The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  Text Classics

  GERALD MURNANE was born in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, in 1939. He spent some of his childhood in country Victoria before returning to Melbourne in 1949 where he lived for the next sixty years. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane.

  In 1957 Murnane began training for the Catholic priesthood but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a primary-school teacher. He also taught at the Apprentice Jockeys’ School run by the Victoria Racing Club. In 1969 he graduated in arts from Melbourne University. He worked in education for a number of years and later became a teacher of creative writing.

  In 1966 Murnane married Catherine Lancaster. They had three sons. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, and was followed by eight other works of fiction. His most recent book is A History of Books. He has also published a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005).

  In 1999 Gerald Murnane won the Patrick White Award. In 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. In the same year, after the death of his wife, Murnane moved to Goroke in the north-west of Victoria.

  WAYNE MACAULEY is the author of three novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (2004), Caravan Story (2007) and The Cook (2011), and the short-fiction collection Other Stories (2010). He lives in Melbourne.

  ALSO BY GERALD MURNANE

  Fiction

  Tamarisk Row

  A Lifetime on Clouds

  Landscape With Landscape

  Inland

  Velvet Waters

  Emerald Blue

  Barley Patch

  A History of Books

  Non-fiction

  Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

  Proudly supported by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Gerald Murnane 1982

  Introduction copyright © Wayne Macauley 2012

  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.

  First published by Norstrilia Press 1982

  First published by The Text Publishing Company 2000

  This edition published 2012

  Designed by WH Chong

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922275

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921921872

  Author: Murnane, Gerald, 1939-

  Title: The plains / by Gerald Murnane ; introduction by Wayne Macauley.

  Series: Text classics.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Macauley, Wayne.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  About the Introducer / Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Wayne Macauley

  The Plains

  Text Classics

  Far Enough: The Peculiar

  World of The Plains

  by Wayne Macauley

  THE dust jacket of the first edition of The Plains describes it as ‘a lament for an Australian literature that has never been written’. Thirty years later this strange, disquieting, curious little book continues to stand almost alone in the library of alternative Australian fiction. But make no mistake: this is no archaeological artefact. The Plains is a masterpiece, and, word for word, sentence for sentence, one of the best novels ever written in this country.

  Like all great allegories, its premise is simple. A filmmaker, researching a script to be called The Interior, journeys to the flat plains of the inland where in a remote town he spends his days in the pub trying to learn what he can about the so-called plainsmen and their peculiar way of life. Because it is peculiar. Like the many other petitioners who have made the journey (‘I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia’) in the hope of finding a patron among the wealthy landowners there, our narrator must work hard to understand their culture— detailed, arcane and to the outsider utterly foreign—if he is to find favour with them.

  It is right that a peculiar literary work should have a peculiar publishing history. Murnane had originally written a work of about 60,000 words, The Only Adam, with the opening and closing sections set in a place ‘that might have stood in relation to the setting of the rest of the book as a mirage stands in relationship to the landscape that gives rise to it’. Bruce Gillespie, the publisher at Norstrilia, a small press specialising in sci-fi and speculative fiction (Murnane: ‘I would have thought that all fiction is speculative’), suggested that if The Only Adam failed to find a publisher he would like to include ‘the plains sections’ in an anthology he was planning. The longer work never did find a home, and Murnane decided to explore his mirage further. ‘It seemed to me,’ he told me recently, ‘that I could write more than I had already written about my mysterious plains.’ In 1982 Gillespie published this 30,000-word manuscript in a handsome hardback.

  When I first read The Plains, in my late twenties, I noted in my diary that it was ‘miles beyond most other Australian writing I’ve read’. I had already given White a fair go, and Stead, I had read most of Lawson and stumbled my way through that other great curio, Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life. I’d read some early Carey and Bail, and was keeping up where I could with the little magazines and journals. But The Plains was something else. Here was a stepping-off into an alternative world as exhilarating as anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino, written in a prose to rival the European greats I had already fallen in love with. And, more importantly, in the subtle cultural investigations going on deep within the book, Murnane seemed to be forging his own way not just towards an alternative Australian literature but an alternative way of imagining the country. With an eye both to the European and South American avant-garde, combined with hefty doses of Proust and Kerouac—most evident in his extraordinary debut novel, Tamarisk Row—he was out on his own making something eccentric, free-floating and completely new.

  Because let’s not forget, aside from its startling originality, The Plains is also a very funny book. In the early pages especially, Murnane maps our national anxieties—the paranoia about who we are and what we might be, the idea that culture is always somehow elsewhere—with a withering sense of humour. Where explorers like Thomas Livingstone Mitchell (quoted in the epigraph) saw this continent’s inland as a blank slate, The Plains dares us to see it otherwise. Yes, the interior, that vast, empty space we coast dwellers habitually turn away from, is forbidding but it is by no means bereft. While we’ve been gazing across the ocean something peculiar has been going on behind our backs. The imaginative leap of The Plains is to reverse the comfortable order of the idea of culture being ‘over there’ and to see instead Australia’s interior as a richly storied other world. The people who dwell out on the plains are not cringing hicks. They’re experimentalists. They’re cutting edge. They’re everything we coast dwellers are not.

  In the dialogues of the landowners, in the narrator’s musings in the pub and then as he wanders the vast library of his patron, in the way he watches his patron’s daughter and wife (‘still beautiful according to the conventions of the plains’) moving among the estate’s gardens and lawns, we see a world shimmering with speculation and wonder. The plains’ history is so rich and its arts and sciences so sophisticated they chal
lenge anything old Europe has to offer and the plainsmen themselves—deep-thinking, serious and culturally alert—’confront even the most obdurate or the most ingenuous work utterly receptive and willing’. No, this is not the inland of lonely truck stops and whistling wires and fat guys fishing the last potato cake out of the bain-marie. Out on Murnane’s plains you get everything: the great perplexity of human existence, the itch of human flesh, the tug on the heart, the dreamy imagining of togetherness, the comedy of trying. Here is the narrator planning his courtship of his patron’s wife:

  As soon as I had finished my preliminary notes for The Interior, and before I began work on the filmscript itself, I would write a short work—probably a collection of essays—which would settle things between the woman and myself. I would have it published privately under one of the seldom-used imprints that my patron reserves for his clients’ work-in-progress or marginalia. And I would so arrange the ostensible subject-matter of the work that the librarians here would insert a copy among the shelves where she spends her afternoons.

  I foresaw this much of my scheme happening as I had planned it. The only uncertain item was the last—I had no way of ensuring that the woman would open my book during her lifetime…

  *

  Dear Gerald,

  This is a letter I have been meaning to write for a very long time. I first read The Plains in 1985 and it had a profound effect on me. At the time I was a 27-year-old writer wondering if there was any new Australian literature I was ever going to like, let alone get inspiration from. Your book gave me great faith in continuing to pursue the writing I had been doing—writing, it’s true, that never looked like getting published but was nonetheless, I think, true to itself and its creator…

  This is the first paragraph of a letter I wrote to Gerald Murnane in 2002. I was at the time a 44-year-old writer about to have his first book published. We are, all of us, at some point, I think, looking for some line of steerage, something to set our course by, some little marker buoy out there somewhere that tells us we’re not completely lost. This is what The Plains was for me. This tiny little book, written in my city by a person twenty years my senior, living in a suburb just a stone’s throw away, somehow made everything right. By that time I’d read and loved Hamsun, Walser, Kafka, Gombrowicz, Beckett and others but there was no one in Australia who spoke to me in the same way. The Plains became for me an iconic book, a black diamond, a Rosetta Stone.

  It was about the feat of imagination—how many Australian books dared go where this one went?—but it was also about the marks on the paper. Few living writers anywhere are as ambitious with the prose form as Gerald Murnane. He fills his works with sentences so boldly constructed and so beautifully finished that any writer serious about their craft would be well advised to spend some time with them: the subtle unreeling of the narrative, the phrases creeping one by one towards a distantly observed idea, the hand-on-mouth humour, the firm and steady gaze. You might not know where Murnane is taking you but you can’t help being taken.

  The countless volumes of this library are closeset with so much speculative prose, so many chapters after chapters appear in parentheses, such glosses and footnotes surround the thin trickles of actual text that I fear to discover in some unexceptional essay by a plainsman of no great reputation a tentative paragraph describing a man not unlike myself speculating endlessly about the plains but never setting foot on them…

  Gerald and I have continued to exchange letters over the years. We have still never met. It is, in the old sense, a prosaic relationship. Late last year in place of a letter he sent me a photo of a straight road cutting a line through the Wimmera plains towards Mount Arapiles in the distance. His note to me was written on the back. He was, he said, ‘in excellent health and spirits’, had a new work on the go and would soon have his tenth book published. I looked at that photo for a long time—the straight road, the low horizon, the big blue sky—and saw in it a story that had now come full circle. Gerald Murnane, author of The Plains, was writing to me from them.

  What then is this thing we might call an alternative Australian literature and what would it look like? The last word might come from one of the earliest passages in The Plains. Compelled one day in the pub to tell the plainsmen his own story before they will let him listen to theirs, the narrator says: ‘I told them a story almost devoid of events or achievements. Outsiders would have made little of it, but the plainsmen understood.’

  I invite all plainsmen and women to read, laugh at, enjoy and be inspired by this extraordinary book.

  The Plains

  ‘We had at length discovered

  a country ready for the immediate

  reception of civilised man…’

  THOMAS LIVINGSTONE MITCHELL

  Three Expeditions into the

  Interior of Eastern Australia

  {one}

  Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

  My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.

  The plains that I crossed in those days were not endlessly alike. Sometimes I looked over a great shallow valley with scattered trees and idle cattle and perhaps a meagre stream at its centre. Sometimes, at the end of a tract of utterly unpromising country, the road rose towards what was unquestionably a hill before I saw ahead only another plain, level and bare and daunting.

  In the large town that I reached on a certain afternoon, I noticed a way of speech and a style of dress that persuaded me I had come far enough. The people there were not quite the distinctive plainsmen I hoped to find in the remote central districts, but it suited me to know that ahead of me were more plains than I had yet crossed.

  Late that night I stood at a third-storey window of the largest hotel in the town. I looked past the regular pattern of streetlights towards the dark country beyond. A breeze came in warm gusts from the north. I leaned into the surges of air that rose up from the nearest miles of grassland. I composed my face to register a variety of powerful emotions. And I whispered words that might have served a character in a film at the moment when he realised he had found where he belonged. Then I stepped back into the room and sat at the desk that had been specially installed for me.

  I had unpacked my suitcases some hours earlier. Now my desk was stacked high with folders of notepaper and boxes of cards and an assortment of books with numbered tickets between their pages. On top of the stack was a medium-sized ledger labelled:

  THE INTERIOR

  (FILMSCRIPT)

  MASTER KEY TO CATALOGUE OF

  BACKGROUND NOTES

  AND INSPIRATIONAL MATERIAL

  I pulled out a bulky folder labelled Occasional Thoughts—Not Yet in Catalogue and wrote in it:

  Not a soul in this district knows who I am or what I mean to do here. Odd to think that of all the plainsfolk lying asleep (in sprawling houses of white weatherboard with red iron roofs and great arid gardens dominated by pepper-trees and kurrajongs and rows of tamarisks) not one has seen the view of the plains that I am soon to disclose.

  I spent the next day among the labyrinths of saloon bars and lounges on the ground floor of the hotel. All morning I sat alone in a deep leather armchair and stared at the strips of intolerable sunlight bordering the sealed venetian blinds in windows overlooking the main street. It was a cloudless day in early summer and the fierce morning sun reached even into the cavernous verandah of the hotel.

  Sometimes I tilted my face slightly to catch the draught of cooler air from a fan overhead and watched the dew forming on my glass and thought with approval of the extremes of weather that afflicted the plains. Unchecked by hills or mountains, the sunlight in summer occupied the whole extent of t
he land from dawn till sunset. And in winter the winds and showers sweeping across the great open spaces barely faltered at the few stands of timber meant as shelter for men or animals. I knew there were great plains of the world that lay for months under snow, but I was pleased that my own district was not one of them. I much preferred to see all year the true configuration of the earth itself and not the false hillocks and hollows of some other element. In any case, I thought of snow (which I had never seen) as too much a part of European and American culture to be appropriate to my own region.

  In the afternoon I joined one of the groups of plainsmen who strolled in from the main street and sat at their customary points along the enormous bars. I chose a group that seemed to include intellectuals and custodians of the history and lore of the district. I judged from their dress and bearing that they were not sheepmen or cattlemen, although they might have spent much of their time out of doors. A few had perhaps started life as the younger sons of the great landed families. (Everyone on the plains owed his prosperity to the land. Every town, large or small, was buoyed up by the bottomless wealth of the latifundia around it.) They all wore the dress of the cultivated, leisured class on the plains—plain grey trousers, rigidly creased, and spotless white shirt with matching tie-clip and armbands.

  I was anxious to be accepted by these men and prepared for any test they might make of me. Yet I hardly expected to call on anything I had read in my shelves of books on the plains. To quote from works of literature would go against the spirit of the gathering, although every man there would have read any book that I named. Perhaps because they still felt themselves encircled by Australia, the plainsmen preferred to think of their reading as a private exercise that sustained them in their public dealings but could not excuse them from their obligation of cultivating an agreed tradition.