In the note at the front of the book mentioned in the previous paragraph, the author of that book explains that he began to think of writing that book on a day in the mid-1950s when the temperature was 108 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale and when he was playing cricket in the Plenty Ranges. The heat of the day together with other circumstances reminded the author, so he explained, of other days in the 1930s when he had lived in the far west of Victoria. When the chief character of this story said in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story, he supposed, among other things, that the cricket ground where the author of the book mentioned above had been reminded of his earlier life must have seemed in the 1950s to be a clearing in a vast forest.
While he stood on the Friday afternoon mentioned previously in the main street mentioned previously, he, the chief character, saw that he had been living for the past twenty years in the northern suburb that was the easternmost part of the grassy countryside that might be thought of as covering most of the western and south-western parts of Victoria. He saw also that he had been living for the past twenty years in the northern suburb that was the nearest place to the forest that might be thought of as covering most of the eastern and south-eastern parts of Victoria.
After he had stepped out for the first time from the branch of the bank where he had seen for the first time the young woman mentioned above, he, the chief character, saw that the face of the young woman, which face was then in his mind, resembled most of the faces of the young women mentioned previously in this story. When he tried to find a word or words to denote or to suggest the most obvious quality of those faces, he could think only of the words sharpness and prickliness.
We had first smelled the acrid smoke from a great distance
The words just above are from Chapter 8 of the book Death of a Forest, by Rosamund Duruz, published in 1974 by Lowden Publishing Company, Kilmore. The town of Kilmore is described on the dust-jacket of the book as being Victoria’s oldest inland town.
The chief character of this story had understood for many years before he read the book mentioned above what he should have been told by his father when he first showed his son, the chief character, the farm where he, the father, had been a boy and the grassy countryside all around the farm: that the farm and the grassy countryside around it and the district of mostly level grasslands that comprised much of the south-west of Victoria had previously been covered by forest.
The chief character of this story had learned at some time before he began to read the book mentioned above that the village or town of Heytesbury in England is in the south-west of that country and is at the edge of the Salisbury Plain. He has never seen the Salisbury Plain, but he imagines it as mostly level grassland.
The book mentioned above is one of many books that he, the chief character of this story, bought during the 1970s but did not read until many years afterwards, if at all. When he finally read the book in the late 1980s, he learned that the author was an English woman who had arrived with her husband in the Heytesbury Forest in the early 1950s, in the very year when he had moved with his family from the western suburbs of Melbourne to an outer south-eastern suburb which was mostly scrub. Much of the book was a history of the Heytesbury Forest, which history was of some interest to him, although he never read it a second time. The chapter of the book that he read a number of times after he had first read it was Chapter 8, which was headed ‘Forest Memories: 1950–60’. From that section he learned, among other things, that the farmers who lived in clearings of the Heytesbury Forest or at the edges of the forest used to burn large parts of the forests in the 1950s on the pretext that they were preventing the spread of bushfires in the future.
Of the sections of the book mentioned above that he read only once, the section that he most often remembered was Chapter 7, which was headed ‘Progress and Destruction: Modern Times’. Much of this section reported the work of the Rural Finance and Settlement Commission from 1954 until the mid-1960s.
Of the illustrations in the book mentioned above, all of them reproductions of black-and-white photographs, the illustration that he most often looked at afterwards was the illustration facing page 17 of the text. Part of the caption beneath the illustration reads: This land was all forest-clad twenty-five years ago. The illustration is of grassy countryside with what seems to be a line of trees in the distance and in the foreground what seem to be scattered outgrowths of scrub in a paddock of grass.
The Interior of Gaaldine
A true account of certain events recalled on the evening when I decided to write no more fiction.
For a long time, I used to dream at night that I had gone to live in Tasmania. After the first few dreams, I would spend my last waking hour each evening at my desk, looking at a map of Tasmania or at one or another leaflet for tourists who might be persuaded to visit Tasmania. (I had no books about Tasmania.) I was hoping either to lengthen the sequences or images in my dreams or to introduce into my dreams details that I would afterwards mistake for memories of an actual place I had left many years before but would return to in the future, but I only succeeded in dreaming of myself at my desk in Tasmania.
I was nearly fifty years of age before I visited Tasmania, although I almost went to live in Tasmania at the age of ten. Before I had reached that age, I had lived in six different houses in Victoria. Like many families at that time, we lived in rented houses, but unlike many fathers of families, my father did not intend to live in his own home in the future. One of his many unusual beliefs was that a working man was entitled to a house at the expense of his employer. My father, who was skilled as a farmer and a gardener, read continually the columns headed SITUATIONS VACANT in several daily and weekly newspapers. He looked forward to becoming one day a head gardener or farm manager at some prison or mental hospital in a provincial city with a rent-free house provided on the premises. At one time, he even applied for several positions as a lighthouse keeper on capes of southern Victoria or islands in Bass Strait. He often spoke of the many hours each week that a man would have for his private pursuits if he could live at the place where he worked and if he was free from the burden of paying for his own house, although he seemed to do no more in his spare time than to read books from the Crime Fiction and General Fiction shelves of the nearest circulating library.
One day when I was ten years of age, my father announced that he had applied for the position of assistant gardener at the mental hospital at New Norfolk in Tasmania and that he was confident of being awarded the position. After he had obtained the position at New Norfolk, so my father told my mother and my brother and me, we would all live together in a six-roomed stone house that was more than a hundred years old and had been built by convicts. While he was waiting for a reply to his application, my father called at the office of the Tasmanian Tourist Bureau in Melbourne and brought home and showed us a publication whose pages contained coloured photographs of Tasmania together with short paragraphs of text. I studied the illustrations and prepared to think of myself as a Tasmanian.
My father was seriously considered for the position at New Norfolk. In the jargon of these days, he was short-listed. The persons making the appointment arranged for my father to travel at their expense by aeroplane from Essendon Airport to Hobart and then to New Norfolk and, of course, back to Essendon. These events took place nearly forty years ago. Few people travelled by aeroplane in those times, and my father was so afraid of taking his first air journey that he made his will beforehand. He travelled safely to Tasmania and back in a Douglas DC-2 but would never speak of his experience in the air and never again stepped into an aeroplane. Soon after he had returned from Tasmania, he learned that he had not been appointed to the position he had applied for. He soon became interested in some other advertised position and never again mentioned the mental hospital and the stone house at New Norfolk. I kept for several years the book with the coloured illustrations of Tasmania but lost it during one of my family’s later moves from one rented house t
o another. During the thirty-five years and more since I last saw the coloured illustrations, I have forgotten all but a few of the many details in the illustrations. Those few are some of the details of an illustration showing a young woman with a basket of apples from the trees of the Huon Valley, of an illustration showing a view from an aeroplane of Elwick Racecourse, which lies beside the estuary of the River Derwent, and of an illustration showing the front of a large house built in a style that I have since learned is called the Georgian style and surrounded by level grassy countryside.
On a certain day in a certain year in the late 1980s, when I had not dreamed for many months about Tasmania, a man who was a stranger to me telephoned me from Hobart and invited me to take part with two other writers in a week-long tour of Tasmania arranged by a writers’ organisation of which he was an office-holder. This was the first invitation I had ever received to take part in an event outside the state of Victoria. The man who telephoned me was the first person who had ever spoken or written to me from Tasmania. I wanted to accept the man’s invitation, but I had never stepped into an aeroplane and I intended never to do so, and I explained to the man in Hobart that I could only accept his invitation if he could arrange for me to travel to and from Tasmania by sea. The man told me that he was surprised by my request and that he would have to look at the budgetary ramifications. The following day, the man told me that I was welcome to join the tour and that I could travel to and from Tasmania in the ferry Abel Tasman but that I would have to spend a weekend in Tasmania before the tour proper began. The first engagement of the tour was in Devonport on a Monday evening, so the man told me, and the other two writers would, in his words, fly in to Devonport on the Monday afternoon, but the Abel Tasman arrived in Devonport only on Tuesday mornings, Thursday mornings, and Saturday mornings, so that I would have to amuse myself, so he said, in Devonport from the Saturday morning until the Monday afternoon when the other writers arrived, although his organisation would book me into a comfortable hotel in Devonport for the Saturday night and the Sunday night.
The tickets for my journey to Tasmania arrived in the post together with a note from the man in Hobart telling me that he had paid in advance for my accommodation for two nights at the Elimatta Hotel and that all other matters would be looked after by a woman from his organisation who would call for me at the hotel on the Monday afternoon and would accompany me and the other two writers on the tour.
I calculated that I was one year younger than my father had been when he travelled by air to Hobart nearly forty years before. For all my years, I had hardly ever travelled outside Victoria and had only once stayed in a hotel. The nine days that I was going to spend in Tasmania would be my first absence from my family since I had become a married man twenty years before. I packed at one end of my suitcase a bowl and a spoon and nine small plastic bags each containing the measured amount of wheat germ and raisins and walnut pieces and honey that I intended to eat in my room each morning for breakfast after having added water from the bathroom tap. I packed also a bundle of blank pages and the few finished pages of a piece of short fiction that I had been trying to write for several months. I packed also two books. The first book – The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, by Michael Mott, published in Boston by the Houghton Mifflin Company in 1984 – I had owned for several years but had not yet read. The second book – A Life of Emily Brontë, by Edward Chitham, published at Oxford by Basil Blackwell in 1987 – I had owned for only a few days; I had ordered the book from my bookseller as soon as I had read a notice of its publication, and my copy had arrived from England by surface mail only a few days before my departure for Tasmania.
I was due aboard the Abel Tasman late on a Friday afternoon. I ate my usual breakfast on the Friday morning, but I could not eat lunch. For most of the afternoon, I paced up and down the lounge-room and the hall of my house while my suitcase stood packed and locked at the front door. I was afraid of missing my train into Melbourne or the train from Melbourne to Station Pier, even though the trains I planned to take would bring me to Port Melbourne more than an hour before the first passengers were permitted aboard. At the same time, I was afraid of travelling so far from home. I had always been afraid that if I were to travel out of what I thought of as my native territory, I would become a different person and would forget the person that I had been. Only a year before I was invited to Tasmania, I had read somewhere of a belief among certain North American Indians that a person who travelled faster than a person could travel on horseback would leave his or her soul behind. I would have had to admit that I had held a driver’s licence and had travelled by motor car for nearly thirty years and that I had often travelled in trains, but I could have argued that I had hardly ever travelled out of what I thought of as my native territory. If I had left my soul behind me when I travelled by train to Sydney in 1964 or by car to Murray Bridge in 1962, then I had joined up with my soul soon afterwards when I hurried back to my native districts.
As the time for my leaving my house became closer, I began to sweat, and the muscles in my legs felt weak. I knew that I could have kept myself calm if I had drunk something alcoholic, and I had six stubbies of beer and two flasks of vodka in my suitcase, but I was afraid that if I drank even a glass of water during the afternoon I would vomit as soon as I stepped on board the Abel Tasman and felt the movement of the sea. I had never been in any vessel larger than a rowing-boat, but I had seen cut-away illustrations of ocean-liners in books I had read as a child, and I supposed that the gangplank of the Abel Tasman would lead on to a vast upper deck and that my vomiting would take place in front of numerous promenading passengers.
I have never since remembered anything that might have happened to me between the time when I left the train at Port Melbourne and the time when I unlocked the door to my cabin deep down among the many corridors inside the Abel Tasman.
The first thing I saw when I had locked the door of my cabin behind me was that I was sealed off from the world. This made me afraid again. I had expected my cabin to have a porthole with a view of sea and sky, but all I could see was the interior of my cabin and all I could hear were faint mechanical noises. I spent the first few minutes in my cabin trying to learn whether or not I was above the waterline. I listened through the wall that I believed was nearest the hull, but I heard only voices, and I began to understand that I was deep inside a honeycomb of cabins and that I would not know whether I was above or below the surface of the sea for as long as I could not remember how many sets of stairs I had descended on the way down to my cabin or how far above the sea I had been when I crossed the gangplank.
A life-jacket was fixed to the inside of my cabin door. Behind the jacket was a notice with instructions for putting on the jacket and following a certain route through the corridors and up the stairways if the ship’s alarm sounded. I took down the jacket and began to fasten it around me. I got the jacket into what I thought was the correct position, but then I saw from the diagram on the door that I had fastened the jacket wrongly. I tried to get the jacket off me, but I could not get it off. I was sweating and trembling. I sat on the bed with the life-jacket still tied around me. I imagined a steward knocking on the cabin door and then entering by means of his master key to welcome me aboard and finding me already in a life-jacket. I imagined myself trying to sleep with the jacket still fastened around me.
I opened my suitcase and took out one of my stubbies and drank. The beer was still cool, and I drank it all in a few minutes and began to feel less anxious. I opened another stubby and began to work at getting the life-jacket off. I remembered the fruit-knife that I had packed in my bag for quartering the apples and scraping the carrots that I intended to eat whenever I could avoid having to sit down in dining-rooms or motels or wherever the writers were going to be fed on tour. I took out the knife and hacked with it at the fastenings of my life-jacket.
The captain’s voice spoke from just behind me, and I dropped the knife. His voice was coming through a sound system
into the cabin. He welcomed all the passengers on board and gave us a few items of information and then let us hear the sound of the alarm and reminded us of what to do if we heard the sound during the voyage. While he was talking, I went on fiddling with my life-jacket, and something gave way and enabled me to struggle free. But I was not able to put the jacket back on the door in the way I had found it, and I thought I could see signs of damage where I had hacked at one of the straps with my knife.
While I was drinking my third stubby, the vessel began to move. The noise of the engines was loud in my cabin, but I was surprised at how little movement I noticed. When I had finished the stubby, I left my cabin in search of a bar.
I found a bar and drank beer alone there until nine. For most of the time, I leaned against a window with a hand cupped around my eyes and stared out into the darkness. I was still surprised at how calm the sea was, considering that the season was winter. For most of the time, I could see a few lights in the distance, but I did not know where I was.
When I was back in my cabin, I did not feel sleepy. I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but I did not feel hungry. I opened another stubby and took out the two books I had brought. Since I had become the owner of the book about Thomas Merton, I had looked forward to learning the circumstances of his death. Merton had travelled widely as a young man, but after he had become a Cistercian monk he had observed what was called his vow of stability and had never left his monastery in Kentucky. In his early middle age, when he had for long been a well-known writer and had corresponded with people in many countries, he began to ask his abbot for permission to travel to conferences. The abbot refused his permission for some years, but finally allowed Merton to attend a conference in Thailand of persons from different religions interested in meditation. On the first day of the conference, Merton was found dead in his hotel bathroom, having been electrocuted by faulty wires. This was as much as I had learned from magazine articles, and I wanted to learn more. But I expected to learn more also about Merton’s life as a monk and a writer. I had been interested in Merton for more than thirty years, as the following paragraph will explain.
Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane Page 46