The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  *

  Towards lunchtime in the almost empty bar, I tried to recall the notes I had made some days before from a scholarly article in one of the three fortnightly journals of criticism and comment published on the plains. The notes were in my room upstairs but I could not leave the bar—the landowners might have called for me at any moment. (I had not found time even to shave or wash, but petitioners who obtained an audience on the second day were always careful to look haggard and dishevelled. The landowners liked to think that while they themselves coped easily with a night of drinking, their clients were of feebler constitution.)

  The author of the article had seemed to claim that all the disputes between factions on the plains were symptoms of a basic polarity in the temperament of the plainsman. Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes—one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.

  What I could not remember was the theory arrived at in the dense final paragraphs of the article. The author had postulated the existence of a landscape where a plainsman might finally resolve the contradictory impulses that his native land gave rise to. After lunch, when I was drinking steadily again and things around me had regained their vibrancy, I succeeded in recalling a note I had made in the margin of the scholar’s article: ‘I, a film-maker, am admirably equipped to explore this landscape and reveal it to others.’

  *

  By late afternoon I had watched perhaps twenty clients going singly into the inner room and coming out again. And I had noticed that the largest groups among them were the designers of emblems and the founders of religions.

  Before their interviews the men of both these groups were invariably tense and anxious and careful not to let slip any details of their projects to rivals. As time passed it became apparent that few of these clients succeeded in the inner room. The landowners were known for their obsession with emblems and forms of heraldic art peculiar to the plains. And although religion was rarely discussed on the plains, I knew that it too had its passionate devotees in almost every great house. But the clients who specialised in these subjects were competing against experts already in favour with the landowners.

  No great house could have done without its resident advisers on emblematic art. Most families made all their new appointments from among the sons and nephews of their senior staff, believing that their traditions were only safe in the hands of men who had been exposed to them since childhood. Even when an outsider was appointed, he was expected to have spent some years acquiring at his own expense a detailed knowledge of genealogy, family history and legends, and those preferences and inclinations that were only revealed in close conversations late at night, hasty entries in diaries on bedside tables, sketches of paintings pinned behind doors, manuscript poems torn to pieces in the last hours before dawn. When a post was vacant it was not unknown for a footman of the household or a tutor from the schoolroom to announce that his years of menial service had only been undertaken to qualify him as a creator of heraldic art. Then the members of the family knew the reason for the uncommon alertness they had often noticed about the man, his untoward appearance in certain rooms at inappropriate times, his formal requests to spend his scant leisure time in the library, his being seen in the furthest paddocks collecting rare plants or discovered afterwards in his quarters peering at the shapes of leaves through a reading glass that someone had missed weeks earlier from a private drawer. But a talented designer was valued so highly that if the man proved his competence he was appointed to the post he coveted and only praised for his enterprise during all those years of furtive study.

  The great houses exhibited their emblems and crests and liveries and racing colours at every opportunity. Families who for generations had scorned all display of wealth or influence would draw a visitor’s attention to a certain design on silverware and table napery or the choice of colours on the painted woodwork of outdoor aviaries or conservatories. I had read a little of the mass of scholarly commentaries on a concern that had reached an extreme of refinement among plainsfolk. And I remembered an essay by a neglected philosopher who contributed for his livelihood to the Saturday pages of a declining newspaper.

  This writer had argued that each man in his heart is a traveller in a boundless landscape. But even the plainsmen (who should have learned not to fear hugeness of horizons) looked for landmarks and signposts in the disquieting terrain of the spirit. A plainsman who was compelled to multiply the appearances of his monogram or some novel choice of colours in the visible plains was only marking the limits of the territory that he recognised. Such a man would have done better to explore whatever was beyond the illusions that could be signified by simple shapes and motifs.

  This account was disputed by other theorists who claimed that a concern for emblems was just the sort of exploration that the philosopher had called for. Thus, when a man displayed his colours on the bindings in his library, he asserted, perhaps a trifle crudely, that no end was yet in sight to the regions he knew in his heart.

  The landowners themselves took no part in the learned discussions of their pursuit. This was not because they lacked a taste for intellectual endeavour but because the actual practice of heraldic art could offer sufficient scope for the most active mind. Many a landowner joined with the designers he had commissioned in their exacting task of finding some theme underlying the history of his family, some motif suggested by the geological structure of his estates, or some ideograph of a species of plant or animal peculiar to his district.

  And while all these tasks went forward in the great houses, the many unemployed students and scholars of the subject added to their knowledge or perfected their skills in public libraries and museums and rented studios and among the outlying swamps and plantations of estates whose vastness and complexity they dreamed of reducing to a stylised image on a simple field.

  Some of those who waited on the great landowners in their hotel bar explained to me that their best hope was to convince a particular landowner that his family’s heraldic art derived from too narrow a range of disciplines. One petitioner intended to outline the results of his research into entomology and to argue that the metallic hues and the prolonged rituals of a certain wasp with a restricted habitat might correspond to something that had not yet been expressed in the art of the family whose patronage he courted. Another petitioner meant to offer his findings from years of study in meteorology, confident that a certain landowner could not fail to see the relevance for him of the vagaries of a seasonal wind when it approached his lands.

  There were others who approached the landowners with nothing to recommend them but their programs for displaying more widely whatever colours and devices were already established in a family. I heard of a scheme for building a system of indoor aquaria and stocking each tank with fish of one species only but arranging the whole so that viewers might see, through numerous thicknesses of pellucid glass and intervals of faintly clouded water and images of clouded water in faintly clouded glass, multiform patterns of two colours that mattered. One man had perfected a process for working the most vivid of dyes into the finest of saddlery. Another spoke guardedly of a theatre, predictably decorated, but with tableaux of marionettes to mimic even those characters commemorated by a mere stem of foliage or a stripe of colour in a familiar coat of arms.

  The most secretive of the waiting men could have been of service only to a landowner who was himself a lover of secrecy. There were a few such heads of families who laboured over their emblems for years but then concealed them partly or wholly. They might speak proudly of them to a few friends, but theirs was the solitary appreciation of a soothing harmony or an arresting contrast that only they could be fully aware of. A petitioner in search of such men carried a stock of panes and lenses, mysteriously tinted, for altering or effacing certain colours; pigments sensitive to the least sunlight; canvases and panellings and bolt
s of silk all with double thicknesses.

  All these groups had some justification for approaching even a landowner known to have settled long before on the patterns and colours that stood for all he valued. But there were also a few petitioners with only a broad knowledge of their subject. These politely offered their services to the assembled landowners in the hope that one great house might just then have declared its heraldic art ‘veiled’.

  The word had come to be used only figuratively in my day, but in earlier times a carriage would be seen with a small train of black or purple velvet draped across each painted panel. And when the coachman, ill at ease in his makeshift grey, steered the horses around the sweeping driveway at evening, certain windows only mirrored the uniform colour of the sky, the same dark velvet having been hung behind them for the sake of some small coloured pane.

  Itinerant designers sometimes got wind of a veiling when they observed a vague irritation and discontent among members of a great family or heard of long conferences in locked libraries and of servants afterwards working until midnight to put away books and manuscripts previously untouched for years. But most veilings were announced with so little warning that even a designer attached to the household would be taken by surprise (and obliged without notice to question the value of his life’s work).

  Sometimes no public announcement was made—more from a passing impatience with formality than from any desire to conceal the event. But a caller at a remote mansion could see the evidence at once. The flagpoles stood bare above the tennis courts. Painters worked at the pavilions by the polo fields. Workmen on many-storeyed scaffolding prised fragments of glass from leaded windows and, for all the urgency of their task, paused to look out on some quarter of the plains through the formless chip of colour that might once have completed a symbol of fame. Indoors, french polishers stepped among heaps of tangled threads left by the seamstresses as they picked out from tapestries all traces of a device that had once seemed part of the very fabric. And in some far, quiet room, the goldsmiths, with eyes made monstrous by lenses gripped under their brows, unclasped from heirlooms the jewels whose settings had been declared unworthy of them.

  This was the slight hope that urged the leastprepared of the petitioners into the inner room of the hotel—that some landowner there might be just then in the grip of the mild madness that could only end when all he owned was stamped or carved or embroidered or painted with proof that he had interpreted his life afresh.

  I had learned this much from the students of emblems. But I knew better than to question the founders of religions. I had never heard a plainsman talk seriously of his religious beliefs. Like the Australians on the distant coast, the plainsmen often commended religion in general as a force for good. And, as on the coast, there was still a minority of families who sat through Sunday services, Catholic or Protestant, in the drab parish churches or the cathedrals with their incongruous European aspects. But I knew that these observances and the commonplace sentiments uttered in public were often meant to draw attention away from the true religions of the plains.

  These flourished in their purest forms among families who had long abandoned the traditional churches (and with them folk memories from the late Roman Empire or Elizabethan England) and spent their Sundays in seeming idleness among the silent rooms of their isolated mansions. I had heard of no sect numbering more than three or four and none whose tenets could be codified or even paraphrased by the most eloquent of its followers. I was assured that elaborate rituals were practised and their efficacy extolled. Yet it seemed that men who had watched the sectaries day after day, and even spied on them in their most private moments, had seen nothing that any irreligious plainsman might not have done—and thought ordinary or even trivial.

  There was this same mystery about the group who waited with me in the hotel—the so-called founders of religions. There was a certain impressiveness about them, but nothing they said or did might have explained why they were so often welcomed into the great houses. (I had heard that few of them secured permanent employment. They practised for brief periods, at lucrative rates, after which they fell from favour and were dismissed, or they declared their tasks fulfilled and resigned.) And a man of a different profession who had happened to observe one of them courting the favour of a group of landowners had seen the priest of obscure persuasion only urging the great men to drink and talk while he listened.

  At one time I had begun to doubt the existence of these esoteric creeds of the plains. But then certain plainsmen had been pointed out to me. I can only explain the impression they made on me by saying that they seemed to know what most men only guess at. Somewhere out among the swaying grasses of their estates, or in the least-visited rooms of their rambling homesteads, they had learned the true stories of their lives and known the men they might have been.

  Whenever it had occurred to me to envy the plainsmen who drew such strength from their private religions, I had gone upstairs to my hotel room and gravely sat down and added to the notes for my filmscript as though that was part of my own religious quest that some stranger wondered about.

  *

  I was called into the inner room at the very hour when the authority and prodigality of the great landowners seemed most awesome. In one of the passageways leading to their bar I glanced over my shoulder at a distant door. The transom window above it was a minute rectangle of intense light—a signal that the plains outside languished under mid-afternoon. But it was an afternoon that the landowners knew nothing of. No tale that I had heard of their wealth impressed me so much as their careless dismissal of a whole day. I walked into their smoky room still half-blinded by the fragment I had glimpsed of the sunlight they spurned.

  My only shock came from the sight of the stretcher in the corner. They were not all, perhaps, the giants of legend. One man lay motionless on the bare canvas. But only a hand pressed awkwardly against his eyes suggested that his sleep was not untroubled. The others sat erect on stools at the bar. One of them poured nearly half a jug of beer into a pewter pot engraved with a strange monogram and handed it to me. Someone else pushed a stool towards me with his foot. But it was half an hour before anyone spoke to me.

  There were six of them at the bar, all in suits of the discreetly patterned fabric that I called ‘tweed’. A few had loosened their ties or undone a top button on their shirts, and one man’s shoes (massive all-leather soles and ox-blood uppers with elaborate whorls and arcs of dots punched from them) were conspicuously unlaced. But every man had still a sureness and elegance that made me finger my own cravat and twist the rings on my fingers.

  I thought at first that they were talking only of women. But then I distinguished three quite separate conversations, each advancing steadily. Sometimes one or other topic occupied them all, but usually each man divided his attention among the three debates, leaning across the man beside him or leaving his stool for a moment to engage some opponent along the bar. And there were long intervals when they all enjoyed some joke that I found irrelevant or puzzling. They were all in a condition that I expected to reach myself after a few more pots of beer. They had lost little of their customary dignity. Perhaps they spoke a trifle too emphatically or gestured too readily. As I understood it from my own experiences with alcohol, they had drunk themselves sober.

  In that condition, as I knew it, they were able to discover a startling significance in almost every object or fact. They were compelled to repeat certain statements for the ring of profundity they seemed to give off. Each man’s history acquired the unity of a great work of art, so that when he recounted something from his past, he dwelt on the least details for the meaning they derived from the whole. Above all, they saw that the future was well in hand. They need only remember afterwards the insights just granted them. And if even those were not enough, they could foresee another morning when they walked inside from the sunlight and began to drink seriously and steadily until all the baffling brightness of the world was only a glowing horizon at the
far edge of their deep private twilight.

  The landowners went on talking. After my second pot was emptied I was ready to join them. But they were in no hurry to interview me. I was careful not to show impatience. I wanted to prove that I was already attuned to their ways; that I was prepared to put aside all else and devote an hour or a day to speculative thinking. And so I sat and drank and tried to follow them.

  1ST LANDOWNER:…our own generation too extreme when they define the ideal complexion for a woman. No one wants his wife or daughter brown from the sun. But am I perverse if I prefer a pallor that’s not quite flawless? I’ll speak frankly. All my life I’ve dreamed of a certain arrangement of…I refuse to use that banal word ‘freckles’. Their colour must be a delicate gold, and I want to come across them in what seems an appropriate site. They lie far apart, but I can see them as a constellation if I wish. Gold on sheer white.

  2ND LANDOWNER:…bustards of course, and plainswanderers, and painted quail and stubble quail, and the brown songlark with that odd call it makes. And I ask myself…

  3RD LANDOWNER:…with our cairns of stones on every hillside and plaques beside the roads and inscriptions still preserved on tree-trunks. But we forget that most of these men shouldn’t be called plainsmen. This obsession with explorers. Please don’t misunderstand me; it’s a worthy task we’ve undertaken. But that vision of the plains we’re all looking for—let’s remember that the first explorers may not have been expecting plains. And many of them went back to their seaports afterwards. Certainly they boasted of what they had discovered. But the man I want to study is the one who came inland to verify that the plains were just as he’d hoped for. That vision we’re all looking for…