Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  Since the previous sentence is part of a piece of fiction, the reader will hardly need to be reminded that the man mentioned in that sentence and in earlier sentences is a character in a work of fiction and that the newspaper clipping and the note mentioned in some of those sentences are likewise items in a piece of fiction.

  While I made the notes mentioned above, I first noted that the man is himself the author of published pieces of fiction. I noted this in order to remind myself of the only conversation that the man and I had had about the writing of fiction. During that conversation, the man and I had agreed that the chief benefit to be got from the writing of a piece of fiction was that the writer of the fiction discovered at least once during the writing of the fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in any way connected.

  I noted further, in my notes for my piece of fiction, that the man in question had at one time begun but had soon afterwards given up a course for the degree of bachelor of laws in a university and had often afterwards made remarks that caused me to suppose he held in contempt the persons who are sometimes called collectively the legal profession.

  I noted further in the notes that later became part of this piece of fiction that the man who is now a character in this piece of fiction had become, when he was a young man, the owner of a guitar and that he had played his guitar often since then. The man owned many books of music for the guitar and many books about famous players of the guitar and many recordings of guitar music. The man had sometimes played his guitar in my hearing, although I had told him politely when I had first seen his guitar that I consider myself a musical person but that I have never been inspired by any sound of strings being plucked or otherwise handled.

  I noted further in my notes that the man had at one time taken a course of lessons in the Spanish language and had told me at the time that he found the sound of the language inspiring. When I was making that note, I recalled for the first time in many years that I had spent more than a few hours at the age of eleven in looking through a newspaper printed in the Spanish language.

  Towards the end of my notes, I noted that I had sometimes admired the subject of the notes as a result of my suspecting that he had been connected sexually with many more women than I had been, even though I had been alive for eleven more years than he had been.

  I noted finally in my notes that the man had been for many years the owner of forty-five hectares of virgin bushland in the Otway Ranges and that he had sometimes told me that if only he could have found what he called the right sort of woman, he would have built on his bushland property a simple but comfortable house and would have moved there with the woman and afterwards lived what he called his ideal life.

  I did not note as part of my final note, but I note here that I have never visited the Otway Ranges or wanted to visit them. I once wrote a passage of fiction the setting of which was a place in the Otway Ranges, but I have written many pieces of fiction the settings of which are places where I have never been.

  After I had finished the notes mentioned above, I looked into the illustration of the persons who seemed to be waiting in a hall for the person who inspired them from time to time. I was looking for what I looked for whenever I looked into one or another photograph or reproduction of a photograph of persons who had been alive during the first twenty-five years of my own life and who might have lived during those twenty-five years in places such that I might have met up with one or another of the persons while I was living at one or another of the twenty-five and more addresses that I lived at during those twenty-five years and before I decided to live for the remainder of my life at the one address. I was looking for the face of a female person who might have met up with me, or might merely have come to my notice, and whose words or deeds, or whose face observed merely from a distance, might have inspired me to become one of the many persons I might have become and to live for the remainder of my life in one of the many places where I might have lived.

  In the illustration that I looked at, the female faces seemed to be those of married women or very young children. (I took no interest in the faces of the two nuns in the front row.) I supposed that the early settlers at the settlement had been families with small children. And then I read the text of the feature article beside the illustration. I found the text sentimental and dishonest, but in order to explain this finding of mine I would have to report certain facts that are not part of this piece of fiction.

  After I had done all the things so far reported I made notes for, and later wrote, the following pages, which themselves make up a complete piece of fiction within the whole of this piece of fiction.

  I was eleven years of age when I first heard of the settlement that I shall call hereafter Outlands. The settlement was in neither the south-east nor the south-west of Victoria but in the far north-east of the state, and it had already been established for several years before I first heard of it.

  When I first heard of Outlands, one month short of fifty years ago, I was already living at a place that had been until recently a sort of settlement founded and managed by a small group of Catholic laypersons who were, in their own way, inspired. This place, which I shall call hereafter the Farm, was in a northern suburb of Melbourne. From the front gate of the Farm I could see, only a short walking distance away, a tram terminus; and yet the suburbs of Melbourne reached in those days so little distance from the city that I could look out from the rear gate of the Farm across a paddock where a few dairy cows had been kept until recently. On either side of this gate were sheds where tools and cattle feed had been stored, and one shed that had been the dairy. Between the sheds and the house was a neglected orchard overgrown with long grass. Where the orchard adjoined the kitchen garden of the house was a small bluestone building that had been the chapel.

  I was living at the Farm as a poor relation of the family whose home it then was. That family consisted of an elderly husband and wife, their only son, who was a widower in early middle age, and his only son, who was five years younger than myself. My own family – my parents and my sister – were scattered among relatives and friends because we had no house of our own. A few months before, my parents had had to sell the house they partly owned in a suburb not far from the Farm. They had needed the money to settle my father’s debts. He had incurred these debts as a part-time trainer of racehorses and as a punter. When my parents had put up the house for sale, they had believed they could move after the sale to a partly built house in an outer south-eastern suburb. Not all of my father’s racing friends were luckless gamblers. One friend was what was called in those days a speculative builder. He was going to let my family live in one of his partly built houses while my father tried to arrange a loan from a building society. But something had delayed this plan, and we found ourselves for the time being homeless. My mother and my sister went to stay with one of my mother’s sisters. My father boarded with friends of his. I went to the Farm.

  I remember no feelings of misery or even discontent. The Farm was a haven of order and neatness after the latest of the many crises that my father’s gambling had caused. I was especially pleased not to have to attend school. I was tired of going to one after another school and being always someone newly arrived or soon to leave while everyone else seemed settled. I arrived at the Farm in the first week of November, and it was decided that I could do without school for the last months of the year. In the main room at the Farm was a tall cupboard full of books. I promised my father when he left me at the Farm that I would read every day, even though he seemed too concerned about his own problems to care how I might spend my time.

  I was a relation of the people at the Farm because the widower’s dead wife had been one of my father’s sisters. I shall call the widower hereafter Nunkie. The name suits my memory of him as being always cheerful and helpful towards his nephew, myself. Nunkie might have been a scholar on the staff of a university if he had been born in a later decade, but he had
been obliged during the Great Depression to train as a primary teacher for the Education Department of Victoria. He had met his future wife when he was teaching at the small school near the farm where my father and his sisters grew up. The school had a residence beside it for a married teacher, but Nunkie lived in the residence with his parents. Nunkie’s parents had come with their son to the far south-west of Victoria for the time being because the father could no longer get work as a musician in picture theatres after the silent films had been replaced by talkies, and because he had been a reckless gambler on racehorses for as long as he had lived in Melbourne. I shall call this man hereafter the Reformed Gambler, because his years away from Melbourne had apparently reformed him. I never saw him looking at a form guide or listening to a race broadcast while I was at the Farm, and every Saturday he went off to umpire one or another local cricket match.

  Nunkie and his mother always seemed united against the Reformed Gambler. The son and the mother mostly ignored him, or, if he tried to break into one of their many long discussions, put him off with short answers.

  Every evening the people at the Farm, together with their many visitors, recited the rosary and a portion of the divine office for the day. The Reformed Gambler was obliged to take part in these prayers, although I could see that they bored him. He was a gentle, likeable man whose religious observance consisted of Sunday Mass and an occasional confession and communion. One evening, after twenty or thirty minutes of prayer during which the word Israel had occurred a number of times (Remember, O Israel…I have judged thee, O Israel…and the like), the Reformed Gambler looked in the direction of his wife and son and asked innocently who was this Israel, anyway: this chap who was always turning up in our prayers.

  Much of what I know about the family at the Farm I learned at one or another later time from my father. According to him, the father at the Farm was the salt of the earth, the mother looked down her nose at the world, and the son meant well but had been turned by his mother into an old woman himself. On the evening when the Reformed Gambler had asked who Israel was, I actually saw his wife look down her nose. There is no better form of words to suggest the pose that she struck. Her son, Nunkie, tried to relieve the tension by saying, not directly to his father but into the air, that Israel was not a man but a people, and not even a people but a symbolic people…

  The Reformed Gambler has no further part in this piece of fiction, but I would like to report here that he lived a long life and that he spent much of his time in later life far from his wife and son and in the company of congenial relatives of his.

  The person who looked down her nose sometimes I shall call hereafter the Holy Foundress. I call her this not only because she had founded the Farm, but because I believe she would have been, in many an earlier period of history, the foundress of a religious order dedicated to one or another special task within the Church; would have written without help from any adviser the compendious Rule and Constitution of the Order; would have travelled to Rome under trying conditions; would have gained at last official approval for her new order; and would have died long afterwards in what was called in earlier times the odour of sanctity.

  My father had warned me before he left me there that I must not ask questions about what he called past goings-on at the Farm. I asked no questions, but I saw much evidence that the Farm had been, until recently, a small farm with a few dairy cows. I guessed that the cows had been milked and other farming tasks performed by the five or six male persons who had slept in the wing of the house which was obviously a later addition and which Nunkie sometimes called absently the boys wing. I guessed that the boys, whoever they had been, had attended daily Mass every morning in the bluestone chapel that was always locked whenever I tried the door but which Nunkie unlocked for me one afternoon, after I had questioned him about the chapel yet again, so that I was able to look at the empty seats and the bare altar and the cupboard where the priest’s vestments had been stored and at the windows of orange-gold frosted glass that made a mystery of each view of trees or sky outside the place.

  At the age of eleven, I never doubted that I would live for the rest of my life as a faithful Catholic, but I found it tedious to sit each Sunday in a parish church crowded with parents and their squirming clusters of children; to hear the priest preaching that the parish school needed money for an extra classroom; to read in the Catholic newspaper that the archbishop had made a speech attacking communist-controlled unions after he had blessed and opened a new church school building in a faraway outer suburb where the streets were dust in summer and mud in winter. From here and there in my reading, I had put together a collection of expressions that inspired in me what I supposed were pious feelings: private oratory; private chaplain;gothic chasuble;jewelled chalice;secluded monastery;strict observance. I seem to have been dreaming of a private place where I could enjoy my religion with a few like-minded persons. At the centre of the place was, of course, the oratory or chapel, but I was also concerned that the place should be surrounded by an appropriate landscape.

  After I had been at the Farm for a few days, I heard for the first time about Outlands. The day was a Sunday, and a visitor from Outlands had arrived for the midday meal. The visitor was a young man perhaps not yet thirty years of age. He was pale and rather plump, and I was surprised when I learned that he came from a settlement of farmers but very interested when I saw that the newspaper he carried with his luggage was in a foreign language. Before I could learn much about the man or about Outlands, my father arrived to take me for a walk and to tell me news of our family.

  While I walked with my father, I tried to learn what he might have known already about the Farm and about Outlands. My father would tell me only that Nunkie and his parents had been very kind to take me in but that I must not let them turn me into a religious maniac. My father, who could well be called for the purposes of this piece of fiction the Unreformed Gambler, was a Catholic in the same way that the Reformed Gambler was a Catholic. My father went to Mass every Sunday and to confession and communion once each month and seemed to suspect the motives of any Catholic who did any more than this.

  While we walked on the Sunday, my father told me that he knew about Outlands only that it was doomed to fail, just as the Farm had failed. Such places always failed, my father said, because their founders were too fond of giving orders and not prepared to listen to advice. He then told me that the Farm had been intended by its founder, the person called in this fiction the Holy Foundress, to be a place where a few men who had recently completed long terms of imprisonment could live and work and pray while they prepared themselves to find homes and jobs in the world at large. The Farm, my father reminded me, was only a few tram stops away from the large prison where he himself had been a warder when I was born and where he had learned, as all the other warders, his mates, had learned, that almost every person who had been imprisoned for a long term was by nature the sort of person who would be later imprisoned again.

  My father had ceased to be a prison warder in one of the first years after I was born, but he had remained friends with many warders. He told me on our Sunday walk, in the streets of the suburb where the Farm was at the end of the tramline that passed the front gate of the large prison, that all the warders who had heard of the founding of the Farm had predicted that the Farm would fail and that the warders’ predictions had been fulfilled. The Farm had failed, my father said, because most of the men who had gone from the prison to the Farm had not been reformed but had gone on planning – and even committing – further crimes while they lived at the Farm.

  My father told me the story of the Farm with seeming relish, but I tried while he talked to compose in my mind arguments in defence of the Farm. I had lived at the Farm for only a few days, but each morning I had gone with Nunkie and his son, my cousin, and the Holy Foundress to early Mass in the semi-public chapel of a nearby convent; each evening I had prayed with the others at dusk in the room where the big bookcase stood; each day I ha
d walked between the fruit trees for ten minutes, imitating the even paces of one or another priest I had once seen walking on the paths around his presbytery while he read the divine office for that day. Perhaps I was discovering the power of ordered behaviour, of ritual. Perhaps I was merely devising for myself one more of the imagined worlds I had devised throughout my childhood. Although I was hardly fond of the Holy Foundress, I admired her for having tried to set up what I thought of as a world of her own, a world apart from or concealed within the drab world that most people inhabited, a small farm almost surrounded by suburbs.

  My own imagined worlds before then had been located each on an island of the same shape as Tasmania, which was the only suitable island I knew of. The people of those worlds had been devoted to cricket or to Australian Football or to horse-racing. I had drawn elaborate maps showing where the sportsgrounds or racecourses were situated. I filled pages with coloured illustrations of the football jumpers of the many teams or of the coloured caps of the cricket teams or of the racing silks of the racing stables. I had spent so much time in preparing these preliminary details for each of my imagined worlds that I had seldom got as far as to work out results of imagined football or cricket matches or of imagined horse-races.

  I had destroyed or lost all the pages showing the details mentioned above, but sometimes during the year before I arrived at the Farm I had felt a peculiar longing and had wanted my adult life to be so uneventful and my future home to be so quiet and so seldom visited that I could spend most of my life recording the details of an imaginary world a hundred times more complicated than any I had so far imagined.

  The people at the Farm seemed not to read newspapers, although I feel sure today that Nunkie and the Reformed Gambler must have looked through the results and reports of cricket matches during the summer. Perhaps they kept the newspaper out of sight of the children, or cut out the sporting pages and burned the rest. When I asked Nunkie, on my first day at the Farm, where the newspaper was, he told me that the people of the Farm were not especially curious about events in the secular world. Nunkie’s expression, ‘the secular world’, gave me even then, on my first day, the pleasant sensation that I was inside a world inside what others considered to be the only world.