The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  He dismissed me with a slight gesture. I left him still lying with his eyes covered and recalled, in the passage outside where the afternoon was tending towards evening, that he had not once met my own eyes.

  *

  I slept from early evening until just before sunrise. I walked from my bed out onto the balcony and watched for the dawn over the plains. I was surprised to find that the last minutes before dawn, even in that country, still set me hoping for something other than the usual sun to appear. And on that of all mornings it seemed odd to be seeing myself as a character in a film and the streets and gardens below me, already portentous enough, as scenery of redoubled significance.

  Before packing the books and papers on my desk, I marked on a folder the label: LAST THOUGHTS BEFORE BEGINNING THE SCRIPT PROPER. Then, on a clean sheet inside the folder, I wrote:

  In all the weeks since I arrived here I have looked out only twice from my balcony. It would have been a simple matter to explore those plains that begin at the end of almost every street of the town. But could I have possessed them as I always wanted to possess a tract of plains?

  Tonight I will stand within sight of her plains at last. The first scenes of The Interior begin to unfold at last. Now I have only to set my notes in order and write.

  Yet an old doubt returns. Is there anywhere a plain that might be represented by a simple image? What words or what camera could reveal the plains within plains that I heard of so often these last weeks?

  The view from my balcony—now, like some native plainsman myself, I see not solid land but a wavering haze that conceals a certain mansion in whose dim library a young woman stares at a picture of another young woman who sits over a book that sets her wondering about some plain now lost from sight.

  In moods like this I suspect that every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain. Can I describe to others even the few hundred miles that I crossed to reach this town? And yet, why attempt to show them as soil and grass when someone far away might see them even now as only a sign of whatever I am about to discover?

  And by now her father will have told her that I am journeying towards her.

  *

  In some of the better shops of the town I ordered a filing cabinet and stationery, a simple camera and ample colour film. I gave my address as the estate of my new patron and relished the respect it earned me. I let it be understood that some employee of the landowner would collect and pay for my goods in due course. I spoke as though I myself would not be seen in the town for many months at least.

  It seemed the hottest day yet on the plains. Even before noon my friends had come in from the streets to their places at the bar where I had first met them. I learned from them that my destination was eighty miles from the town and beyond the barest of districts. And the afternoon sun would be in my face all the way. But I thought of my journey as a venture into obscure regions by a route that few knew of.

  My companions on that last morning in the bar talked, as they so often did, of their own projects. A composer explained that all his tone-poems and symphonic sketches had been conceived and written within a few miles of his birthplace in one of the least populous quarters of the plains. He was trying to find the musical equivalent of the characteristic sound of his district. Strangers commented on the utter silence of the place, but the composer spoke of a subtle blend of sounds that most people habitually failed to hear.

  When his music was performed, the members of the orchestra were stationed far apart among the audience. Each instrument produced a volume of sound that could be heard only by the few listeners nearest it. The audience was free to move around—as quietly or as noisily as they wished. Some were able to hear snatches of melody as subtle as the scraping together of grassblades or the throbbing of the brittle tissue of insects. A few even found some spot from which more than one instrument was audible. Most heard no music at all.

  Critics objected that no one from the audience or the orchestra could hope to hear whatever harmony might have resulted from themes that were barely stated. The composer had always maintained in public that this was just as he intended: that the purpose of his art was to draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.

  But in private, and especially in the hotel where I spent the last hours before my journey, the composer regretted that he would never know what his works amounted to. During each rehearsal he wandered all over the almost empty hall hoping—quite unreasonably, he knew—to hear from somewhere a hint of the whole whose separate parts he knew so well. But he was seldom aware of any more than the trembling of a single reed or string. And he almost envied those who heard the play of the wind across miles of grass as no more than a tantalising silence.

  I thought it fitting that my last hours in the town should be spent with an artist whose work was lost on the world. I had sometimes thought of The Interior as a few scenes from a much longer film that could only be seen from a vantage point that I knew nothing of.

  Then, in the last half-hour before I left the hotel, a painter I had never seen before told me a story that no film-maker could ignore.

  Years earlier this man had set out to paint what he called, for convenience, the landscapes of dreams. He claimed to have access to a country derived from his unique perceptions. It was superior to any country that others called real. (The only merit of so-called real lands, he said, was that people of dulled sensibility could find their way about in them by agreeing to perceive no more than did others of their kind.) He had doubted whether any but an alert few could make out the features of his land. Nevertheless, he undertook to represent it by the traditional means of paint on canvas, lessening its strangeness a little for the sake of those who saw only what they saw.

  The painter’s early works were well praised but, so he thought, misunderstood. Viewers and critics saw his layers of gold and white as a reduction of the plains to their essential elements and his swirls of grey and pale green as hints of what the plains might yet become. For him, of course, they were unmistakable landmarks of his private country. And to emphasise that the subject of his art was in fact an accessible landscape, he put into his later work a few obvious symbols—close approximations of forms common to both the plains and his own land.

  These works of his ‘transitional period’, as it came to be called, earned still higher praise. Seizing on the trace of a pattern far out in a waste of orange and gamboge, the commentators spoke of his coming to terms with the traditions of the plains. And the freakish greenness that emerged from an excess of blue was taken to mean that he had begun to acknowledge the aspirations of his fellow plainsmen.

  The painter saw that I was anxious to be away. He interrupted his story and predicted that I would find no new country wherever I travelled. When he heard of my film, he said that no film could show more than those sights that a man’s eyes rested on when he had given up the effort to observe. I objected that the last sequence of The Interior would bring to light the strangest and most enduring of my dreams. The painter said that a man could dream of nothing stranger than the simplest image that occurred to another dreamer. And he went on with his story.

  There had been further stages in what the critics called his development. But all that I need know was that he was now painting what were agreed to be inspired landscapes. For three years he had seldom left his studio, whose only window was overhung with dense evergreen leaves. When he had to walk through the town he kept his eyes away from the segments of plain that loomed at the end of almost every street. He asserted that now he saw nothing but the land he had once dreamed of. But each day he turned his eyes away from its familiar colours and shapes and composed on his canvas some view of a country that might only be dreamed of in the sort of land he now inhabited continually.

  He showed me a small coloured reproduction of one of his best-known works. It seemed to me a crude imitation of one of the gilt-framed, glass-covered
landscapes I had seen in the furniture department of the town’s largest store. While I tried to think of a comment, the artist looked hard at me and said that this was for many plainsmen the only place remote enough to be a setting for dreams.

  When I was fifty miles away on the road to the location of my film, I wished I had asked the artist whether he knew that his purple hills and silvery stream could have passed for a view of Outer Australia.

  *

  I met her at dinner on my first evening in the great house. As the only daughter, she was seated opposite me, but we said little to each other. She seemed not much younger than I, and therefore not as young as I had wanted her to be. And her face was not quite so untroubled as I had hoped, so that I had to visualise anew some of the compelling close-ups in the final scenes of my film.

  I arranged to take only my evening meal with the family and to spend most of my day in the library or my suite of rooms adjoining it on the upper floor of the north wing. But the family understood that I might be met with at odd times anywhere in the grounds or out on the estate. As an artist I was entitled to look for inspiration in unlikely places.

  My patron, the girl’s father, required me to drink with him for an hour or two on the verandah after dinner every evening. On the first night, the two of us sat just outside the french windows of the drawing room. The man’s wife and daughter were still in the room with a few female guests. I knew there would be many evenings when the verandah was crowded with male guests and with clients of the same standing as myself. But on that first night, whenever the daughter looked out towards the moonlit plains she saw the dark figure of myself huddled in close conversation with her father.

  Crickets chirped intermittently from the obscure lawns. Once, a plover raised its faint, frantic cry in some far paddock. But the immense silence of the plains was scarcely disturbed. I tried to visualise the bright window and the figures against it as they would have appeared from somewhere in the vast darkness before me.

  *

  Alone in my study towards midnight I began a new section of my notes in a folder labelled: REFLECTIONS FROM THE ULTIMATE (?) PLAIN. I wrote: The road to the estate was an offshoot from a deserted side-road whose signposts were sometimes vague and contradictory. And when I stopped at the front gate (I made sure of this) there was no house or shed or haystack to be seen in all the miles of land around. The place where I stood was at the bottom of a gentle hollow measuring perhaps a few miles from rim to rim. And within the circle of those horizons I was the only human soul. My patron’s home, of course, was somewhere on the other side of the gate but certainly not within view. The driveway that led to it did not even point the way. It went behind a plantation of cypresses on the shoulder of a slight hill and did not reappear. As I drove in from the road I told myself I was disappearing into some invisible private world whose entrance was at the loneliest point on the plains.

  Now what remains for me to do? I am so close to the end of my quest that I can scarcely recall how it began. She has spent all her life on these plains. All her journeys have begun and ended within this enormous, quiet country. Even the lands she dreams of have their own kinds of plain far out in the heart of them. There are no fit words to describe what I hope to do. Descry her landscapes? Explore them? I could hardly tell in words how I have come to know these plains where I first came upon her. Hopeless to speak yet of those stranger places beyond them.

  First I must have an intimate understanding of her own territory. I want to see her against the backdrop of the few square miles that are hers alone—the slopes and flats and timbered watercourses that seem unremarkable to others but yield a hundred meanings to her.

  Then I want to bring to light the plain that only she remembers—that shimmering land under a sky that she has never quite lost sight of.

  And I mean to see still other lands that cry out for their explorer—those plains that she recognises when she gazes out from her verandah and sees anything but a familiar land.

  Last of all I want to venture into the plain that even she is not sure of—the places she dreams of in the landscape after her own heart.

  *

  During my first months in the great house I suited my methods of work to the leisurely rhythms of the plains. Each morning I strolled a mile or so from the house and lay on my back and felt the wind or stared at the clouds creeping past me. Then the time I had spent on the plains seemed unmarked by hours or days. It was a trance-like period or a long succession of almost identical frames that could have comprised some minute or so in a film.

  In the afternoons I explored the library, sometimes adding to the notes for my filmscript but more often reading from the published histories of the plains and the bound diaries and letters and family papers that my patron had made available. And there was an hour towards evening when I waited by a certain window to see the daughter of the house walking towards me across the acres of lawn from the stables after her daily ride towards some district I had yet to see.

  Sometimes in those first months I was still reading among the shelves of material on the plains when I heard her calling to the half-tame quail and bustards on the far side of the ornamental lake. Then, when I hurried to the window and looked for her in the shady park, her figure was never quite distinct from the shadowy after-images of whatever I had been reading. Alone in the distance she might have been the woman of three generations before who had been addressed each day for fifteen years in a long letter that was never delivered. Or the images of shrubbery and sky in the lake beside her might have lain in one of the fanciful lands in the unpublished stories for children written by her great-uncle, reputedly the most pessimistic of the philosophers of the plains. Or creeping towards the hesitant, timid bustards, she might have been her imagined self—the girl I had read of in her earliest diaries, who went to live among the tribes of ground-dwelling birds to learn their secrets, so she said.

  Towards the end of the summer my notes were so extensive that I sometimes put them aside and looked for simpler means of devising the opening scenes of my film. I would stand at the window, holding up against the glass a painting done by the young woman in the last years of her childhood, and trying to see some detail of the land outside as though it was suspended in the translucent swathes of faded paint. Sometimes I cut a piece from the paper so that a distant view of actual plains appeared at a significant point of a painting. Once, I pasted a detail from a painting onto the glass at the centre of a large rectangular blank in a different painting. When this arrangement was fixed to the window I walked slowly towards it, murmuring music appropriate to the first frames of a film concerned with memories and visions and dreams.

  *

  Late on an afternoon in autumn I got up from reading her pencilled notes in the margins of the collected essays of a forgotten traveller and natural philosopher. I strolled to the window as usual and saw her not far off. There were no obvious signs of autumn in that part of the plains. On the few exotic trees the leaves curled at their edges. Patches of lawn were littered with tiny unpalatable berries. And horizons seemed a little less vague.

  I supposed it was the lack of something in the sunlight that made her face so surprisingly distinct as she walked towards the house. But I could not account for her looking up as she did, for the first time, at my window.

  I was standing a few paces back from the glass but I made no move to step forward. In the shadows of some of the earliest works on the plains I struggled to memorise a sequence of images that occurred to me. At the beginning of a film, or at its end (or perhaps the same scene would serve for both), a young woman appeared out of some solitude among the plains. She approached a massive homestead. Rounding a certain wing of the building she glanced through the windows of a complex of rooms decorated with toys and a child’s sketches in crayon and watercolour. She reached a thicket of shrubbery and gazed at a vista of garden, or of garden receding into the plains, that only she could see. (Her body came between the camera and whatever she loo
ked at.)

  Finally she went to the most exposed slope of the lawns. She moved indecisively, as though in search of something unmistakable (had she glimpsed it somewhere before?) but nevertheless elusive.

  A moment arrived when a watcher of the film might have decided that the young woman was not acting a part—that her uncertain movements were a genuine search for something that the author of the script had only been able to guess at.

  And then the woman turned her face fully to the camera, and a watcher might have said she was not even one of those participants in a documentary film who try to behave freely with no thought of the cameras following them. She was looking at whoever observed her as though the thing she sought might lie in that direction. Or perhaps she was simply unsure of what was expected from her: of what the scriptwriter had in mind.

  *

  The daughter of my patron turned away at last from looking up at my window. When she was gone from sight, I carried a small table to the place near the window where I had stood while she looked up. I placed a chair on the table and draped my cardigan over the back of the chair. I stood beside the chair to be sure that it reached to the height of my shoulders.

  I needed a head for my dummy. I taped a feather duster to the chair in the correct position. But I guessed that the dull tail-feathers of a bustard would be barely visible through the window, whereas my own face was noticeably pale. (It occurred to me that most of my days on the plains had been spent indoors.) The top drawer of my filing cabinet was half-full of unused paper for manuscripts and typing. I took a handful of crisp white sheets, moulded them loosely around the fronds of the duster, and then fixed them in place with tape.