Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  When that question is put to him, the man says he hardly ever travels, and certainly never to the places that other people choose as their destinations. He says he has never been in an aeroplane and he has only once crossed the River Murray in a northerly direction. And while his interviewer pauses to wonder about all this, the man adds that he does all the travelling he needs to do in his mind—in his dreams. (It is quite in character for the man to use words such as mind and dreams loosely like this. He has very vague notions of what he consists of. His inner life, if it could be so called, is a continual wandering through a maze in which the walls are images of the places he has never travelled to.)

  If the people who are always declaring that God is dead are really yearning deep down for God to appear and to put his arm around their shoulders, then the man who keeps on telling the world that he never travels must be secretly waiting for a well-wisher to present him with a passport and a sheaf of travellers’ cheques and to tell him to sit back and relax because he’s going to be whisked away to all the places his nomadic heart has always yearned after.

  Where would the stay-at-home choose to go if this journey of a lifetime was put in his way? What means of travel would he use? And would he travel alone, or would he have a companion when he crossed the Great Dividing Range?

  I see that I have answered one of my questions already. The man of this story has always thought of travel as taking him first northwards across the Keilor Plains towards Mount Macedon.

  Since he does not own a motor car, our man will have to take a Bendigo train on the first leg of his long-awaited journey. And he thanks you politely, but he wouldn’t dream of putting anyone to the trouble of wandering off with him, or even saying goodbye. Just write down your address and slip it to the traveller before he sets out, and you might find yourself from time to time reading a rambling report of his travels.

  * * *

  Like most children of my time and place, I travelled on passenger trains drawn by steam locomotives across the countryside of Victoria in the years just after the Second World War. I would like to be able to describe the look and the feel of the carriages that I sat in from early morning until far into the hot afternoon. But lately I read again part of the story “First Love” by Vladimir Nabokov, which always reminds me that I have no memory for furniture or fabrics or interiors.

  The narrator of “First Love” travelled on the Nord Express from St Petersburg to Paris in the years just before the First World War. The author of that story, looking across the same number of years that I now look across to my own railway journeys, wrote in the 1940s of the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, the tulip-shaped reading lamps, the tassel of the blue, bivalved night light … As against all that, I can only recall the mild stickiness of the dark-green leather seats and of the bulbous armrests that had to be pulled out and down from recesses between the shoulders of the passengers.

  * * *

  I seem to have no memory for interiors. I am so little aware today of the insides of all the houses I have lived in that the rooms of those houses might have been only shelter from the wind, or shade from the sun, or places to hide in while I wrote and read. And instead of trying to remember railway compartments, I might as well complain about all the blank spaces that stayed in front of my eyes when I should have seen landscapes all around me on my travels across the countryside of Victoria.

  But there is one other detail from the Melbourne-to-Bendigo or the Melbourne–to–Port Fairy: just one grey and brown memory to sit drably beside the tasselled night light or the mitre-folded napkins in the dining car of the Nord Express. In each compartment, above the green leather backrest and just below the metal latticework of the luggage rack, the wall was inlaid with three photographs behind glass of scenes from Victoria.

  The weather outside the compartment was nearly always the heat of January, but the skies in the photographs seemed anything but blue, and I was glad not to be tending towards them. Even beach scenes (Cowes, Lorne, Frankston) with crowds in the water and well-defined shadows under the Norfolk Island pines could not convince me. There was only the sunlight around me and the sunlight I was headed for; there was no other sort.

  It would be too easy to say that the photographs made me gloomy because they were old. Of course the canvas-topped motor cars and the moustached men in waistcoats were from my father’s childhood, and one of the clouds high above was likely to be a tobacco-juice colour where dampness or something worse had got through a crack in the glass and had spread. Yet the word old meant hardly anything to me. What saddened me was to think how far from me those forests closed over the roads; those matchstick piers tapered away into milk-white seas without waves. I must have been seeing already in its simplest form the map of the world that has since grown in front of my eyes from just a few translucent panels like coloured glass prettifying my path to something so elaborate that I hardly remember any other sights behind it—any other world that these winding corridors and confusing windows might have been copied from.

  The map grew out of one simple proposition. I speak of it tactfully as a proposition, but it has always seemed self-evident to me. In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.

  Before I begin to explain what follows from this, someone reading these traveller’s notes is sure to remember a neat little sentence from an advertisement for a motion picture of a few years back. (If I were writing exclusively for those who understand the secret dominance of place, I would have put the word away instead of back in the previous sentence. My world has no forward and no back, only a place here and a million million other places near or further away.) Someone will remember the neat little sentence and will think I am only repeating what that sentence says.

  The sentence actually comes from the book of fiction that the film-makers got their story from. The past, says the neat little sentence, is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

  How poetic, and how promising this must have seemed to people preparing to watch a motion picture. Just when the movie-watcher might have thought all the countries in the world had been thoroughly photographed, here was a new sort of foreign country waiting to welcome camera-people and sightseers and tourists. How wrong we were to think of history as lost to sight, the movie-watchers would have said; history is really a folk-festival in an exotic country, and history books are just a more wordy sort of travel brochure.

  I went to my bookshelves just now and found a Penguin edition of The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. On the front cover is a picture of a hard-faced woman wearing a long white frock and holding a parasol and standing on mown grass among green branches. On the back cover is this sentence (among others). The cover shows a scene from the MGM-EMI Film Distributors Limited Release The Go-Between starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, also starring Margaret Leighton.

  After I had read the sentence on the back cover I looked again at the picture on the front. I am looking at the picture now. I ask myself: this woman named Julie Christie or Margaret Leighton—is she in a foreign country? And if she is, I ask myself, do they do things differently there? And if the answer to each of these questions is “yes,” should I call the foreign country the past?

  These are questions I cannot answer. As soon as I look at the woman named Christie or Leighton, I see her strolling among the trees and flicking her parasol impatiently about her. Now she speaks; and although she looks anywhere but in my direction, I know her words are aimed at me.

  Granted, she says, she is in my power to some extent. But I have power only over what I see. And all I can see is the long frock, and the parasol being flicked in anger, and the haughty and unsmiling face; whereas she can see the house behind all these lawns and trees, and she sees the peop
le of the house, who are her equals as I can never be.

  I look around me at this shabby room, and then through the window at the unkempt cotoneasters and the long sodden grass that was once a lawn, and I have no doubt that the woman who speaks to me—for all her haughtiness and her parasol and her long, elaborate frock—is in my own country.

  But of course she is in my country, someone will object. She is in my country because she is not a woman named Christie or Leighton but an image of a woman—in fact an image of an image of a woman, or something even more complicated.

  Instead of answering my objector just now, I turn from the picture on the cover to the text inside the book. According to the log that I keep of my reading, I read the text of The Go-Between in January 1977. But of all the text, I can only remember today about ten words spoken by a man to a boy. I remember none of the characters and nothing of the action. I could open the book at any page today and read it as though for the first time. But to prove to my own reader that this investigation is without bias, I hereby announce that the passage I will now read is the passage beginning on the seventh line of the seventy-seventh page.

  And the heat was a medium which made this change of outlook possible. As a liberating power with its own laws it was outside my experience. In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature.

  These are the very words I read when I opened the book at the place chosen entirely by chance. The book is supposed to be about a foreign country called the past, yet every word in the passage I found belongs to the story I am writing at present. The reader will find every one of those words in context towards the end of this story. The words happen to describe something from the most memorable afternoon of my life.

  I have nothing further to do with any objections. Not only is there no such thing as the past; there is almost certainly no such thing as a foreign country. Now, instead of wasting precious space with speculations about theoretical countries, I will go on writing about the here-and-now.

  And I am going to write in the language of this world instead of the jargon of an imagined world ruled over by those invisible and sinister science-fiction tyrants Time and Change. It is the present now all over the world. It has always been the present and it always is the present. I use the word present only for old time’s sake. What I should write is not It always is the present but It always is.

  What is? All this scenery, of course: all this scenery multiplied endlessly around me wherever I look.

  * * *

  I am writing to you from the compartment of a railway carriage. In front of me, and somewhat above the level of my eyes, part of a pale road crosses a sandy hilltop. A motor car is stopped on the road—a motor car with a canvas roof and with side-windows of something tough and yellowish that is not glass. A man stands beside the motor car; the man has a thick moustache and wears a waistcoat and a watch-chain beneath the jacket of his suit. The man stands between me and a blur of sand-dunes and distant sea and hazy clouds. Across the width of the road at the man’s feet are the words: Warrnambool with Lady Bay.

  * * *

  I am writing to you from the compartment of a railway carriage. In front of me, and exactly level with my eyes, a yellow-brown grassland rises and falls, bulges and sags, and moves continually from left to right. At its right-hand side the grassland is disappearing, bulge and hollow by bulge and hollow, behind the grey felt hat with the peacock feather in its band and the clean-shaven face and the three-piece suit of a man seven years younger than myself. At its left-hand side the yellow-brown grassland is being continually renewed, but the man with the peacock feather in his hatband is saying to me that from where he sits he can see the end of the Keilor Plains and the beginning of Mount Macedon.

  * * *

  I am writing, as usual, from the compartment of a railway carriage. In front of me, and somewhat above the level of my eyes, the sky is pale blue at its lower level and even paler at the upper edge of my view. The sky is moving from left to right. At its right-hand side, the pale blue is disappearing behind the grey sea and the grey-white sky of Warrnambool with Lady Bay. At its left-hand side, the pale blue is being continually renewed.

  * * *

  I am still writing from my railway carriage. The man in front of me, with the peacock-blue in his hatband, is my father, who was born at Allansford, Victoria, in 1904 and died at Geelong, Victoria, in 1960. His grave is in the Warrnambool cemetery, which overlooks the estuary of the Hopkins River at the eastern end of Lady Bay. From my father’s birthplace to the site of his grave is a walk of perhaps two hours along the Hopkins, the most placid of rivers, from the shallow place of green rushes and smooth stones that was once a ford for the pioneers Allan to the wide, calm lake between grassy hills, cemetery, and sea.

  From my father’s birthplace to the place where we buried him is an afternoon’s stroll, but the man with the rich blue in his hatband has travelled for most of his life in every State of Australia, and backwards and forwards across the Great Divide. He is sitting now, this endlessly travelling man, with the advantage that most travellers like to secure for themselves: he is facing his destination. I do not have this advantage. I am facing my father, and the man with the moustache and watchband, and Warrnambool with Lady Bay.

  The man of the blue-green feather is telling me his travels are nearly over. He is taking me to a place we will neither of us want to leave. Today we have left Melbourne for good; from now on our home is Bendigo. And already from where he sits, my father says, he can see the end of the Keilor Plains and the beginnings of Mount Macedon. Soon we will cross the Great Divide and go on to live for the rest of our lives in Bendigo. I, of course, have not yet seen the Great Divide. I have still not even seen the end of the plains.

  * * *

  I am on my travels in this world of place after place, and my father is travelling with me, not to mention the old-timer on the road at Warrnambool with Lady Bay. The last of the plains have disappeared behind my father and his grey hat with the peacock-coloured feather. The last of the sky over the plains has disappeared behind the man at Warrnambool with Lady Bay.

  * * *

  Where else would I be but in this railway compartment? In front of me, and level with my face, is a slope of Mount Macedon. The slope is covered with forest, which is being renewed continually on its left-hand side. I can see no sky. The lower slope of Mount Macedon is disappearing where the plains have disappeared—behind my father. And the upper slope of the mountain is going where the sky over the plains has gone—behind Warrnambool with Lady Bay.

  * * *

  I am in the railway compartment where I am always. The forest is not being renewed, any more than the plains were renewed in place after place. My father tells me we have crossed the Great Divide. He says our home now is a country of gentle hills scattered with ponderous trees. He says a new sort of weather is settling over us once and for all.

  The sky in front of my eyes is blue only. The sky is so blue and so far-reaching that I have never seen it disappear behind my father or behind any scenery.

  * * *

  Please assume that I am still in the railway compartment for as long as I go on writing about my travels. And please do not ask how I can be in two places at once. If the wooden-faced woman in the white frock is allowed to be waving her parasol not a thousand miles from where the little Russian boy stares at the blue night light somewhere on the plains of Europe, then I too am somewhere on my travels.

  * * *

  I am lying on my back and looking at sky. I am lying among dark-green glossy stems of rye-grass on the unmown land beside a small weatherboard hall in Neale Street, Bendigo. Under my head and body the soil is trustworthy. Even through the thick grass the feeling reaches me that this soil deserves to be trusted. I have learned to trust absolutely the strong, gravelly soil of Bendigo.

  At the moment I am not thinking of soil. I am looking at the sky and wondering what to make of its blueness.

  From where I lie, I can see more deepl
y into this sky than I have seen into any other. I seem to be looking at a part of the sky so deep it is not meant to be looked at. I am looking at a blue so blue it is turning continually, far inside itself, into another colour.

  My father is standing near me, but I cannot see him because I will not take my eyes away from the sky. My father is grazing his chestnut gelding, which is still a maiden after a long career in racing. I cannot see the horse, but I can hear its teeth tearing at the rye-grass.

  My father tells me the sky is the blue that it is because we are on the other side of the Great Divide. He says the sky over the places where he and I were born is not the true colour. Over Melbourne and Warrnambool the sky has been watered down; the sea has drained the true colour out of the sky. But here at Bendigo the sky is its true colour because it has nothing but land beneath it—and not just any land but soil and grass that are mostly golden orange, which of all colours brings out the richest from blue.

  I discuss with my father the true name for the colour of this sky of the inland. My father finds rather conveniently near his feet a few small flowers of a kind I have always taken for weeds. He tells me that these are cornflowers and the sky is cornflower blue.

  I cannot quite see in the sky overhead the blue of the flowers my father calls cornflowers. Yet I am pleased that my father has claimed to see that sort of blue. I understand that I am free myself to see in the sky a colour from earth.

  I have to admit that the sky here, north of the Great Divide, is an incomparable blue, but its colour makes me sometimes uneasy. The deep, pure blue is a little too deep and too pure. I would lie more comfortably on the soil of Bendigo if I knew that the powerful blue is not all there is to the sky.