The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  It occurred to me to present myself to the landowners as a man destined to reconcile in my own life or, better still, in my film, all the conflicting themes arising from the old quarrel between the blue-greens and the old-golds. As if to encourage my enterprise, a loud but not undignified roar sounded just then from the distant room where the great men were beginning the second day of their session.

  *

  I had heard that at one stage of the dispute, bands of men were armed and drilled in the back paddocks of certain estates. And yet the whole matter had begun with a cautiously expressed manifesto signed by an obscure group of poets and painters. I did not even know the year of this manifesto—only that it fell during a decade when the artists of the plains were finally refusing to allow the word ‘Australian’ to be applied to themselves or their work. Those were the years when plainsmen generally began to use the term ‘Outer Australia’ for the sterile margins of the continent. But if it was a period of excitement it was also the age when plainsmen acknowledged that their distinctive forms of expression were for themselves alone. For all that outsiders would know of them, the poets and musicians and painters of the plains might never have existed and no peculiar culture have survived within the drab outer layers of Australia.

  One small group in those days formed around a certain poet whose first published volume was a collection named for its most arresting poem, ‘The Horizon, After All’. The poetry itself was never labelled as derivative, but the poet and his group offended many by gathering regularly in a bar that served a sort of wine (most plainsmen had a congenital dislike for this drink) and discussing aesthetics much too loudly. They identified themselves by the wearing of a blue and a green ribbon, fastened so as to overlap. Later, after much searching, they found a cloth dyed an unusual bluegreen, from which they cut single ribbons of the famous ‘tint of the horizon’.

  What this group originally proposed had been almost lost among the jumble of doctrines and precepts and so-called philosophies later attributed to them. They may well have intended no more than to provoke the intellectuals of the plains to define in metaphysical terms what had previously been expressed in emotional or sentimental language. (This seemed to me the best summary of the matter that I had heard, even though I had always had the greatest difficulty in understanding what metaphysics were.) It was clear that they felt for the plains the passionate love that artists and poets had so often professed. But people who read their poems or inspected their paintings found few renderings of actual places on the plains. The group seemed to be insisting that what moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance.

  Members of the group were challenged, of course, to explain themselves. They replied by talking of the blue-green haze as though it was itself a land—a plain of the future, perhaps, where one might live a life that existed only in potentiality on the plains where poets and painters could do no more than write or paint. The critics then accused the group of rejecting the actual plains for a landscape that was wholly illusory. But the group argued that the zone of haze was as much a part of the plains as any configuration of soil or clouds. They said they esteemed the land of their birth for the very reason that it seemed bounded continually by the bluegreen veil that urged them to dream of a different plain. Most critics dismissed such statements as wilfully evasive and chose to ignore the group from then on.

  But the controversy was kept alive by the appearance soon afterwards of another group of artists who seemed equally keen to provoke criticism. This group exhibited a roomful of paintings with a novel subjectmatter. The most impressive of many similar works, Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass, seemed at first sight only a very detailed study of a small patch of native grasses and herbage—a few square yards from any one of the countless grazing paddocks on the plains. But spectators soon began to make out of the trampled stems and frayed foliage and minute, severed blossoms the shapes of things quite unconnected with the plains.

  Many of the shapes seemed deliberately imprecise, and even those that most nearly represented architectural ruins or abandoned artifacts were of no style known from history. But commentators could point to a score of details that seemed to comprise a scene of grandiose desolation—and then, stepping back, could see once again a painting of plants and soil. The artist himself encouraged the search for shattered colonnades and tapestries flapping on roofless walls. But in his only published account of the painting (a brief statement which he tried repeatedly to amend in later years) he claimed it was inspired by his study of a certain small marsupial. This animal had disappeared from settled areas before the plainsfolk had given a common name to it. The artist used its unwieldy scientific name, but someone in the course of debate referred to it (inaccurately) as a plains-hare, and that name stuck.

  The painter had studied a few passages in the journals of explorers and early naturalists and a single stuffed skin in a plains museum. Observers had remarked on the animal’s attempts to hide by flattening itself in the grass. The early settlers had walked boldly up and clubbed hundreds of the creatures to death for their barely usable hides. Rather than flee, the animal seemed to trust to the last in its colouring—the same dull gold that predominated in the grass of the plains.

  The painter, so he said, found a large significance in the stubborn foolishness of this almost-forgotten species. All its near-relatives were burrowing animals. It might have used its powerful claws for digging the spacious, well-concealed tunnels that kept other species safe. But it was obliged to cling for safety to its barren surroundings; to persist in seeing the shallow grass of the plains as a fortress against intruders.

  The man who made these claims insisted that he was no mere nature lover calling for the return of vanished wildlife. He wanted the people of the plains to see their landscape with other eyes; to recover the promise, the mystery even, of the plains as they might have appeared to someone with no other refuge. He and his fellow artists would assist them. His group utterly rejected the supposed appeal of misty distances. They were pledged to find grand themes in the weathered gold of their birthplace.

  None of this was any better received than the earlier manifesto in favour of an ‘art of the horizon’. The earliest attacks on the painters accused them of wilfully inventing subjects unconnected with the essential spirit of the plains. Other critics predicted that the end of the painters as a group would be as swift as that of the pathetic animal that so inspired them. But the painters took to wearing their dull-gold ribbons and debating with the men of the blue-green group.

  The dispute might have been soon forgotten by all but the rival groups. But it was transformed once more into an issue of wider interest when a third group tried to promote its own views at the expense of the blue-greens’ and the old-golds’. This third group concocted a theory of art so eccentric that it angered the most tolerant of plainsmen. Even laymen, writing in the daily press, saw the theory as a threat to the precious fabric of culture on the plains. And the blue-greens and old-golds set aside their differences and joined with their former critics and with artists and writers of every sort in condemning the new absurdity.

  They discredited it finally on the simple grounds that it was derived from ideas current in Outer Australia. The plainsmen were not always opposed to borrowings and importations, but in the matter of culture they had come to scorn the seeming barbarisms of their neighbours in the coastal cities and damp ranges. And when the more acute plainsmen had convinced the public that this latest group were drawing on a jumble of the worst kinds of foreign notions, the members of the despised group chose to cross the Great Dividing Range rather than endure the enmity of all thinking plainsmen.

  Then, because the discredited group had originally used their theory to attack both the blue-greens and the old-golds, these two factions enjoyed for a while a large share of the general goodwill towards artists. For, as one commentator reminded the public (in the inflated p
rose of that era), ‘Their notions may be no more acceptable to us now than before. But we recognise them as fundamentally inspired by our incomparable landscape and, therefore, as connected, however tenuously, with the great body of our cherished mythology. And what they propose seems entirely reasonable beside the preposterous fallacy that we have lately banished from our plains: the specious argument for the artist’s concerning himself with the distribution of material wealth or the workings of Government or the release of men from the constraints of morality in the name of a universal licence masking itself as Freedom.’

  But, as I knew from my research among borrowed books and my long conversations in saloon bars, the public had soon tired of quarrels among artists. For many years the two inimical theories were of interest to no one but a few diehards hunched over acrid wines in back bars or haranguing casual acquaintances at opening nights in inferior art galleries.

  Yet in the years that some liked to call the Second Great Age of Exploration, two groups arose who were proud to be called Horizonites and Haremen. And the two colours reappeared—not merely in buttonholes but on gaudy silk banners at the head of public processions and in hand-lettered pennants over gateposts. The disputes of those days had little to do with poetry or painting. The self-proclaimed Horizonites claimed to be men of action. They called themselves the true plainsmen, ready to push back the limits of pasturage into regions too long neglected. The Haremen insisted that they were the practical ones, and contrasted their own realistic plans for closer settlement with their opponents’ grand schemes for populating a desert.

  Thirty years later again the colours were mostly seen on the tiny enamelled pins worn discreetly by estate agents and owners of small businesses. These were the badges of the two major parties in local government. Blue-green denoted the Progressive Mercantile Party, with its policy of establishing new industries and building railway lines between the plains and the capital cities. Gold was the colour of the Plains First League, whose slogan was ‘Buy Local Goods’.

  The great landowners of those days mostly kept aloof from politics. Yet it was observed that at the end of every polo season, when two combined sides were chosen from the dozens of smaller associations and leagues, the team calling themselves Central Plains always wore a certain shade of yellow when they rode out against the men representing the Outer Plains. In the official program the Outer Plains uniform was described as ‘sea-green’ but the sea was five hundred miles away.

  I had listened to men who had stood as small boys in the crowds watching those polo games. Some of them, looking back, remembered odd words that proved their fathers knew what was in the air. But my informants were sure that as boys they had seen nothing ominous in the hectic clash of colours. A blue-green might break loose and dash alone towards the far goal. A knot of golds might pursue him, gaining steadily, the very tilt of their bodies—low over the flapping manes— suggesting menace. But it still seemed no more than sport—the traditional game of the plains, whose technical terms made up so many figures of speech in the plainsmen’s dialect.

  They knew now, so they had told me, that those years had been an interval of halcyon weather on the plains. The dual colours of the horsemen hinted every moment at some pattern about to appear out of the dusty field. High overhead the countless clouds of the plains formed vast but equally unstable patterns of their own. The dense crowd stood mostly silent (as crowds will on the plains, where the empty air brings back few echoes and where even the loudest cry may be followed by a sudden and disturbing quietness). And the children saw what they should have remembered afterwards as no more than well-meant rivalry between teams of the finest horsemen of the plains.

  The plainsmen still resented the term ‘secret society’, but it seemed to me the only possible name for either of the two mysterious movements that had spread for years through the networks of polo clubs and probably, too, among the jockey clubs and athletic leagues and associations of riflemen. No leaders had ever been identified. The horsemen and sharpshooters who exercised in lonely corners of remote estates saw only their immediate commanders. Even the councils that met in panelled drawing rooms beneath silken flags (of novel designs but always with one of two wellknown colours prominent) were apparently conducted with no show of deference towards any of the three or four who had secretly elected a leader from their own number.

  Almost certainly both societies had begun with the same general aim—to promote whatever distinguished the plains from the rest of Australia. And it must have been many years before either society considered the extreme proposal of absolute political independence for the plains. But inevitably the more daring of the theorists in each group gained influence. The Brotherhood of the Endless Plain devoted themselves to an elaborate scheme for transforming Australia into a Union of States whose seat of government was far inland and whose culture welled up from its plains and spilled outwards. The coastal districts would then be seen as a mere borderland where truly Australian customs were debased by contact with the Old World. The League of Heartlanders wanted nothing less than a separate Republic of the Plains with manned frontierposts on every road and railway line that crossed the Great Dividing Range.

  I had always supposed that plainsmen must regard armed revolt as somehow demeaning. And when I first learned the history of the plains I doubted the stories of private armies masquerading as polo clubs. My friends in the saloon bars could offer me little evidence. But in any case, the tale they told did not end in pitched battles. In the humid air of a certain summer men began muttering that the time had come. It was a season of exceptional storms, so that even the spacious land seemed constricted by a nameless tension. And then word came that the plains had settled for peace.

  No one who passed on the message knew in which library or smoking-room of which mansion the decision had been taken. But those who heard the news realised that somewhere out on one of the oldest estates some great plainsman had lost sight of a particular vision of the plains. They heard the news and went back to their quiet routines and perhaps noticed in the air the glassy clarity of the approaching autumn.

  For some years afterwards there were savage brawls after the great annual polo matches. A man who had seen his father lose an eye one Saturday afternoon told me years later that this was the only fighting the plainsmen had ever been capable of. There had never been any likelihood, he told me, of armies from the plains marching under banners of the blue-green or the gold against outsiders. Some landowner, isolated in his book-lined rooms behind leafy verandahs and acres of lawns at the heart of his miles of silent land, had been dreaming of a plain that ought to have been. He had talked to others of his kind. All the trappings of the secret societies, the privately printed essays reviving forgotten quarrels, the whispered plans for military campaigns—all these had been the work of lonely, deluded men. They had talked of separating the plains from Australia when they themselves were already marooned on their great grassy islands impossibly far from the mainland.

  The son of the brawler told me that in all the battles behind sports pavilions and on hotel verandahs the colours ripped from men’s coats or clenched in bloodied fists had signified only the two sporting associations of ‘Central’ and ‘Outer’. He claimed to know nothing of a story that I had heard elsewhere of a third group disrupting the great annual matches and throwing themselves into the thickest of the fighting until the blue-greens and the golds were sometimes forced to unite against them. Yet I knew that a few local associations had later combined briefly to choose a team with the name Inner Australia and uniforms red for the sunrise or the sunset or, perhaps, something unstated.

  I wondered how much these obscure sportsmen might have known of the dissident group that had once been expelled from the Brotherhood of the Endless Plain. The Inner Australians had apparently disappeared even more swiftly than the two older societies. But at least they had been discussed occasionally in historical journals. Like the Brotherhood from which they seceded, the Inner Australians
proposed that the whole continent known as Australia should be one nation with one culture. And they insisted, of course, that the culture should be that of the plains rather than the spurious ways of the coast. But whereas the Brotherhood envisaged an Australian Government dominated by plainsmen with a policy of transforming the continent into one gigantic plain, the Inner Australians refused to talk of political power, which they claimed was wholly illusory.

  In fact, the Inner Australians had been divided amongst themselves. The best-remembered of them argued for a hasty military adventure. They hoped not for success but for a memorable failure against much superior numbers. They resolved to conduct themselves, after their capture, as citizens of a real nation who happened to be detained by the forces of an antination compounded of the negatives of all the attributes of Inner Australia.

  A minority (some said two or three only) argued that the plains would never receive their due until the continent then known as Australia was renamed Inner Australia. No other change need be made to the appearance or condition of what had formerly been Australia. The coast-dwellers would soon discover what the plainsmen had always known—that talk of a nation presupposed the existence of certain influential but rarely seen landscapes deep within the territory referred to.

  And then, so it was said, not long before the sudden collapse of the secret societies one man had dissociated himself from the minority of Inner Australians and had taken up the most extreme of all positions. He denied the existence of any nation with the name Australia. There was, he admitted, a certain legal fiction which plainsmen were sometimes required to observe. But the boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men. And according to the projections of real, that is spiritual, geography, the plains clearly did not coincide with any pretended land of Australia. Plainsmen were therefore free to obey any parliament of State or Commonwealth (as, of course, they had always done) and even to participate in the New State Movement, which the secret societies had previously condemned as a farce. It was expedient for plainsmen to appear as citizens of the nonexistent nation. The alternative was to upset a neatly poised complex of delusions and to have the borders of the plains beset by a horde of exiles from the nation that had never been.