Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  Even at the risk of irritating her, he wanted to tell her one last thing about himself. When the bus had left the outer suburbs behind, and the road ran between farms with forested hills in the background, he set out to tell her that he was now further east than he had ever been and that he was now entering a region that he had often seen in his mind since his mother had told him as a child about the fires that had burned in the week before he had been born.

  She half-turned towards him several times and nodded, but mostly she stared out of the window or looked over her shoulder, waiting for a chance to join in talking with the couple in the seat behind. He soon stopped talking.

  He had wanted to tell her that his father and mother had been born in the far south-west of Victoria, in the region that he always thought of as consisting of grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. Even when they had moved to Melbourne, they had stayed on the western side, which was mostly treeless and grassy, as distinct from the eastern side, where forests and scrub still grew in places. In the week before he was born, his mother had been afraid that the world would end before she had given birth to her first child.

  The department where he was employed, he might have told his girlfriend as the bus carried them further in among the mountains of the Upper Yarra district, was concerned with Crown lands, whether grassy or forested. In the library of the department, he had gone looking for and had found the report of the Royal Commission into the causes of the bushfires and other matters. He might have impressed her, if he had not already repelled her with all his talking, by quoting to her in the bus some of the passages that he had copied out and memorised from the introduction to the report. Seventy-one lives were lost. Sixty-nine mills were burned. Millions of acres of fine forest, of almost incalculable value, were destroyed or badly damaged. Townships were obliterated in a few minutes. On that day it appeared that the whole state was alight. At midday in many places it was dark as night. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished … These and several other passages he might have quoted to her, but even while he was thinking of what he might have said to her, he was noticing the thick forests on either side of the road. In his mind, he had always thought of the eastern half of Victoria as blackened by fire. He had known that the image in his mind was a child’s simple image, but he had expected to see on the trip to Donna Buang some evidence still remaining of the day, fewer than twenty years before, when the whole of Victoria had appeared to be alight.

  His girlfriend and the couple behind were playing a version of the child’s game of Bags. Each person in turn would call out that she or he bagged some desirable object or person through the windows. When his girlfriend took her first turn, she bagged a whole farm. She said she would love to live in the white-painted farmhouse that they were passing and to own the green paddocks around it for as far back as the forest in the background. The young woman in the seat behind told his girlfriend that she could hardly live in the house alone. No one spoke for a moment, and then they went on with their game.

  The bus stopped at a place that the driver called the turntable. More than twenty other buses were stopped nearby, some with groups of young persons gathered around. Those from his own bus who had been to Donna Buang in previous years explained that lunch was to be eaten at the turntable, after which everyone was free to climb to the summit.

  His girlfriend and her sister had packed a large hamper for their boyfriends and themselves. He forced himself to eat a sandwich and a cake while the others ate the rest of the lunch, saying how hungry they felt in the cold air.

  On the way to the summit, the bachelors from the rear seats of the bus began to make snowballs from the few patches of hard snow lying about. With the snowballs in their hands, the bachelors changed from being the awkward outcasts of the parish dance or the rear of the bus. A pair of them would single out a pretty young woman—even though her boyfriend might have been beside her—and would try to drag the collar of her pullover away from the back of her neck and to force snow down against her bare skin. Some unspoken rule prevented the boyfriend from trying seriously to protect the girl. He would smile while his girlfriend was squealing and struggling against the bachelors, but the only help he would offer her would be to shake the snow from her clothing afterwards or to wipe her neck with his scarf. Other girls might leave their boyfriends and try to help a threatened girl, but this would only bring the whole pack of bachelors, and the outnumbered girls would all go back to their boyfriends squirming and squealing and dragging at the snow under their clothing.

  He knew what was coming, and his girlfriend seemed also to know. The whole pack approached her. She shrugged and looked at her sister and tried to hold her collar close around her neck. They had something different in mind for her, as he had known they would. They hardly bothered to force any snow down the neck of her clothing. Instead, two of the bachelors leaned towards each other and locked hands to make a seat for her. Two others hoisted her onto this seat. She teetered and had to fling an arm around the shoulders of each of the bachelors whose hands she was sitting on. When she was seated securely, the pack of bachelors escorted her to the side of the track. They stopped a few paces short of a patch of deep snow. When she saw the snow, she began to squeal. While she squealed, the two bachelors who were carrying her began to swing her backwards and forwards and to count aloud. Several times they counted down to zero, and each time she shrieked and pleaded, but each time they went on swinging while she kept her grip around their shoulders.

  Even he, watching from a distance and grinning, had not expected the bachelors to throw her into the snow. He foresaw that they would release her in their own good time and that she would come back to the group where he was standing and would smile at her sister and her boyfriend but not at himself. But he foresaw more than this. While the bachelors had been seizing her and carrying her off, he had noticed something in the way that a certain bachelor had behaved towards her. He, watching, had been surprised and stung, but she, so he had noticed, seemed not to have been even surprised.

  The bachelor mentioned in the previous paragraph had been one of the two who had made a seat for her with his hands. He, the chief character, had thought while he watched the bachelors of how they had become emboldened as soon as they had set foot on the mountain. On Donna Buang, the bachelors had taken liberties that they would never have attempted at any dance or party or even in the bus on the way to the mountain, and the boyfriends had deferred to the bachelors. He had watched especially his girlfriend’s hand clutching at the shoulder and the neck of the bachelor who had behaved in a certain way towards her. He, the chief character, had watched even more the hands of the bachelor taking through a mere layer of the grey cloth of her slacks the weight of her thighs and buttocks.

  While he watched, he foresaw a number of events, most of which later took place as he had foreseen. He foresaw himself moving gradually away from his girlfriend and her sister and her boyfriend as they approached the summit of Donna Buang—not to join the pack of bachelors but to walk as a solitary bachelor and to stand conspicuously alone looking out at the view from the summit. He foresaw himself joining up with his girlfriend’s party again for a few minutes when they arrived back at the turntable. The vacuum-flasks in the hamper would still have enough warm tea for all four in the party to take a last drink together, and he would thank his girlfriend and her sister for all the trouble they had taken in preparing lunch. (The bachelor who had behaved in a certain way towards his girlfriend would have been by her side when her party had reached the summit, but he would have broken away as they approached the turntable again and would have stood with the pack of bachelors while he took the last drink that he would take with them as a bachelor.) As the various parties filed into the bus for the trip homewards, he, the chief character, would walk down the aisle and would choose a seat at the very edge of the bachelors’ seats. His girlfriend, who would be by then no longer his girlfriend, would sit i
n the same window-seat that she had sat in on the way to Donna Buang, and the bachelor who had looked at her in a certain way while they were climbing the mountain, and who would be by then no longer a bachelor, would sit beside her. He, the chief character, would not talk to the bachelors and certainly not to the spinsters on the return journey but would look out through the window towards the dark shapes of mountains and forests and the lights of farmhouses and townships beside the road leading back to Melbourne from the easternmost place that he had yet visited. He foresaw himself getting down from the bus in the churchyard and then walking to the house of the young woman who had formerly been his girlfriend in the company of that young woman and her sister. While they walked, he would carry the empty hamper and would talk cheerfully with the young women. He would not be merely pretending to be cheerful. He would be a bachelor again and would no longer have to endure the misery and the anxiety that he had endured while he had been in love. He would be somewhat proud of himself for having conducted himself with dignity while he had been changing earlier that day from a boyfriend to a bachelor. While he prepared to say goodbye politely to the young women outside their house and then to ride away on the bicycle that he had left in the morning in their backyard, so he foresaw, he foresaw that he would live as a bachelor for several months, after which he would fall in love with one image after another in his mind until the next occasion when he noticed that the image in his mind was an image of a person from outside his mind. At the same time, he foresaw that he would see by chance from time to time in the future on some train travelling between Melbourne and Dandenong the young woman from Dandenong who had once been his girlfriend and would talk with her easily as a bachelor to a woman content with her boyfriend or fiancé or husband. He did not foresee that he would remain a bachelor for most of the next ten years; that he would not have seen the young woman or have heard of her for more than thirty-five years on a certain afternoon in the future when he learned from a woman who had formerly lived in Dandenong that the young woman had married many years before and was by then a grandmother and that she had lived for much of her life in a place that had been when she first lived there one of the nearer towns of Gippsland but had later become one of the outermost south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He did not foresee that he would learn also from the same woman who had told him these things that the mother of his girlfriend of more than thirty-five years before had died while her daughters were still young married women and that the father of those women, after he had been a widower for several years, had become a lay-brother in the monastery of the Cistercian order between Yarra Glen and Healesville, which monastery he, the chief character, had once visited and which he remembered afterwards as a pale-coloured building surrounded first by green paddocks through some of which the Yarra River wound and then, on three sides, by mountains covered with forest.

  When he had first got down from the bus and for almost all the time while he and the others had climbed towards the summit of Donna Buang, they had been surrounded by what they thought was mist or fog, but just as they approached the summit they saw blue sky above them and they stepped into bright sunshine. He stood alone, just as he had foreseen, while he looked out at the view from the summit. The summit was a grassy and mostly level place, and he walked at once to what he judged to be the eastern side of the summit. He had not foreseen the view that he saw to the east of the summit.

  The poems that had interested him most at school had been those that brought to his mind images of places. When he took out a sheet of ruled paper and prepared to write on it during an evening in the week after the events reported in the previous paragraphs, he had never previously tried to write a poem but he supposed that a poem was the sort of writing that would most clearly record the details of the place that had been in his mind for much of the time since he had come down from the summit of Mount Donna Buang on the previous Sunday. At some time before he sat down in front of the sheet of ruled paper, he had begun to hear in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story, and at some time soon afterwards he had decided that the words should be the last line of his poem.

  If he had been able to write the earlier lines of his poem, those lines would have reported first the details of the place that he had seen in his mind whenever during the years before he had first travelled to Mount Donna Buang he had imagined the eastern half of Victoria, which details would have included a large area of green in the foreground being the region of Gippsland and a narrow zone of blue-black at the left-hand side being the mountains, many of them damaged by fire, at the northern edge of Gippsland. The lines would have reported next the details he had seen in his mind whenever during the days since he had travelled to Mount Donna Buang he had imagined himself as putting his face close to the narrow zone of blue-black as though it was a detail in a picture in his mind, which details would have included a large area of blue in the foreground being ranges of mountains covered with forests that had grown in place of the forests burned in the past and a narrow zone of the colour of smoke at the horizon, which zone he was not yet able to imagine as being close to his face.

  In the Blue Dandenongs

  The words above were the caption of a coloured illustration on a calendar that his mother received from one or another shopkeeper in one or another year during the late 1940s when she and her husband and their two sons were living in a rented house in a western suburb of Melbourne. The calendar hung for a year in the kitchen of the rented house and was designed so that the numbered spaces denoting the days of one or another month were torn away at the end of that month while the illustration above the numbered spaces remained visible throughout the year. After he had looked several times at the illustration on the calendar during the first days after it had been hung, he resolved not to look again at the illustration during the remainder of the year, but he went against his resolution many times.

  In later years, whenever he remembered the illustration on the calendar, he remembered the following details. In the foreground, two children are standing in green grass that reaches halfway to their knees. Near the children, a horse has lifted its head from the grass and is looking towards them. The girl holds out a hand towards the horse. In her hand is a carrot with the green top still growing from the red root. From where the children and the horse are standing, the grassy paddock slopes downwards through the middle ground of the illustration towards a fence. On the other side of the fence, a mountain rises from an unseen gully. The side of the mountain is covered with forest. Behind this mountain, in the far background, is part of another mountain. The forest on this mountain is blue-grey. The mellow light suggests that the time of day is late afternoon.

  The children had at first reminded him of children in illustrations in the books for English boys and girls that his unmarried aunts lent to him to read during his summer holidays. Those books, so his aunts would remind him, had belonged to his father and his brothers when they were boys. The girls in those illustrations were as tall as women but had the innocent faces and the hips and chests of children of nine or ten. The boys had the chests and shoulders of men, but they wore short trousers and had the guileless faces and tousled hair of choir-boys on a Christmas card. The boys and girls in the books that he read from his aunts’ collections defended themselves against burglars and spies and smugglers and were spoken to respectfully by detectives but were never troubled by even the thought that they might fall in love.

  The children on the calendar had reminded him at first of child-men and child-women in English storybooks, but the illustration on the calendar was a photograph, and so the children were not distortions or caricatures. He was able to estimate from the bodies and the faces that the children were about eleven years of age. But he tried for most of the time not to look at the children. Their air of innocence annoyed him.

  He was not so angry with the girl. She was trying to coax the horse towards her and could have been excused for her look of preoccupation. If he could have seen mo
re than her profile, he might even have found that her face was of the sort that appeared in his mind from time to time and caused him to fall in love. The boy might have been looking at the face of the girl or at the carrot in her hand or at the horse or even at something that had distracted him from beyond the range of the camera. His curly hair and his vacant grin seemed meant to make adults think of him as a likeable young rascal who was preparing, even while he posed for the photographer, to put a caterpillar on the girl’s skirt in order to make her squeal.

  If, in spite of himself, he looked at the picture on the calendar, he tried to look past the boy and the girl who had never fallen in love or felt jealous or anxious in connection with a person whose image stayed in his or her mind. He tried to see, behind the forested mountain in the background, one of the many other pairs of children who would have been in the Dandenongs on the day when the photograph was taken.

  That boy and that girl lived in the same neighbourhood in an eastern suburb of Melbourne, and their parents often visited one another and arranged family outings together. Each family owned a motor car, and at least once in each month the two cars followed each other through the outer eastern suburbs and then through grassy countryside and then into the foothills of the Dandenongs and then along the red-gravel roads through the forested gullies and between the mountainsides. On hot days in summer, the children paddled among mossy stones in creeks with treeferns on their banks. Late in summer, they picked blackberries. In autumn, they scooped up armfuls of coloured leaves among stands of European trees. In the coldest days of winter, when the fathers had fixed chains to the car-tyres, the children played in shallow drifts of snow. In late winter, they picked sprays of wattle-bloom. In spring, they visited the camellia and rhododendron gardens. On wet days in any season, they drank soft drinks in cafés while their parents were served Devonshire teas. At a certain hour late on many a Sunday afternoon, he had felt, even as a child in his first years at school, that some other male person of exactly his own age was living, perhaps only a few miles away, the life that he himself ought to have been living. When he had felt this on certain Sundays as he was waiting with his mother and his younger brother at a tramstop near the home of his aunt who lived in an inner eastern suburb, before returning to his home in a western suburb, he had sometimes seen in the rear seat of a motor car passing the tramstop a young person returning with his family from a place that must surely have been in the Dandenong Ranges, so he, the chief character, supposed on some day during the year when he looked for pairs of children in the background of the picture on the calendar.