Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  If the founder of Grasslands had been asked at the time why he had founded his settlement, and if he had been able to describe in detail to his questioner the images mentioned above, he would have assumed that the questioner would not need to question him further and would understand that he, the founder of Grasslands, wanted to live in a place where he need no longer fear the bombs of an Unfriendly Power and need no longer try to imagine the details concealed by low-cut necklines of dresses of female film stars.

  One of the young men who called at the Farm from Outlands wore a beard. Until I met him, I had never seen a beard on any but an aged man. I watched the bearded man while he worked with rolled-up sleeves to load some timber from a disused Farm building onto a truck that was going to Outlands. The bearded man joked and said such things as gave me to understand that he read often from the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church and Saint Thomas Aquinas. I thought of the bearded man as resembling a man from medieval times, and I supposed Outlands more resembled medieval Europe than modern Australia.

  The newspaper carried by the pale and plumpish young man mentioned much earlier in this piece of fiction was in the Spanish language. Even before I stayed at the Farm, I had come to understand that Spain was the most admirable of all European countries, even though it was the most reviled by the secular press. It was the most admirable, so one of my father’s sisters had once told me, because it was the only country in Europe where Communism had been fought to a standstill, and it was the most reviled because many journalists secretly sympathised with Communism.

  Many years after both Outlands and Grasslands had ceased to exist, I read a statement by a man who had been a commentator on current affairs in various Catholic newspapers and on a Catholic radio program from the 1930s to the 1950s. The man had stated that he had taken many unpopular positions during his career as a commentator and had received many angry letters as a result but that the most numerous and the angriest letters by far had been those that reached him after he had written and had broadcast his opinion that the government of General Franco better suited the interests of Spain than any government that might have been installed if the Civil War had ended differently.

  The founder of Grasslands knew nothing of the causes or results of the Spanish Civil War, but he sensed that in this connection, as in so many others, the sort of Catholic who wore a beard and chose to live on a remote settlement possessed an inner, private knowledge of moral issues which was almost the opposite of what passed for knowledge with other persons. The founder hung about the pale and plumpish young man while he read parts of his newspaper. He, the founder, asked to have the dialogue in the Felix the Cat cartoon translated for him and laughed at the humour of it and learned from it the only five Spanish words he was ever to learn. The same founder was not at all troubled when the same pale and plumpish young man returned to the Farm two weeks later for another short visit and took out the same edition of the same newspaper (the founder identified it from the Felix cartoon) and began to read parts of it.

  When the liturgical season of Advent was about to begin in the world where the settlement of Grasslands appeared as a few rows of cracked mud blocks and its settlers as a dozen and more forked twigs, the uncle of the founder of Grasslands, in whose eyes the settlement was a thriving village whose residents sometimes angered their neighbours by speaking the Spanish language instead of the English, took his nephew and the nephew’s cousin into the garden of the Farm in order to choose leaves for the weaving of an Advent wreath, which was a custom, so the uncle said, that European Catholics had kept up since the Middle Ages and earlier. They chose fig leaves for the wreath, wove the wreath, and hung it in the main room of the Farm. For a few days, the wreath looked well: a mass of green leaves hanging like a halo above the dining table. On each of those days, the residents of the Farm had gathered at evening and had prayed beneath the wreath and had sung an Advent hymn, some of the words of which can be found in a book of fiction that I wrote nearly twenty years ago.

  Ten minutes ago, I took down from the bookshelves in this room a copy of the book of fiction mentioned in the previous sentence. I had not looked into that book for several years, although I see in my mind every day one or another of the images that caused me to begin to write the book, the title of which is Inland. I learned from my looking into the book Inland just now that the narrator of the book did not report that a certain wreath of fig leaves mentioned in the book had become brown and withered soon after the wreath had been hung in the living room of a certain house. I learned also just now that the narrator of Inland, which is a book of fiction in the same way that this piece is a piece of fiction, had reported in the book that a certain utopian settlement founded by certain characters in the fiction was situated between two rivers the names of which are identical to the names of two rivers on the maps of Victoria in the collection of maps in this room.

  The wreath of fig leaves that is part of this piece of fiction became brown and withered after a few days. Afterwards, the leaves seemed so brittle whenever I looked up at them that I was often afraid some of them might crumble and fall as a result of the vibrations from our hymn singing of an evening. I was afraid that this would oblige Nunkie to have to explain to his son and to me that European people were able to make Advent wreaths that stayed green for much longer than ours had stayed, which was something that I might have found hard to believe, although I would never have said so.

  All the settlers at Grasslands were unmarried. The founder of the settlement might have been only dimly aware of the power of sexual attraction between men and women, but he himself had for some years past felt a strong attraction towards one or another female person, which attraction he thought of as a falling in love, even though the female person was sometimes of a different age than his. Accordingly, the founder had designed the settlement so that females and males lived at opposite ends of the place, with the chapel, the library, and all the farm buildings between. They mostly worked at separate tasks, but they met for meals and for prayers of the divine office, which they recited during their several visits to the chapel each day. This chapel was so arranged that the males and females faced each other, with each sex occupying a set of stalls to the side of the building. Males and females were permitted to look freely at each other. The founder expected that many a male would feel attracted to one or another female, but he supposed that such a male would be affected as he, the founder, would have been affected in such circumstances: the male would be continually inspired by the image in his mind of the face of the female as she appeared in the chapel or in the dining room; he would work more strenuously in the paddocks in order to impress her; he would study harder in the library so that he could discuss theology and philosophy with her. In the fullness of time, every male settler would be continually aware of the face and person of a young woman who was sometimes visible on the opposite side of the chapel or the dining room and was at other times an inspiring image in his mind.

  One of the explanations that I heard long afterwards for the failure of the settlement of Outlands was that the bishop of the diocese where the settlement was situated would never allow any of his priests to be stationed as chaplain in a place where the presence together of unmarried males and females might have given rise to scandal among non-Catholic neighbours. The Outlanders had tried by every possible means, so I was told long afterwards, to obtain a chaplain. They had drawn up an eloquent petition at one time, and a number of them had travelled by horse and cart – their only available transport – from Outlands to the palace of the bishop, which palace was in a suburb of the city that was named Bassett in my first published work of fiction. The Outlanders had travelled for two weeks and had arrived tired and dishevelled at the bishop’s palace, but he had rejected their petition.

  This piece of fiction is as it were a letter to a man who was mentioned earlier in the fiction. As soon as I have finished the final draft of this fiction, I will send a copy to the man just mentioned. I mentio
ned this now rather than at the end of the fiction so as not to lessen whatever effect the last pages might have or to suggest that the whole piece is anything but a piece of fiction. While I was writing the previous paragraph, I intended to put marks beside that paragraph in the copy that I sent to the man mentioned above so that the man would not fail to note that a party of dishevelled Outlanders must have passed close by the house where he lived in the first year of his life. I understand now, however, that my having written the previous sentence relieves me of the need to put any marks in the margin of this text.

  No one at the Farm knew about the settlement of Grasslands. I was not anxious to keep the place secret, but I was mostly clearing the forest and building the buildings and keeping the twig-persons active during the daytime, while Nunkie and my cousin were away. Sometimes one of the young men or women from Outlands would be sitting with a book on the veranda or strolling up and down beside the house – praying, perhaps, or even meditating – and would ask me later what I had been doing out in the long grass. I would tell the questioner a half-truth: that I had a toy farm in the grass.

  Grasslands had been already well established when a certain young woman arrived for the first time at the Farm. I shall call the certain young woman hereafter the Pretty-faced Woman. Perhaps I might not consider her so pretty if I saw her likeness today, but in the last month of 1950 she was the prettiest young woman I had seen. She was on her way to or from Outlands, busy on some secular or spiritual errand that I could never hope to know about. She bustled through the quiet rooms at the Farm, talking softly and earnestly to Nunkie or the Holy Foundress. Her noticeable breasts swung often behind her blouse. Her dark blue eyes and dark brown hair went strangely together. I stared often at the pale freckles above the high neckline of her dress.

  The Pretty-faced Woman was different from the other young women from Outlands not only because she was pretty and they were plain but because she seemed more curious about me. She asked me who I was, how I was connected with the persons at the Farm, where my home was, why I was living away from my family. She asked these things as though she was truly interested.

  On the day after the Pretty-faced Woman had arrived at the Farm, I looked through the branches of the fruit trees at the Farm in search of a twig to represent a new settler at Grasslands. The females at Grasslands were by no means all plain Janes; some of their faces had already begun to inspire some of the male settlers. But I had taken no special care in choosing any of the twigs that represented the females. Now, I found a twig with a certain shapeliness and symmetry and with a certain smoothness when the bark had been peeled away from the paler wood beneath. I placed this twig among the other representations of female settlers and looked forward to a series of events that would soon take place at Grasslands, the first of which events would be a long exchange of looks between the twig that represented myself and the twig that represented the new arrival when the settlers were next gathered in the chapel.

  I did the things mentioned above on the morning of the day mentioned above. After lunch on that day, I was only just settling myself on my knees beside the settlement of Grasslands when I heard someone walking up behind me through the long grass.

  I was a child, but I did not lack guile. I went on staring ahead. I pretended not to have heard her footsteps behind me. I sat back on my thighs and stared ahead of me as though I was contemplating fold after fold of an endless landscape. She remained for a short while a female presence just out of sight behind me, and then she stepped forward and asked me what I would have expected any visitor to the Farm to ask about my dirt clearings, my lumps of cracked mud, and my forked twigs standing crookedly here and there.

  I told her as much of the truth as she needed to be told: that I had founded a settlement in a remote place; that I had been inspired by the example of Outlands, even though I had only heard a little about it…

  She reached down and drew her fingers through my hair and then told me she hoped to welcome me one day to Outlands, which was still hardly bigger than my own settlement in the grass but which would grow and thrive. And then she went back to the house.

  After she had gone, I began to modify somewhat my original ground plan for Grasslands. Somewhere at the edge of the settlement there would have to be space for a house, and perhaps a small garden, for the first two of the settlers who were a married couple. Later, other such houses would be needed for other couples and their children. But these plans of mine were never carried out. On the next day, my father arrived without notice at the Farm. The electricity had been switched on in the partly built house on the far side of Melbourne where my parents and my sister and I were going to live happily together during the foreseeable future. (In fact, we lived there for four years, until my father, who had become for several years a reformed gambler, became again a gambler and had to sell the house in order to pay his latest debts.)

  I suppose the last traces of Grasslands would have melted away several years after I had left the Farm. And yet, the settlement of Outlands did not outlast Grasslands by many years. At some time in the 1960s, I heard that the settlement no longer existed, although several of the married couples who had been among the last settlers still remained on the site. They had bought a share each of the land and had survived as farmers.

  At some time in the early 1970s, after I had been married for several years and was the father of two children, I decided I had better make my Last Will and Testament with the help of a legal practitioner. While I was looking into the telephone directory at the pages where legal practitioners advertise their services, I saw a very rare surname that I had only once previously come across. I understood from what I saw that the bearer of the surname was the principal of a firm of legal practitioners in an inner eastern suburb of Melbourne, where the value of the most modest house was three times the value of my own house. After I had looked at the initial of the first given name of the principal just mentioned, I became convinced that the man I had heard of twenty and more years before as one of the founders of Outlands was now a prosperous legal practitioner in one of the best suburbs of Melbourne, so to speak.

  Only a year or so after the events reported in the previous paragraph, I heard of the death of Nunkie. I had seen him only occasionally during the years since I lived briefly at the Farm, but I took steps to attend his funeral service.

  I sat near the rear of Nunkie’s parish church and saw hardly anything of the chief mourners until they came down the aisle with the coffin. Among the leading mourners was a man of middle age whose appearance could only be called commanding. He was very tall, strongly built, and olive-skinned. He had a mane of silvery hair and a nose like an eagle’s bill. He looked continually about him, nodding to this person and that. He did not nod at me, but I was sure he took note of me. And while his black eyes measured me, I was aware of what a weak, ineffectual person I have always been and of how much I have needed to be guided and inspired.

  At the side of the commanding man was a woman with a pretty face. She was perhaps ten years younger than the man and was herself approaching middle age, but I could readily recall how she had looked twenty and more years before. She kept her eyes down as she passed.

  Behind the couple mentioned above were four young persons who were obviously their children. I estimated from the seeming age of the oldest that the parents had been married in the very early 1950s.

  In one of the last years of the twentieth century, I pressed by mistake a certain button in the radio of my motor car and heard, instead of the music that I usually hear from that radio, the voices of persons taking part in what was probably called by its makers a radio documentary. I was about to correct the mistake mentioned above when I understood that the actors taking part in the program were reading the words previously spoken or written by several persons who had been among the settlers at Outlands almost fifty years before. After I had understood this, I steered into a side street and stopped my motor car and listened until the program about Outla
nds had come to an end. (The program was one of a short series. The following week I listened for an hour to a similar program about the place mentioned in the second paragraph of this piece of fiction.)

  I learned less than I had expected to learn, except for what will be reported in the last paragraph of this piece of fiction. The details of the daily lives of the Outlanders seemed to have been hardly different from what I had imagined while I lived at the Farm. Even when the actors spoke the words of the early settlers (who would have been aged seventy and more when they were interviewed) explaining why they had left the secular world for a communal settlement, I was not surprised. The Outlanders too had felt that the world was becoming more sinful and that the cities of the world were in danger of being bombed flat. I was beginning to be disappointed while I listened. But then a number of younger female voices began to report the recollections of the earliest female settlers at Outlands while they asked themselves what had finally persuaded them to leave the world and to join the settlement in the mountains. The reports were at first rather predictable. But then a name was mentioned: the name of a man. The surname had a musical sound and ended in the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet. The reports from the young female settlers became more specific, more in agreement, more heartfelt. I shall end this piece of fiction with a paragraph reporting my own summary of what I understood the female actors to be reporting from the females who claimed still to remember their feelings of nearly fifty years before.

  He was the sort of person who would be called today charismatic, truly charismatic. He had graduated in law but had declined to practise. He was a cultured European in the dull Australia of the 1940s and 1950s. He had a Spanish father, and he spoke Spanish beautifully. We had never heard such a musical language. And he played the guitar. He would sing Spanish folk songs for hours while he played the guitar. He was inspiring.