Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  On day after day, I observed that the button-shape was developing into a frond and that the pale green was changing to green. My first catching sight from a distance of the single shred of greenery protruding from the dark-blue wall became for me the chief event of each day. I soon understood that the sight of the fern-frond growing out of the wall would become in time the sort of image that would go on troubling me until I had discovered more of the network of images and feelings of which the frond-image was only the most noticeable part.

  For as long as I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing, I used to tell my students that my own way of writing fiction was only one of many ways. Even so, I made sure that my students were well aware of how I went about my writing. I told my students of Advanced Fiction Writing during a discussion about the origins of fiction in the year when the fern had appeared that I believed I would write at some future time a work of fiction the central image of which was an image of a fern-frond protruding through a bluestone wall. I told my students further that an image connected with the central image would be an image of a strand of hair lying diagonally across the forehead of a young female person who looked out across an ocean or who lay with closed eyes beneath a lake.

  Only a year or two after I had told my students what is reported above, I gave up writing fiction. The work of fiction that I talked about in front of my students will never be written. And yet, the simple network of images that would have given rise to that work remains in my mind and has become more complex in recent years.

  Nowadays, the south-west coast of Victoria is often described as a popular tourist destination. At a certain point on that coast, the local government authority, hoping perhaps to reassure the persons known as tourists that the place whereat they have arrived is of historical importance, has erected a sign on which appear two words. The second word is Bay. The first word is the surname of my paternal great-grandfather followed by the possessive apostrophe. The surname on the sign is, of course, the surname of the author of this sentence and of all the other sentences in this work of fiction. I have been told that many tourists, so to call them, visit the place where the sign has been erected and admire the high cliffs thereabouts and even descend the steep stairway to the small bay named on the sign. I myself have not visited that part of the coast for twenty-nine years and will not visit it again. When I last visited the place, long before anyone would have wanted to erect a sign on it, I did so for the purpose of showing to my wife and my three young children a district that stayed in my mind even though I had turned away from it. I showed them the red-roofed sandstone farmhouse built by my father’s father on the site of the earlier wooden house built by that man’s father, who was the first owner of the nearest farm to the coast and the man for whom the steep bay was named. I photographed my children standing on the edge of a cliff with the bay visible below them and beyond the bay the Southern Ocean. I told my children of how my parents had taken me often to the farm beside the coast while my father’s father was still alive during the 1940s. During those years, the steep bay was so seldom visited that the sand would be littered with driftwood during winter and spring. Only in the hottest weeks of summer did visitors arrive, and they were mostly local farming families bringing picnic-lunches. I told the children that my parents and my brother and I sometimes picnicked in the steep bay. I told the children of how I had hated and feared the sea since the time when my mother had taken me onto the beach at Port Campbell before my first birthday and when I, a quiet and docile baby, had screamed until she took me away from all sight and sound of the waves. I told the children of how I used to plead with my parents not to take me down the path from the cliff-top into the steep bay; of how I used to stand on the cliff-top and to turn my back on the sea and to look northwards across the first few of the hundred and more miles of the so-called Western District and to yearn to belong to one of the families who lived there and who looked out all day from their windows and verandahs onto views of seemingly endless grassy countryside with intervening lines of trees marking the courses of creeks that trickled towards some far-away river that flowed sluggishly towards some farther-away ocean. I told the children of how I was always compelled to go down with my brother and my parents into the steep bay but of how I often avoided having to paddle and to splash among the incoming waves and to pretend that I was enjoying myself or even learning to swim. I often avoided these hateful rituals by creeping, with my parents’ reluctant permission, in among the piles of boulders at either side of the bay. The boulders were pieces of cliff that had fallen during past centuries. The waves from the ocean had so eroded the boulders as to create a complicated system of tunnels and sluices and pools. If I crept far out among the boulders, I was able to hear the crash of each ocean-wave against the outermost boulders and afterwards the long succession of hissing- and gurgling- and sucking-noises that marked the flowing of the water from the wave inwards among the boulders. I could sit in safety by some or another rock-pool while the force of the ocean-swell shook the boulders all around me but barely troubled the water of the pool. The sides of the pool would have been overgrown with bunches of the plant that I called sea-lettuce and with fronds and ribbons of plants that I had no name for. Currents in the pool caused the plants to sway continually. The currents were surely caused by the waves that struck the outer boulders, and yet the swaying of the plants seemed unconnected with any inrush of water from the ocean. The water from each wave took so long to travel through the heaps of boulders to the furthest pools (the nearest to the beach) that a second wave would sometimes arrive before the water in those pools had begun to recede. The plants attached to the sides of the rock-pools moved unpredictably, although always gracefully. Many years after my last visit to the heaps of boulders beside the bay named after my father’s grandfather, at a time when I supposed that I might soon begin to write a piece of fiction in which one of the central images was of a fern protruding through a wall of bluestone and another central image was of a strand of hair lying across the forehead of a female person, I began to understand that a further central image was of green bunches or fronds moving under water at unpredictable intervals, which further central image might require me to report in my piece of fiction that a certain young female personage on a balcony, or a certain young female personage presumed by other personages to have died, seemed sometimes to move her head from side to side as though she wondered at, or as though she disbelieved, or as though she could wish not to have seen some or another image that appeared in her mind.

  I did not tell my children of how I had often daydreamed during my childhood about a certain series of events that might take place on one or another Sunday afternoon in the near future: a Sunday afternoon when one or another of my mother’s sisters and her husband and children would join my parents and my brother and myself for a picnic at the steep bay with the rock-pools at its side. The series of events would have begun with one or another of the daughters of the sister of my mother, that is to say, one or another girl-cousin of mine agreeing to go with me among the boulders in order to watch the swaying of the green leaves and fronds in the rock-pools. The series would have continued with the girl-cousin and myself, soon after we had found ourselves alone together beside the most secluded of the rock-pools, agreeing that a girl-cousin and a boy-cousin were uniquely placed one to another, being neither sister and brother nor girlfriend and boyfriend but something in-between, as we might have expressed the matter, and further agreeing that we two cousins, during our few minutes together beside the secluded pool, were provided with an opportunity to treat with one another as surely no sister and brother, nor any girlfriend and boyfriend, ever treated.

  The series of events reported in the previous paragraph never took place beside the fictitious rock-pool or any other sort of rock-pool or in any other sort of secluded setting. And yet, there came into my mind while I was writing the previous paragraph an event that happened during the week after the horse named Rimfire won the Melbourne Cu
p in the world where I sit writing these paragraphs, and there came into my mind soon afterwards a fictitious version of that event: a version well-suited for including in this piece of fiction.

  During the week mentioned in the previous sentence, my brother and I and my parents lived in a farming district about five miles inland from the steep bay mentioned previously. The district, so far as I could see, comprised mostly level grassy countryside with lines or clumps of trees short of the horizon, some of which comprised the nearest tracts of the Heytesbury Forest. My family had arrived in the farming district only a few weeks before. We had previously lived in a provincial city several hundred miles away. I did not know it at the time, but we had left the provincial city in haste so that my father could avoid paying the large sums that he owed to bookmakers who had allowed him to bet with them on credit. In the farming district, my family paid a token rent for a house that had no bathroom, no laundry, and no sink or running water in the kitchen. We were one of only two families in the district that had no motor-car; my father rode a push-bike for three miles each day to and from the farm where he milked the cows and did labouring jobs. I marvel today that I never shrank with shame during my first days at the school in the farming district when one after another boy or girl asked me where I lived and what my father did. Perhaps I thought that my family’s humble circumstances counted for nothing beside the fact that my surname was attached to the steep bay on the coast not far away: the bay where many of my schoolfellows picnicked with their families on Sundays in summer.

  My family’s circumstances were seemingly no hindrance to my proposing to the daughter of our nearest farmer-neighbour that she and I should look at one another’s naked bodies from near at hand. The daughter was a year younger than I. She had yellow hair and a pert nose, and I considered her pretty. On several afternoons each week I would visit her parents’ farm on the pretext of wanting to play with her brother, who was in my class at school. The parents were always in the milking-shed when I visited. The mother, like the daughter, had yellow hair and a pert nose. The father I hardly ever saw; he seemed always to be finishing some or another job of work. I learned some years later that the farm was owned by his father-in-law, the father of the pert-nosed wife. The father-in-law owned several other farms and was the largest land-owner in the district.

  I would like to be able to remember what arguments or inducements I used in order to persuade the yellow-haired girl to show herself to me. I can only remember the sight of her standing in the dimly lit shed with her pants around her knees and her dress bunched beneath her chin. During the minute or so while she stood thus and while I inspected her, she neither moved nor spoke, so that I remembered her body afterwards as being hardly different from the many images of marble torsos that I looked at in books about sculpture, except for one or two significant details. And even those details I had struggled to appreciate in the dim shed, not because the yellow-haired girl was less than generous in showing them to me but because I had been for so long outside in the bright sunlight. I had been playing cricket or football with the brother of the yellow-haired girl in the so-called house paddock and looking often across the mostly level grassy countryside with lines or clumps of trees short of the horizon, and my eyes had been dazzled.

  Some years before I began to write this piece of fiction, a man who has read all of my published writing told me by telephone that he had been travelling recently along the coast in the southwest of Victoria and had come across a certain steep bay above which stood a sign proclaiming that the bay was named after a person bearing my surname. I told the man that the bay in question had been named after my father’s grandfather. I told him that I had not visited the steep bay for nearly thirty years and would not visit it again. I told the man also that I hoped he knew me better than to suppose that I got satisfaction from having my surname displayed on a sign above the Southern Ocean. I told the man finally that I had already arranged for my surname and my given name to be displayed at some or another time in the future in the only sort of landscape that I cared to be connected with. I explained to the man that I had bought some years ago a burial plot in a cemetery at the edge of a small town in the far west of Victoria after having satisfied myself first that the view in every direction around the cemetery was of mostly level grassy countryside with scattered trees in the middle distance and with a line of trees in the far distance and then that many a person standing in the Western District of Victoria and looking towards the furthest line of trees to the west of him or her would be looking in the direction of the small town.

  Have I answered yet the question why had I written?

  I would be willing to admit that I have not yet answered the impending question, but only if my hypothetical questioner would admit that a question can hardly be worth asking if its answer can be delivered in fewer than ten thousand words.

  A certain sort of reader may have learned already why I wrote what I wrote during the years before I gave up writing. Another sort of reader may need to read one or more of the following three paragraphs, even though no sentence in any of those paragraphs is in the indicative mood of traditional grammar. Another sort of reader may agree with me that a question can hardly be worth asking if it admits of only one answer. Still another sort of reader may be able to interpret the following paragraphs as variants of the one definitive statement.

  I may well have written in order to prepare myself to write at last the stories of such as Little Bridget or of Huldah (not the true Huldah, so to call her, but the veiled female personage that I had envisaged when I read the early parts of The Glass Spear) or of Rod Craig’s hidden goddess or of other such female personages. It would be no argument against the foregoing proposition for anyone to point out that none of my published works of fiction includes any reference to any of the female personages mentioned in the previous sentence. I may have written those works only so as to render visible for ever to some or another reader the many images that had appeared in the foreground of my mind during the many years while I was still preparing to write about Little Bridget or about Huldah or about such personages. In short, I may have written those works only so that I could write at last about the images that had persisted for fifty years and more in the background of my mind no matter whom I fell in love with or who became my wife or what children were born to us or what befell us during the onrush of events that might be called my seeming life.

  Another answer suggests itself. My published books may have been written not in order to remove images from my mind but to arrange them more appropriately and to give certain images their rightful prominence. I may have written during the past thirty years and more not one after another separate book but one after another chapter of the one book, the final chapter of which I am trying to write at present: a chapter devoted to Little Bridget, Huldah, and others of their kind.

  Each of the two previous paragraphs would have been misleading if it had seemed to suggest that the purpose of my writing about Little Bridget and the others was to bring their stories to an end. On the contrary, my hope would always have been that those stories would never come to an end. As a ten-years-old child, reacting simple-mindedly to fiction meant to entertain adults, I had seemed to meet up with images of personages and of landscapes the origins of which were utterly outside my awareness; but even as a man past middle-age who has read perhaps two thousand books, I could never wish for those images to be reported even as likely to come to an end, even such an end as a passage in a work of fiction might seem to have brought about. If ever it occurred to me that even the little I have written in these pages about Little Bridget and her kind might bring nearer the end of their fictional existence or of whatever other sort of existence they enjoy, I would never again refer to Little Bridget or to any other such personage in any sentence that I might write. Instead, I would try to devise some means other than the writing of sentences in order to prolong the existence of my favourites.

  I have taken hardly any interes
t in the so-called visual arts, but it seems apt to mention here a game that I used to play or an exercise that I used to perform three and more years before I first read about any of the personages mentioned above. One of my father’s unmarried sisters used to send to my parents every year as a Christmas present a calendar published by a religious order of Catholic priests. My mother used to hang each calendar on a nail behind the kitchen door. The calendar had a separate page for each month. On the lower half of each page was a pattern of numbered squares denoting the days of the month. On the upper half of the page was a coloured reproduction of one or another painting with a subject-matter that might be called biblical or religious. The pictures on the calendar were the only illustrations of any kind displayed in our rented house. I stared often at picture after picture during several years of the mid-1940s but I recall today only two pictures together with the words of a title. I recall the image of a group of persons on the top of a hill surrounded in every direction by water. In all the expanse of water, the only solid object is a large boat in the middle distance. The persons on top of the hill are gesturing as though to implore the persons in the boat to rescue them. During the year when I looked often at this picture I had not yet heard the story of Noah, but I did not doubt that the persons on top of the hill would soon be drowned. I recall also the image of a clump of dark-coloured trees in the right foreground of an extensive landscape. Opposite the trees, in the left foreground, is a tall building with what would have seemed to me a lofty and spacious verandah. The roof of the verandah rests on columns. I was hardly interested in the building, but I looked sometimes at the columns. The building as a whole was outlandish, but I recognised the columns as being no different from the columns at the front of the Capitol Theatre in the provincial city where I then lived. In December of each year, in the evening of the last schoolday, my school took part in a concert. While I stood with my classmates on the stage of the theatre, I was never unaware of the painted backdrop behind us: a landscape of green meadows and dark-green copses and the blue water of a winding stream. On the following day, our long summer holiday would begin, and my feeling of pleasant expectation seemed sometimes to spread beyond me and to add a certain glamour to my surroundings. At such times, I might have been about to begin not a long holiday in a well-known city but a new mode of living in landscapes of exaggerated colour. A dozen and more persons busied themselves on the verandah or in front of the building, but I seldom looked at the persons. During the year when I looked often at this picture, I looked mostly at the scenery on the farther side of the tall building and of the dark trees. The words that I still recall comprise the title of the picture: Landscape with Samuel Anointing David. I surely read at least once the name of the person who executed the painting, but I have long since forgotten the name.