*
I continued to keep to the hotel but almost every day I drank with a new group. For all my note-taking and drafting of plans and outlines, I was still far from sure of what my film would show. I expected to be granted some sudden strength of purpose from meeting a plainsman whose perfect assurance could only have come from his having just that day finished the last page of his notes for a novel or film to rival my own.
I had by then begun to speak freely in front of the plainsmen I met. A few wanted to hear my story before they divulged their own. I was prepared for this. I had been ready, if they only knew, to spend months of silent study in the libraries and art galleries of their town to prove I was no mere tourist or sightseer. But after a few days in the hotel I had devised a story that served me well.
I told the plainsmen that I was on a journey, which was true enough. I did not tell them the route I had followed to their town or the direction I might take when I left it. They would learn the truth when The Interior appeared as a film. In the meantime I let them believe I had begun my journey in a distant corner of the plains. And, as I had hoped, no one doubted me or even claimed to know the district I had named. The plains were so immense that no plainsman was ever surprised to hear of their encompassing some region he had never seen. Besides, many places far inland were subject to dispute—were they part of the plains or not? The true extent of the plains had never been agreed on.
I told them a story almost devoid of events or achievements. Outsiders would have made little of it, but the plainsmen understood. It was the kind of story that appealed to their own novelists and dramatists and poets. Readers and audiences on the plains were seldom impressed by outbursts of emotion or violent conflicts or sudden calamities. They supposed that the artists who presented such things had been beguiled by the noises of crowds or the profusions of shapes and surfaces in the foreshortened landscapes of the world beyond the plains. The plainsman’s heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat—or the man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated farmhouse for fear that he would not recognise the place if he saw it from the distant vantage points that others used.
There were historians who suggested that the phenomenon of the plains themselves was responsible for the cultural differences between the plainsmen and Australians generally. The exploration of the plains had been the major event in their history. What had at first seemed utterly flat and featureless eventually disclosed countless subtle variations of landscape and an abundance of furtive wildlife. Trying to appreciate and describe their discoveries, the plainsmen had become unusually observant, discriminating, and receptive to gradual revelations of meaning. Later generations responded to life and art as their forebears had confronted the miles of grassland receding into haze. They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains.
*
One afternoon I noticed a faint tension in the saloon bar that had become my favourite. Some of my companions kept their voices low. Others spoke with an uneasy stridence as though hoping to be overheard from a distant room. I realised that the day had come for me to test myself as a plainsman. Some of the great landowners had come to town, and a few of them were even then in the hotel.
I tried not to look agitated, and I watched my companions closely. Most of them too were anxious to be called into the distant inner lounge for a brief interview with the men they wanted for patrons. But my companions knew they might still be waiting at sundown or even at midnight. The estate owners on their infrequent visits cared nothing for the hours that townsmen observed. They liked to settle their commercial affairs in the early morning and then ensconce themselves in their favourite hotel lounges before lunchtime. They stayed there for as long as they pleased, drinking extravagantly and calling for snacks or entire meals at unpredictable intervals. Many stayed on until the morning or even the afternoon of the following day, with never more than one of the group dozing in his chair while the others talked privately or interviewed their petitioners from the town.
I followed the custom of sending in my name with one of the townsmen who happened to be called early. Then I learned what I could about the men in the remote lounge and wondered which of them would surrender a portion of his fortune and perhaps his own daughter in return for seeing his estates as the setting for the film that would reveal the plains to the world.
I drank sparingly all afternoon and checked my appearance in every mirror that caught my eye. My only cause for anxiety was the paisley-patterned silk cravat bunched in the open neck of my white shirt. By every rule of fashion that I knew, a cravat at a man’s throat marked him out as wealthy, refined, sensitive, and possessed of ample leisure. But few plainsmen wore cravats, as I suddenly reminded myself. I could only hope the landowners would see in my dress the sort of paradox that discerning plainsmen delighted in. I wore something that was part of the despised culture of the capital cities—but only to distinguish myself a little from my fellow-petitioners and to assert that the way of the plains should be to avoid even the proper gesture if it threatened to become merely fashionable.
Fingering my crimson paisley silk before the mirror in the toilet, I was reassured by the sight of the two dress rings on my left hand. Each was set with a prominent slab of semi-precious stone—one a cloudy blue-green and the other a subdued yellow. I could not have named either stone, and the rings had been made in Melbourne—the city I preferred to forget—but I had chosen those colours for their special significance to plainsmen.
I knew a little of the conflict between the Horizonites and the Haremen, as they had come to be called. I had bought my rings knowing that the colours of the two factions were no longer worn in a spirit of partisanship. But I had hoped to learn that one or the other colour was sometimes preferred by plainsmen who regretted the spiritedness of past disputes. When I found that the practice was to wear never one colour alone but both, intertwined if possible, I had slipped the two rings onto separate fingers and never afterwards removed them.
I planned to represent myself to the landowners as a man from the very edge of the plains. They might comment on my wearing the two colours and ask me what traces of the famous dispute still survived in my remote homeland. If they did, I could tell them any of the stories I had heard of the lingering influence of the old quarrel. For I knew by then that the original issues survived in countless popular variants. Almost any opposite viewpoints that arose in public or private debate might be labelled the Horizonites’ or the Haremen’s. Almost any duality that occurred to a plainsman seemed easier to grasp if the two entities were associated with the two hues, blue-green and faded gold. And everyone on the plains remembered from childhood the day-long games of Hairies and Horrors—the frantic pursuits far into the paddocks, or the insecure hiding-places in the long grass.
If the landowners wanted to talk at length with me about ‘the colours’ (the modern name for all the complex rivalries of the past century), there was nothing to prevent me from offering them my own erratic interpretation of the celebrated conflict. By late afternoon I was no longer so eager to show them how close I was to their own ways of thinking. It seemed just as important to give them evidence of my imaginative prowess.
And then the door from the street was flung open and a new group of plainsmen came in from the dazzling sunlight with their afternoon’s work done and settled themselves at the bar to resume their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth. I felt a sudden elation at not knowing what could be verified in the history of the plains or even in my own history. And I even began to wonder whether the landowners might prefer me to appear before them as a man who misunderstood the plains.
*
ALSO BY GERALD MURNANE<
br />
Tamarisk Row
A Lifetime on Clouds
The Plains
Landscape with Landscape
Inland
Velvet Waters
Emerald Blue
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (essays)
Barley Patch
A History of Books
A Million Windows
Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf
Border Districts
Collected Short Fiction
Green Shadows and Other Poems
PRAISE FOR GERALD MURNANE
‘[A Season on Earth is] an ideal jumping-off point for readers new to Murnane and his particular way of looking at the world.’
Books+Publishing (five-star review)
‘‘No living Australian writer…has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘‘Unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today.’
Australian
‘‘A writer of the greatest skill and tonal control.’
Financial Times
‘‘Reading Murnane, one cares less about what is happening in the story and more about what one is thinking about as one reads. The effect of his writing is to induce images in the reader’s own mind, and to hold the reader inside a world in which the reader is at every turn encouraged to turn his or her attention to those fast flocking images.’
New York Times
‘‘Murnane’s is a vision that blesses and beatifies every detail.’
Washington Post
‘‘A careful stylist and a slyly comic writer with large ideas.’
Robyn Cresswell, Paris Review
‘‘The Plains is a bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed.’
Ben Lerner, New Yorker
‘‘Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.’
Teju Cole, Guardian
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Copyright © Gerald Murnane, 2019
The moral right of Gerald Murnane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2019 (A Lifetime on Clouds first published by William Heinemann, Australia, 1976)
Jacket design by W. H. Chong
Front-cover image by Neville Bowler / Fairfax Syndication
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ISBN: 9781925773347 (hardback)
ISBN: 9781925774160 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
A Season on Earth Page 43