither a part of the sentence preceding it nor a sentence in itself.”

Murnane once described himself as a “technical writer” — meaning, he explained, that in his depictions of “the mental imagery that is my only available subject-matter,” he strove for the rigor and precision of a white paper. (He often refers to his stories as reports.) I’d say he’s more like a detective, pacing in front of a gigantic evidence board. A typical Murnane work of fiction unfolds like a procedural, often spinning out from a single, half-remembered image, something as simple as a jockey’s racing colors, as glimpsed on a youthful outing to the track in Bendigo, a city in Victoria. Other memories will follow — anecdotes, personal asides, funny or sad little stories within the story — and it can all seem digressive, until the methodical obsessiveness of Murnane’s self-interrogation becomes clear. He’s searching the furthest reaches of his memory for clues, hidden meanings, details that might have slipped away. The digressions turn out to be leads. And in the end, there’s no writing-workshop epiphany, but rather that thrilling moment when the circles and arrows linking up the photographs thumbtacked to the squad-room wall form a previously unseen web of connection.

For newcomers, the wide-ranging “Stream System” is the place to begin. Some of the stories assume more recognizable forms — for instance, the entire history of Australian colonialism becomes a concise, Borgesian parable about desire in “Land Deal.” Most of the other pieces feature self-conscious narrators who compulsively draw readerly attention to the text (“Boy Blue” begins “A few weeks ago, the person writing this story read aloud to a gathering of persons another story that he had written”) and could be read as fragmented, expressionistic memoirs in miniature. In “Velvet Waters,” the subject is failed romance; in one of the story’s funnier episodes, the shy, Murnane-like narrator tries to impress a love interest by telling her about a weekend trip to an art movie — unfortunately, it’s Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” and he ends up going into great detail about the rape sequence. “Cotters Come No More” is a tribute to a complicated relationship with a favorite bachelor uncle who, in a lovely bit of imagery at the opening of the story, traps a fly under a glass, tosses it into a spider web “and then stands with his hands on his hips, observing.” Later, the teenage narrator recalls walks with his uncle on the family land, where

the chief event of the afternoon might have been his sitting down beside me on a hilltop, taking out of his trousers pocket the folded form-guide from The Age, pointing to a certain name among the fields of horses, and then fiddling with his wireless until I was just able to hear, above the crackle of static and the buzzing of insects in the grass, the call of a race more than a hundred miles away with the horse that my uncle had brought to my notice in the thick of the finish.

In a long appreciation in his recent collection of essays, Coetzee praised Murnane’s “chiseled sentences,” placing him among of the last generation of Australian writers to come to maturity when the country “was still a cultural colony of England, repressed, puritanical and suspicious of foreigners.” Murnane’s Australianness comes through most clearly in “The Plains” — considered his masterpiece by many — which follows an artist seeking patronage from wealthy landowners in a mysterious frontier town, hoping to film the unfilmable secrets of the titular landscape. The world Murnane describes is a dream-country, where battles are waged between rival schools of artists (the Horizonites and the Haremen) and coastal condescension is flipped on its head as the vast, unloved interior becomes a place of rich and bedeviling obscurity, where landowners in their baronial estates “pity the poor coast-dwellers staring all day from their cheerless beaches at the worst of all deserts” and express bafflement with “their awe at a mere absence of land.”

When I spoke to Salusinszky, a former professor of English who published a monograph on Murnane with Oxford University Press in 1993, he brought up the story “Precious Bane,” which is also included in “Stream System,” pointing out that the title is a phrase used by Milton to describe money, something “we need to get the things we want.” Salusinszky went on, “I think for Gerald writing is a kind of precious bane. It’s a burden and a nuisance, almost a duty, having to explore the connections between the images in his mind. And he keeps telling us that he has done his duty, that this is it. But of course, to use, if you’ll forgive me, Derridean language, there’s always a supplement. There’s always an appendix. There’s always something left unsaid.”

My first day in Goroke, Murnane instructed me to pick him up at the local Men’s Shed, housed in a former bank. For the non-Australian reader, a quick explanation: A men’s shed is a communal workshop where members do things like repair shelves or bicycles, part of a national public-health initiative aimed at curbing depression among retired men. Murnane possesses few useful skills for a men’s shed, but the week after he moved to Goroke, the owner of the local service station invited him to join. He looks after the kitchen, cleans the toilet and serves as treasurer.