The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  And yet, what was this tradition? Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker’s peculiar usage of it.

  On that first afternoon I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves and others. This was the very opposite (as the plainsmen themselves well knew) of the common urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other cultures. A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

  *

  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.

  *

  Waiting all that day in my saloon bar, I came to learn of the capriciousness of the landowners. A townsman had gone in to them with bundles of designs and samples for a series of handprinted volumes. He wanted to publish for the first time some of the many manuscript diaries and collections of letters still preserved in the great houses. Some of the landowners had seemed interested. But in answering their questions the man had been too cautious and conciliatory. He had assured them that his editor would seek their advice before including any material likely to cause scandal. This was not what the great men wanted to hear. They feared no harm from their families’ follies being known all over the plains. When the publisher had first begun to speak, each of them had seen the whole mass of his family archives being issued year after year in costly bindings embossed with his own insignia. The projector’s talk of suppressions, of abridgements, had suddenly checked the steady expansion of their collected papers along imagined shelves. Or so the man himself had surmised afterwards when he talked with me of his failure. He had quietly put away his mockups and samples of paper and typefaces and left the room while the landowners were trying to calculate, by no means frivolously, how many individual lifetimes might be required to assemble, to read and comprehend, and then to decide on the significance of the lifetime of a man who delighted (as each of them certainly did) in filling drawers and chests and filing cabinets with every document, even the briefest scribbled note, that hinted at the vast unseen zone where he spent most of his days and nights.

  But one of the townsmen who followed the publisher into the inner lounge had come back whispering that his future was assured. He was a young man previously unable to earn a living from his specialised interests. He had studied the history of furnishings, fabrics and interior design in the great homes of the plains. Most of his research had been done in museums and libraries, but he had recently arrived at a theory that he could test only by visiting some mansion where the tastes and preferences of several generations were all evident under the one roof. I understood the main claim of the theory to be that the first generation of landowners on the plains had been fond of complex designs and profusely ornamented objects that seemed to contrast with the simplicity and bareness of the landscapes around their homes, whereas later generations chose to decorate more simply as the plains outside became marked by roads and fences and plantations. But this principle was always modified in its operation by two others: first, that in the early days a house was furnished more elaborately the nearer it was situated to the supposed centre of the plains or, in other words, the further it was from the coastal birthplaces of the first plainsmen, whereas in more recent times the reverse applied, that is, the homes nearer the putative centre, and once thought remote, were now considered close to some ideal source of cultural influence and decorated with less zest, while those nearer the margin of the plains were fitted out in great detail as though to compensate for a bleakness that their owners perceived not far off, in the lands beyond the plains.

  The young man explained his theory to the landowners soon after midnight. He had proposed it hesitantly and reminded them that it could only be verified after months of research in great homes of every district of the plains. But the landowners were delighted with it. One of them took the floor and announced that the theory might justify a suspicion he had whenever he walked alone late at night through the longest galleries and across some of the vast halls of his mansion. At such times he felt obscurely that the appearance and the exact position of every painting and statue and chest and the arrangement of collections of silverware and porcelain and even of the butterflies and shells and pressed flowers under their dusty glass had been determined by forces of great moment. He saw the countless objects in his home as a few visible points on some invisible graph of stupendous complexity. If his impression was unusually powerful he peered at the repeated motifs in a tapestry as though to read the story of a certain succession of days or years long before his time, or he stared at the intricate brilliance of a chandelier and guessed at the presence of sunlight in the memories of people he himself scarcely remembered.

  The same landowner began to describe other influences that he felt late at night in the more remote wings of his house. He sensed sometimes the lingering persistence of forces that had failed—of a history that had almost come into being. He found himself looking into corners for the favourite pieces of the unborn children of marriages that were never made.

  But his companions shouted him down. This was not what the young man, their astute historian of culture, had in mind. They listened while a second speaker proposed a method for allotting a numerical value to each of the influences described by the young man, then correcting (by what the speaker called ‘some sort of sliding scale’) the dominance of prosperous years over lean times, and finally devising a formula that would ‘come up with’ (his own words again) the true, essential style of the plains—the golden mean of all the variations that had occurred in different places and times.

  While this man had been talking, another had sent for sheets of graph paper and a box of finely sharpened coloured pencils. He replied to the latest speaker that his golden mean was no more than a grey average and that the great value of the young man’s theory was not that it could be used to calculate any one traditional style but that it allowed each family to plot its own graph, showing all the co-ordinates of culture that made its own style unique. And he cleared a table and called the young man to help him with his graph.

  The next hours, so the young man told me afterwards, were the most rewarding of his life. All but one of the landowners sent for supplies of paper and pencils and sat down among the ashtrays and glasses and empty bottles to plot the coloured lines that might reveal unguessed-at harmonies beneath the seeming confusion of a century and a half of impulsiveness and eccentricity. They soon agreed that each colour should denote the same cultural vector in each of their charts. And they referred all doubtful points to the young man for his ruling. But even so, the variety of patterns that appeared was remarkable. As time passed, some men left off their calculations and began to compose simpler, stylised versions of their designs or to reduce outstanding features to motifs for emblems. They had all been remarking for some time on a gradual change in the intensity of their colours before someone stepped into a hallway and came back to announce that a cloudless dawn was breaking over the plains.

  The men put down their pencils and served themselves a new round of drinks and made reckless offers of fees to the young man for his services as a consultant historian of fashion. But he begged to tell them that while they had been busy over their charts, the one man who had hung back had appointed him as resident historian of design and adviser on matters of taste in his own household—with lifetime tenure, an absurdly generous stipend, and an annual allowance for private
research and travel.

  This particular landowner had not been so interested in plotting the influences on his family’s taste in past years. He had suddenly seen the possibility of employing the young man to isolate and quantify every received idea and respected theory of the present day, every tradition and preference that survived from the past, and every prediction of future changes in the value of current beliefs; to give due weight to family legends and local customs and whatever else distinguished one household from all others; to allow for the limited exercise of whim and caprice in the choices of the present generation; and so to arrive at a formula that he, the landowner, and his family could use to decide which of any number of paintings or furnishings or colour schemes or table settings or bindings of books or topiary work or outfits of clothing was most likely to establish such a standard of elegance that other families would have to include it as a constant in their own formulae of fashion.

  The young man finished his story and went home to sober up. I ate a hasty breakfast and went on thinking of the Horizonites and Haremen. The success of the young designer had encouraged me to be bold with the landowners. When it appeared unlikely that I would be called in to them before lunch, I adjusted the hand that encircled my glass and stared at the two stones on my fingers. An electric globe was still burning on the wall just behind me. The light was refracted through my beer (the darkest of the nine varieties brewed on the plains) into a diffuse aura that seemed to quench the more intense hues of each gem. Their essential colours persisted but the contrast between them had been lessened by the glow from the ale.