Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  Perhaps my native district has a soul. Perhaps when the grasslands between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri have been covered over by roads and houses, and when the two streams themselves – the trickling stream and the stream that wanders from the north – have been turned into concrete drains, then my district may be said to have died, and its ghost will have drifted away from it. And perhaps one day in the country of ghosts my own soul – my own drifting ghost – will see drifting towards it a ghost with the look and the feel of virgin grasslands between the ghost of the Moonee Ponds trickling and the ghost of the Merri wandering from the north.

  If you got up sometimes, reader, from your table deep in the famous Institute, and if you looked sometimes at an atlas instead of at books with colour-plates of birds or of prairie-grasses or at collections of pages from writers in far states of America, you would find in time the name of every place I have named in my pages and of some persons I have not named.

  I have already written, on another of these pages, the names of places that you or I might pass, reader, if we travelled first south from Ideal, South Dakota, to the Platte River and then upstream to the junction of the North Platte and the South Platte and from there upstream along the South Platte towards Climax, Colorado, and afterwards towards the district between the Hopkins and Russells Creek. We were not so much interested in the North Platte, reader, but now is the time for me to remind you that we passed, on our way to Climax and beyond, the junction of the South Platte and a river that might have led us to a place somewhat different from Climax, Colorado, and might never have led us to the district between the Hopkins and Russells Creek. In Weld County, Colorado, near the town of La Salle, is the junction of the South Platte and the Thompson. If, at La Salle, we had turned aside into the lesser river instead of following the South Platte towards Climax and further, we would have arrived almost at once in Larimer County, Colorado, and at the town of Loveland.

  Having read so often about districts between streams, reader, you may be wondering when I am going to write about the most noticeable of all such districts: the district between the North Platte and the South Platte in western Nebraska. You may be wondering when I am going to mention the strangely shaped district between the two rivers that merge near the town of North Platte in Lincoln County, which is not to be confused with the state capital of Lincoln in Lancaster County nearly three hundred kilometres to the east.

  I have only now mentioned that district, reader, but I have been looking at the district or dreaming of myself looking at it for as long as I have been writing on pages. Almost as soon as I began to look at maps of America, I noticed the district that might have been shaped like a female breast if the North Platte and the South Platte had met in Morrill County instead of wandering side by side through four counties and for nearly two hundred kilometres. How could I not have noticed, almost as soon as I began to look at maps, the district that might have been shaped like a female breast but is shaped in fact like a preposterous nose?

  And how could I not have wondered often who I might have been if I had been born in the district between the North Platte, trickling from Wyoming, and the South Platte, wandering from Colorado, and what I might have done if I had gone on living on the grasslands of Morrill County or of Garden County or a little further south, in Deuel County, whose chief town is Chappell?

  On each Sunday of my childhood, the colour that I saw in the silk of the vestments and the altar-cloths in church was green or red or white or violet. For one hour each week one or another of those colours appeared, in strict accordance with the calendar of the Roman Church.

  The colours coming and going were like the threads that I watched in the hands of the girls during sewing class, on Friday afternoon in the schoolroom. I sometimes asked a girl to let me look at the underside of the cloth in her hands – the side away from the pattern of leaves or flowers or fruit slowly forming. I trusted that a pleasing pattern was beginning to appear on the upper side of the cloth, under the eyes of the girl. But I studied the side of the cloth that seemed to matter less. I watched the tangled strands and the knots of mixed colours underneath for hints of shapes quite different from leaves or flowers or fruit. I would have enjoyed the game of pretending to the girl that I knew nothing of the pattern she was working at: of pretending to think that the tangled colours were all I could admire.

  The colours and the seasons of the Church were complicated, but I saw them only from beneath. The true pattern was on the other side. Under the clear morning sky of eternity, the long story of the Old Testament and the New was a richly coloured tapestry. But on my side, under the changeable skies of Melbourne County, I saw only the green and the white and the red and the violet strangely interlaced, and I made from them whatever patterns I could.

  The liturgical year began with Advent, which was a time of looking forward to Christmas. Yet the colour of Advent was not the green of hope but the violet of sorrow and repentance. And although the year was only beginning inside the church in Advent, outside in Melbourne County spring was almost over. At the end of Advent would come the season of Christmas and white for joy. But only a few weeks later, and in the first heat-wave of summer in Melbourne County, the colour would be green again for the season after Epiphany and the looking forward to Easter. The green would persist through the hottest weeks of summer, when bushfires might be burning at the edge of Melbourne County. Then, at the time of year when I had been born, when the north wind blew at the end of February, Lent would begin and the same violet would reappear that had been, in late spring and early summer, the colour of Advent. Easter, in the mild days at the end of autumn, was white. The white continued through the month and a half of the season after Easter but on Pentecost Sunday, in the foggy first weeks of winter in Melbourne County, the rare and brilliant red appeared. After the brief red, the longest of the seasons of the Church began: the long green sequence of the season after Pentecost. Even on bleak Sundays in mid-winter the church was green with the expectation of Christmas, which seemed then only faint and whitish on the other side of far, violet Advent.

  I thought of all these colours as the underside of the true and the much more eloquent pattern that was visible only to the inhabitants of heaven. I was not resentful at having to look for the time being at the crossed and tangled strands on the underside of my religion. I even looked for more knots and quirks. Each Sunday the different readings from the Bible told part of the story of Jesus, or the story of the Jews (but only until Jesus had founded the Universal Church), or the story of the world. The beginnings of these stories were in Genesis. The one end of all three stories was prophesied by Jesus in the gospels and also by John in the Apocalypse. For a week or more after Christmas, the story of Jesus seemed to go forward at the slow pace of my own life. Six days after Christmas Day, Jesus had only just been circumcised; six days after that, the three Wise Men had only just arrived with their gifts. But I could only think this if I ignored the epistles, which were also read on Sundays, and which spoke always of Jesus as dead and gone. Soon, even in the gospels Jesus was thirty years old and wandering with his disciples, and for the rest of the Church year things happened before their rightful time, or the same things happened again and again.

  And from the fig-tree learn a parable: when the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know the summer is nigh.

  Each year as a child I heard these words in the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost, which was the last Sunday of the Church year.

  The number of Sundays after Pentecost in any one year was between twenty-four and twenty-eight. The number was determined by the date of Pentecost itself, which in turn was determined by the date of Easter. These and many other details of the complicated calendar I learned as a boy from studying the table of movable feasts in my missal.

  Every Sunday after Pentecost, like every other Sunday of the year, had its own gospel reading: a passage read aloud by the priest first in Latin at the altar and later in our own
language from the pulpit. The gospel reading listed in my missal for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost was Matthew 24, 1535. In a year when the twenty-fourth was also the last Sunday after Pentecost, the priest would read the passage from Matthew and I would hear, on the day when the calendar had told me to expect them, the words that made me shiver.

  But I much preferred what happened when the twenty-fourth was not the last Sunday. In such a year, on the twenty-fourth Sunday, I would turn to the pages for that Sunday, but I would have learned already from the notes attached to the table of movable feasts that a different gospel was allotted to that day. The notes would have reminded me that the verses from Matthew belonged not to the twenty-fourth or to any other numbered Sunday; the verses belonged to the last Sunday, whenever that day happened to fall. And so, on one Sunday, or on two or even three or four Sundays in an exceptional year, I could glance privately at the sentence about the fig-tree, but in the church on that Sunday some other gospel would be read aloud.

  Some other gospel would be read aloud in the church, but I would be whispering to myself the words from the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, whose hour had not yet come. I would be wondering how I could warn the women with child and those giving suck. Or I would have decided that the young women should not be warned; it was their husbands who should have warned them. I almost preferred the women to suffer as punishment for having become the wives of men who could never learn a parable from any tree.

  While I was whispering in church the words that were going to announce, all in good time, all three of the end of the ecclesiastical year, the fall of the city of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the world, the season in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri was late spring. The lilac flowers in front gardens had turned brown and had shrivelled. The magpie fledgling teetered on the edge of its nest in the sugar-gum high over Ray Street, and the parent-birds no longer bothered to dive at the heads of children walking underneath.

  Across the road from the church, on the lawns and pathways of Raeburn Reserve, I could still see the last few of the small papery discs that had fluttered down from the elm tree a month before. In the days when the discs had been drifting down, I had dragged my feet through heaps of them and had thrown handfuls over my head like confetti. Sometimes I stopped and examined one of the discs and saw the red-brown lump at its centre. Then I remembered a picture I had seen of a dark blur that was a tadpole-embryo at the centre of a bubble of spawn. I supposed the discs from the elms were seed-cases and each lump at the centre was a minuscule elm tree wrapped and curled darkly in on itself. I was walking among thousands of unborn elms, arrived before their time or in the wrong place.

  In the year when I was twelve years old, on Sundays when I was already thinking of the fig-tree although the coming-forth of the leaves had not yet been announced in church, I used to walk in the afternoon from my parents’ house to a street where the houses ended abruptly and grasslands began. I walked to Sims Street, which is still marked on maps of my native district although the paddocks of grass that I saw on the northern side of that street have been covered for more than thirty years by streets I have never walked in.

  I walked to Sims Street on Sunday afternoons leading a dog named Belle, who was a wire-haired fox terrier less than a year old. My father could never have spared the money to buy a dog such as Belle; he had answered a newspaper advertisement offering pedigreed female pups free to anyone who would give them a good home. Belle was said to belong to all our family but she was kept chained in the backyard and was mostly forgotten by my parents and my brothers. Sometimes when I came home from school I found time to unfasten her chain and to stand watching while she ran in circles around the back lawn. On afternoons when I had other things to do I tried to sneak into the house without Belle’s seeing me – I was always ashamed to hear her whimpering for company.

  In the autumn after the spring when I had walked with Belle to Sims Street, and after my parents had taken me to live in the sandy district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek, my father announced one evening that we had to get rid of Belle. To use my father’s words, Belle had come into season for the first time and we had no place to lock her away from the male dogs of the neighbourhood.

  My father was the son of a farmer and was not afraid to kill animals. He went out into the backyard as soon as it was dark. While he was looking for the tomahawk and a hessian bag, I crept out and patted Belle and said that what was going to happen was not my fault. Belle did not look at me; she was watching two dogs at our front gate.

  I was inside the house while my father was pushing Belle into the sugar-bag and tying it around her so that only her head was free, and while he knelt over her and killed her. I heard no noise from Belle, but I heard a frantic barking from the male dogs at the front of the house. When the male dogs stopped barking I thought they must have heard my father hitting Belle on the head with the blunt edge of the tomahawk or even Belle herself groaning or whimpering. But then the dogs began barking again, and they were still barking when my father came inside and washed his hands carefully with the sandsoap in the laundry.

  My father told me that Belle had died quickly and without suffering. He said her skull had been as thin as an eggshell and he had only had to hit her once or twice. He said he had buried her in a deep hole that he had dug beforehand. The male dogs would soon go away, my father said. They would smell the blood from Belle, or somehow get wind of her death, and then they would leave us alone. But I thought I heard the two males still outside and sniffing in the dark while I lay in bed that night.

  On my walks with Belle on Sunday afternoons in spring, I passed through Raeburn Reserve. For as long as the seeds were lying under the elms I used to scoop up a handful as I passed. I packed the seeds into my shirt pocket until it bulged out from my chest.

  After I had turned left into Sims Street from Landells Road I saw that I was walking along a notable boundary. The greyish stripe of Sims Street, which was not a paved street but only a trail of wheel-ruts and puddles, was the border between the town where I lived, which was red-brown from the terra-cotta tiles on the roofs of all the newly built houses, and the green paddocks leading back to the grasslands where I dreamed of living.

  Half-way along Sims Street on those Sunday afternoons I unhooked the lead from Belle’s collar. She ran far out into the grass and then back to my feet, then far out and back again. While Belle was far out in the paddock I dragged the elm seeds out of my shirt pocket and strewed them just inside the fence on the north side of the street.

  I knew the seeds I was scattering were seeds of a tree from Europe, whereas the paddock had once been covered with the trees of my native district. But I had always admired European trees for the deep shade that they cast in summer, and I had often thought how strange it would be to live in a country where the forests were of trees that I had seen only in gardens and parks. Such forests would have seemed more truly wilderness than any bushland in my own part of the world. In the deep shade of a forest of oaks or elms I would have felt a mixture of feelings. I would have felt urged sometimes to do the worst I could do – to lie in wait for the barefoot female child of fairy tales who would soon appear, lost and helpless. At other times I would have felt inspired to search for the castle or the monastery at the heart of the forest, and then for a certain precious book in the library among the rooms and corridors.

  At that time, Jesus said to His disciples, When you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet...

  The world was far from neatly ordered. Colours spilled over what should have been their boundaries. Many a colour had traces of another colour showing through from underneath.

  In the streets and gardens of the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri the season changed from winter to spring and then almost to summer, but inside the church the one long season of hope persisted. The green of hope seemed appropriate in winter; but September would come, and then Octo
ber, and the leaves of the elms in Raeburn Reserve would be thick against the sunlight, and yet the Church would seem not to have noticed the dark greens or the emerald greens of leaves or even the orange-reds and the yellows of poppies and roses in front gardens but would still be waiting in its green of hope. And the longer the green of the Church lasted, the more often I thought of the words that had still not sounded from the gospel of Saint Matthew, in which the green leaves of the fig-tree came forth from the grey branches under the grey sky and the smoke of the end of the world.

  Late in September each year the air one morning would be surprisingly warm. For two days the sun would have been shining, with a scattering of high, white clouds, but on the third morning the sky would be quite bare and the wind would blow in gusts. The wind would be not the faintly damp wind from the sea but a drying wind from inland – the first north wind of the season.

  Long before midday the north wind would dry the dark patches of moisture from the ruts and hollows in streets where the mud had been knee-deep during the winter. All morning the loose soil from the crumbled ridges between the ruts, together with the fine silt from the dried beds of puddles, would be lifted by each gust into the air but then let fall. By lunchtime the wind would have stopped playing about. What had been fairy-puffs and streamers in the morning were now bomb-bursts and continuous pourings upward of clay-loam dried in a day to the fineness of sand. The first dust of summer was blowing in the streets of my district.

  On the day of the first north wind in the season of spring, I closed my eyes and felt against my face the weather of high summer. The north wind had brought into the streets and gardens between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri the weather of the plains that reached from the edge of my district north to Mount Macedon and of the wider plains further inland. Before I had been able to prepare myself, before I had understood that the winter had ended, I was breathing the air of the summer that was still to come.