Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  I was standing on a certain page of the calendar, but the hot wind was blowing against my face from a page out of sight. And the calendar that I was standing on was only the calendar for the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri: a calendar with pages of the colour of grass or of flowering bushes in front gardens. If I thought of the calendar for the plains further inland and the calendars for the great plains of America and other countries of the world and lying among all those calendars the calendar of the Church with the season after Pentecost like a bright green stripe across page after page, then the colours of the world began to blur.

  On the day of the first north wind in spring, in the year when I was twelve years old, I sat near a fig-tree whose leaves were coming forth. On the grey branches the leaves were green: the same hopeful green that I would see in the church for many more Sundays yet. The fig-tree was in the backyard of my parents’ house on the flat land east of the junction of the Moonee Ponds and the Westbreen. I looked at the green coming forth from the grey, and I looked at the dust stirring behind the wire-netting of the fowl yard fence. I had not wanted to think of summer, but the north wind had made me think of the summer that was nigh.

  I thought of the colours red and dark green. The dark green was the colour of the water in the fish pond on the square of lawn between me and the back door of the house. The red was the colour of the four chubby fantail fish in the water.

  The fish pond was not an ornamental pool dug out of the lawn and overhung by reeds and by fronds of ferns. The square brick pond had been built on the level surface of the yard by the previous owner of the house. The four walls were rough red bricks raised to the height of my thighs and lined with cement. The water in the pond was green. You would see one or another of the fish, surprisingly red, if it drifted up to the surface; but if you reached out your hand, or if your shadow fell across the water, the red flashed and then plunged out of sight in the green.

  I had lived in the house in my native district for less than two years. The season I am writing about was only the second spring that I had spent between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. The house with the fish pond behind it was the first house I had lived in that was owned by my parents. A few months after I was born my parents had taken me away from my native district, and from then until I was ten years old I had lived in rented houses, a different house almost every year, in counties other than Melbourne County.

  The house on the clay a little east of the Moonee Ponds was older and uglier than most of the houses around, but it was the first house I was proud to be seen going into. Boys and girls from my school, whenever they passed my house, looked over the front gate, or so I hoped, and thought of a boy in the shade of the apricot tree whose outer leaves they could see at the rear corner of the house. Or the boy that they thought of strolled across the lawn (the first back lawn my father had ever mown) to taste the red currants from the bushes that were only just visible behind the house on its blind side. Or the boys and girls that I thought of thought of the boy beside his fish pond.

  The fish pond on the back lawn was well hidden from the street. A few boys from my school had walked around the pond and had leaned over and peered into the green water. Sometimes a visiting boy waited patiently until he saw one of the red fish. One boy had once dipped a stick into the water and had dragged out a tangle of ribbon-shaped leaves and hairy strands of water-plants and had held them, streaming with water, in front of my eyes. But I had not invited that boy to my house again, and even my regular visitors were not encouraged to loiter near the pond.

  When I had first seen the pond, on my first day in the house with the apricot tree and the back lawn, I had seen clearly that the bricks went no further down than ground level. The pond was built on the surface of the yard, with the lowest bricks set into the soil to the depth of only a few centimetres. But after a month or two my father’s careless mowing had left tufts of grass growing against the lower rows of bricks. I teased the tufts every day with my fingers to hide even more of the bricks. Sometimes I strolled around the corner from the side of the house into the backyard and tried to catch sight of the pond as it would have appeared to someone visiting my house for the first time. I wanted my visitor to be confused by the unruly grass and to see the pond not as resting on the ground but as protruding from beneath it: as the blunt end of a deep column reaching upwards from a sheath of grass and earth.

  In the spring of the year when I was twelve years old I was preparing for the first visit to my backyard of a girl who was the same age as myself and who lived near Sims Street, where the grasslands began, a kilometre north from my house.

  Later I will write the name of the street where the girl lived with her parents, but first I have to prepare my reader for what he is about to read.

  Did you notice just now, reader, my writing as though you are no longer my reader but only someone I am writing about?

  I have written by now on many pages. Each day I cover a page with writing and then I push the page gently away from me towards the edge of my table. By now the table is strewn with so many pages that each page I push away from me causes other pages to drift ahead of it. Sometimes one of those drifting pages drifts over the edge of the table in the way that a cloud drifts over the edge of a district of level land. Sometimes on my way from this table to the window I pass some of the pages that have drifted over the table-horizon. Sometimes my walking past causes the air to move and a page to drift a little across the floor.

  Today I stood between this table and the window and I looked down at one of the pages that had drifted furthest from the place where I sit now writing about that page. I looked down and I saw on the page the words my reader. I read the two words, and then I thought of the man I was reading about.

  I thought of that man reading the page I had been writing on when I got up from my table to walk to the window. I had been about to write on that page the name of a street in my native district. I had been about to write, before I wrote that name, that each name is more than one name. I had been about to write then that the name of a street in a district of Melbourne County might be also the name of a city one hundred and fifty kilometres north of that district. I was about to write next that the name of a city north of Melbourne County might also be the name of a town a hundred kilometres south-east of Ideal, South Dakota – the county seat of Rock County, Nebraska. I was going to write also that the name of a town in the grasslands of Nebraska might also be the name of a city in a book which is partly about a lilac tree and a row of tamarisk trees. And I was going to write, just before I wrote the name of the street in my native district, that the name of the city in the book that is partly about a lilac and a row of tamarisks is also the name of a city where I lived from my sixth year until my tenth year. And then I was going to write that when I was twelve years old and living in my native district I became interested in a girl who had only just arrived in my district and that I asked the girl what street she lived in and that she said she lived in Bassett Street.

  I had been about to write what I have just written, but when I stood between my table and the window I thought for a moment what my reader would have thought if he had been reading the page where I had read the words my reader. I had thought for a moment what a man would think if he saw himself clearly named on a page he was reading.

  I had thought of a man in a room very different from my room who had written the page that I was reading. I had thought of the man I had always thought of as my reader. I had thought of that man sitting at his table and not reading but writing. I had thought of him as having written all the pages around me. And then I thought of him as being about to write on the page that I had been about to write on when I left my table and walked towards the window. He was about to write on the page that I had been about to write on, except that he was going to write instead of the last words that I was going to write:

  And then I was going to write that when I was twelve years old and living in my native district I bec
ame interested in a girl who had only just arrived in my district and that I asked the girl what street she lived in and that she said she lived in Bendigo Street.

  In front of me on my table is a clipping from a daily newspaper issued in the year when I was eleven years old. The clipping comprises a reproduction of a photograph together with a caption of three lines underneath. At the centre of the photograph the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne County, the Most Reverend Doctor Daniel Mannix, holds open a small book and pretends to study the pages. Standing a little to one side of the Archbishop are two schoolgirls of thirteen or fourteen years. Each girl wears the pleated skirt and blouse and tie and blazer and gloves and bowl-shaped hat of the school uniform of Catholic colleges for girls in Melbourne County thirty-five years ago. The book in the outstretched hand of the Archbishop is rather far from the eyes of the two schoolgirls, but the girls are polite and obedient; the photographer has told them to look at the pages of the book in the Archbishop’s hand, and so they do. For the sake of appearances the two schoolgirls strain their white necks a little and compose their faces as though they are actually reading the pages held slightly beyond them.

  On some nights in this room with books around the walls, I clear a space among these pages and I look at the newspaper photograph from thirty-five years ago. I look at the faces of the schoolgirls: at the clear skin of the faces and the alert and thoughtful eyes. On some nights in this room, after I have put aside my pages and after I have drunk my evening’s beer, I promise myself I will take steps next day to insert in the same newspaper (which is still published in Melbourne County) a copy of the photograph (I assume the original is still in the archives of the newspaper) together with the names of the two girls and a request to each girl, as she was then, to write to me here in this room telling me simply where she lives and what name she uses nowadays, so that I can write to her at length and perhaps even send her some of these pages.

  But the next morning in this room I put the clipping in a drawer and I do not take it out again until some night, months later, when I look at the photograph through a reading-glass trying to identify the monogram on each of the blazer pockets and so to learn which of the many colleges for Catholic girls in Melbourne County each of the two girls attended and which two streams she lived between in the years when I lived between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri.

  In the photograph of thirty-five years ago the two girls are standing on one side while the Archbishop stands in the centre. The girls have been included in the photograph because they have been awarded prizes. They have won prizes in one of a group of competitions for children of all ages in Catholic schools of Melbourne County. The competitions have been conducted by a body called the Paraclete Arts Society.

  The title Paraclete is used for the Holy Ghost, the third Person of the Blessed Trinity and traditionally the person of those three most ready to help writers, artists, and all who today would be called creative. I knew as a schoolboy in the early 1950s that the word paraclete was from the Greek and meant helper, or comforter, but I was struck then, as I am still struck today, by the likeness of the word paraclete to parakeet.

  Almost certainly before I had heard the word paraclete, I had heard and learned the meaning of the word parakeet. And almost certainly before I had heard of a personage named the Holy Ghost who was one third of the God I was obliged to worship, I had become a worshipper of birds. I was never interested in the flight of birds – I have never watched the soaring of falcons or the gliding of gulls that writers about birds are so taken by. I have admired birds for as long as I can remember for their furtiveness.

  Something else I knew as a schoolboy in the early 1950s was that I would have seemed foolish if I had revealed that I had a favourite among the Persons of the Trinity. Yet privately I much preferred the Holy Ghost to either the Father or the Son. Unlike the other two, the Holy Ghost was never represented in pictures as having a human shape. The Holy Ghost was shadowy and changeable. He was many things rather than one thing: sometimes a rushing wind and sometimes tongues of fire or a shaft of light. He was most often represented as a bird.

  I am not writing about some milksop-child in a joke told by smiling nuns or priests. I knew the difference between the words paraclete and parakeet. But I knew already that each word is more than one word. And I was beginning to find messages and signs beneath the surfaces of words. I was struck by the roundabout ways of my thinking whenever I looked at a sketch of the bird that was meant to suggest the presence of the Holy Ghost and when I said aloud the word paraclete and heard at the same time the word parakeet and saw the gold collar and the grass-green and royal-blue body of Barnardius barnardi, Barnard’s parakeet, or the ringneck parrot, close to the ground in the grasslands of the Mallee district far away past Mount Macedon.

  I sometimes chose to see the two birds perched side by side: the dull-coloured, dove-shaped Paraclete and the vivid but furtive parakeet. The Paraclete was no less than the Third Person of the Triune God; the parakeet I recognise now as one of the demigods who live on earth rather than in heaven and who are all I know of divinity.

  The Paraclete stood for the official religion, which seemed to me in those days a vast and not uninteresting body of doctrine that I might go on learning for the rest of my life. The parakeet stood for something that I knew was no part of the official religion, although I often wished it could have been: what I might have called the religion of grasslands. I could only have talked vaguely about the religion of grasslands. But whenever I stood alone in the paddocks near Sims Street, with Bendigo Street just in view over my shoulder, I felt without straining to feel it what I supposed I was meant to feel during prayers and ceremonies in church.

  The two girls standing to one side of Archbishop Mannix have won first and second prize in the essay-writing section (for boys or girls under fourteen years at closing date) in the competitions conducted by the Paraclete Arts Society. Each girl has written an essay on the subject ‘How I Can Help Newcomers From Europe To Be Good Catholics’. The girls have probably not yet seen a newcomer from Europe, but they know from their newspapers that several thousand people known as Balts will soon arrive in Melbourne County and that many more thousands of other Europeans are expected to follow the Balts.

  Each year when the Paraclete Arts Society advertises its competitions, the nuns and the brothers in most of the Catholic secondary schools of Melbourne County choose the few that they call their most talented pupils and compel them to enter. The boys or girls write drafts of their essays, which the nuns or brothers then edit and comment on. More drafts are written. These too are edited and even rewritten here and there by the teacher, but not to an extent that will prevent the same teacher later from certifying that the essay is the original and unaided work of the entrant in the competition. At last, on an afternoon when the rest of the school has gone home, the essay-writers sit in their strangely quiet classroom writing – with steel-nibbed pens and with blue Swan ink from a squat bottle instead of the black, gritty mixture of powder and water from the everyday inkwell. Each pupil has to write a faultless draft, in his or her best copperplate handwriting. From time to time the nun or the brother strides into the room and stands behind each pupil, silently checking the draft word by word. If the teacher finds an error, a finger points it out to the writer. A missing comma can be corrected by a stroke of the pen, but any other error obliges the pupil to abandon that page and to take a clean page and begin again.

  I have never been able to identify the uniforms of the two prize-winning schoolgirls, but I have always supposed that those girls, like most of the prize-winning girls in my childhood, are from schools among the hills south of the Yarra Valley. On the night when she wrote her final draft, each girl stepped out onto a long veranda with archways between thick brick columns. She looked across the lawns and the gravel paths around her school to the wide shallow valley of the Yarra filling with mist; or she looked to the east, where the last sunlight picked out the few creases and fold
s in the forested mass of Mount Dandenong. Even if the girl had looked north-west she would have seen no further than the hills of Heidelberg. She could hardly have been curious to know that on the other side of those hills the flatlands began; that somewhere in that flatness the Merri flowed through its gorges; that further away still was the Moonee Ponds in its valley; that somewhere in the flat district between those two streams, on a slight hill marked by a few elm trees, was a building of timber and fibro-cement which on Sundays was the church of the parish of Blessed Oliver Plunket and on weekdays was the primary school of the same parish, and in one of the three rooms into which the building was divided on weekdays by sets of folding doors, seated alone at an oddly shaped piece of furniture which on Sundays served as a seat-and-kneeler in the church and on weekdays – folded somewhat differently – served as a desk in the classroom, was myself writing carefully the final draft of my essay ‘How I Can Help Newcomers From Europe To Be Good Catholics’.

  In the photograph I am standing beside Archbishop Mannix, on the opposite side from the two girls. I am not wearing any recognisable school uniform; I am wearing my best grey pullover and a white shirt with the top button undone. The photograph does not show my trousers, but they are short; that is, they reach from my waist to just above my knees. I am not wearing school uniform because my school has no uniform. Blessed Oliver Plunket’s School is a parish primary school whereas the two girls are from secondary fee-paying schools, or what would be called today private schools.