Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

  On the day when we found the nest, my father and I were on the outward leg of a short journey. Knowing we would come back that day by the same route, we spiked the tallest stem of a clump of rushes through a sheet of paper to mark the site of the nest. Later that day we returned to the place where our marker fluttered. I had said I wanted to inspect the nest and the eggs once more, but when I strode to where I thought the nest lay, I could not find it. My father and I walked backwards and forwards over the area around the marker. At each step I stared down at the grass and took pride in my learning the secrets of plains. At each step I gloated over the nest that I could not find and would never see again.

  Since my return in 1951 to Melbourne, where I was born, I have mostly thought of myself as being surrounded by grasslands. I think of an inner arc of actual grasslands such as the plains from Lara through Sunbury to Whittlesea. Then I think of a further and more sweeping arc of grasslands in a vague area on the far side of the Great Dividing Range. This arc, provided that I have no maps nearby to confine my thinking, reaches from Camperdown through Maryborough and then around through Rochester towards Shepparton.

  Beyond these two concentric arcs of grass is foreign territory. Whenever I think of myself as being forced, for whatever reason, to flee from my native district, I think of myself as fleeing into the grasslands. In desperate circumstances I might flee as far as the outer grasslands, but I could never see myself as fleeing further.

  I think of myself as having learned from ground-dwelling birds how to preserve myself: how to go to earth on grasslands. I have never been so anxious that I have not been able to think of myself as being saved by my grasslands.

  And yet I have suspected for most of my life that grasslands may not be a secure refuge. In the first days of my reading my bird books, I thought often about the species described as extinct or probably extinct. Of these species I thought most often about the bustard, Eupodotis australis, which had once been common on the plains around Melbourne but was no longer found there.

  I thought of the Romanians in my photographs as a rare species. I wondered what grasslands they might have fled to. The photographs showed more mountains than grasslands, but I thought of the mountains of Europe as I thought of the mountains to the east and the north-east of my native district. The mountains were too obvious a place to hide in.

  One photograph in my National Geographic showed two hundred men and women arranged in concentric circles for an elaborate, slow-moving dance called the hora. The men and women were arranged in circles on grass. The photograph showed as background nothing but grass – a field of grass under a wide sky. The photograph had been taken as though to suggest a great sweep of grass, but I could not accept that a true grassland could be found in Europe. The dark faces under the hats and scarves seemed troubled by a European sadness. The people in the photograph could see what I could only surmise. From where they shuffled on the grass the Romanians could see, just out of the zone of the photograph, some decrepit village where children with scabs on their faces hung out of dark doorways, or some roadside camp of gipsies with stringy hair. The slow, sad dancers longed for a true grassland.

  The dancers shuffled across the grass. When the American girl had taken her photograph from beside her iron steed, the grass had already been trampled. I saw no tussocks where a bird might have sheltered. If the ground-dwelling birds of Australia had almost all gone from their grasslands, where were the birds of the trampled grasslands of Europe?

  In 1971 I bought for my children an encyclopedia of the animal world. Under the heading Bustard I read about the Great Bustard of Eurasia. I read that the species had become extinct in Britain in the 1830s and was no longer seen in populated areas of the Continent. In 1971, if I looked towards Europe from my vantage point on the edge of the grasslands north of Melbourne I saw only populous river valleys or uninviting mountains.

  What I read about the Great Bustard was written in the present tense. I read about the elaborate courtship dances that the male bustard performs in front of the female in a broad clearing among the grass. But I saw the male as a ghostly outline drifting around an almost-invisible female. I saw the birds in the same way that I see ghostly American men and women when I read texts in the present tense written by anthropologists – ghostly Americans such as the men and women who fish and hunt and farm on islands in the mouth of the Hudson River.

  In another article in the encyclopedia, under the heading Courtship Display, I read that experimenters had observed male bustards performing their elaborate dance in front of effigies each made by attaching the severed head of a female to a short pole. I included this fact in a paragraph in my third book of fiction, The Plains. Some years after that book had been published, I received a letter from the director of a small dance company asking my permission to read aloud short passages from my book during a performance of several dances. One of the passages was the paragraph reporting the dance of the male bustard in front of the effigy of the female.

  I believe nowadays that I considered the people of Europe less than real during my childhood because they had no grasslands where they could have discovered the nests of ground-dwelling birds and where the people themselves could have dreamed of hiding themselves if they had to flee.

  In the summer of 1986–87, while I was writing my fifth book of fiction, Inland, I asked myself what I remembered most clearly from all the books of fiction that I had read. I decided that I remembered most clearly and with most pleasure what I call spaces-within-spaces.

  I decided that what I remembered most clearly from the work of fiction that I admire most, Remembrance of Things Past, is my understanding the Narrator as the man with two Ways running through him – the Guermantes and the Méséglise. I remember the Narrator as a man made up mostly of landscapes and urged to study those landscapes until the impossible takes place in front of his eyes and the many landscapes and the two Ways merge to form the whole of a private country – his true homeland.

  I decided that I remembered most clearly from the book that I admire most among books of fiction in the English language, Wuthering Heights, a scene near the end of the book. Mr Lockwood, now living far from the North, is invited by a friend back to that district to shoot grouse on the moors. At a roadside inn in the North, Lockwood observes an ostler looking at a cart of green oats passing by. The ostler speaks:

  Yon’s fraugh Gimmerton, nah! They’re allas three wick’ after other folk wi’ ther harvest.

  This scene has haunted me since I first read Wuthering Heights as a schoolboy thirty years ago. I am fascinated by the shape of what takes place. A man visits a remote district. In that district the man sees a sign of a further district that seems as remote and harsh to the people around him as their district seems to him. Then the man remembers that the further district is linked with his own past.

  ‘Gimmerton?’ I repeated – my residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy.

  In the further district, so the man remembers, is a house where he once lived, a woman he once thought of falling in love with, a tribe of people with their own joys and sorrows, and a bleak and distinctive landscape.

  Writing this today, I was struck for the first time by the fact that Mr Lockwood is returning to the moors for the purpose of destroying ground-dwelling birds. This sent me to a passage in Chapter 12 in which Catherine Linton, née Earnshaw, lies in bed at Thrushcross Grange handling feathers from her pillow and remembering the birds of the moors. She remembers especially the ground-dwelling lapwing and a clutch of young lapwings that had died because Heathcliff had set a trap over their nest.

  From this passage I turned to two passages in Inland describing the killing of birds. For most of the time while I was writing Inland I was thinking of the characters in Wuthering Heights. Only today I understood that I must have had in mind also the birds of that book.

  The spaces-within-spaces are not only landscapes within landscapes. When I remember The Trial and The Castle or even The
Man Without Qualities, I am looking in each case across a huge room towards a doorway into another huge room. Without being able to see into the further room I understand that further doorways open from that room into other huge rooms. Chairs and coffee tables and grand pianos and marble busts are arranged around the walls of the room where I stand, but the vast space of floor at the centre of the room is bare. I hear from somewhere among the further rooms a crowd of people talking and laughing. The noise grows louder. I think of the roar of an incoming sea. I can see no place to hide myself in the huge room, but I set out hopefully through a doorway at the side. I am hoping to find the one room among the hundreds of rooms where I can hide safely. I am hoping to reach the library.

  The first picture that I saw of a Hungarian was not of an actual person but of a stuffed effigy – an outsize man of white cloth strung high between two trees that looked like poplars. This picture also had been taken by the American girl. I had been annoyed in the 1940s to learn that the boundaries of Europe were untidy: that thousands of Hungarians lived in Transylvania.

  The effigy was of a bridegroom. In the white-walled farmhouse below the poplar-like trees, a wedding was being celebrated. As I recall it, the photograph showed no one connected with the wedding. All I remember are the white farm buildings under a grey sky, the tall trees, and the white monster-mummy hanging.

  Today, as I wrote the paragraph above, I realised for the first time that most of the details I saw forty years ago in the first photograph I saw of things Hungarian – most of those details are important items in Inland, part of which is set in a country like Hungary. The white farm buildings, the poplar-shaped trees, the American girl behind the camera – these I recognised at once as belonging in Inland. I did not see at once that the blank-faced figure hanging in the trees, the dummy-bridegroom, is the narrator of my book.

  I learned while I was still a child about the Hungarian grassland, the puszta. The first picture that I saw of the puszta I have forgotten, perhaps because the caption included the words Hungarian cowboys to describe a group of horsemen. The word cowboy would have made me consider the men of the puszta imitation Americans and therefore doubly inferior to Australians by my father’s and my own standards of horsemanship.

  In time, however, the few pictures that I saw and the references that I read to the terrain of Hungary led me to think of Hungarians rather than Romanians when I wanted to think about Europe. The Hungarians had a grassland, even though I thought of the grass on the puszta as short and trampled like the grass where the Romanians had danced the hora, and even though I never thought of any ground-dwelling birds nesting on the puszta. When I had learned that the Magyars had migrated to the puszta from somewhere in Central Asia, the people of Hungary seemed to me at last a real people: the first people I had been able to imagine as real from among the peoples of Europe. The trampled puszta, the actual grassland of Hungary, was not for the Hungarians their grassland of last recourse. When the Hungarians stared at the puszta they might have been dreaming of another grassland far away – a grassland of grasslands.

  In 1976 I read People of the Puszta, a book of non-fiction by Gyula Illyés. I learned from the first page of that book that in Transdanubia, where Illyés was born, the word puszta refers to the collection of buildings belonging to the farm servants on a great country estate. I had opened the book expecting to read about the people of the grasslands, but I was reading about oppressed farm servants in the low hills west of the Danube before the Great War. Yet I owe to my reading of People of the Puszta my writing of Inland.

  Two details from People of the Puszta stayed with me afterwards until I was driven to turn them into a book of fiction. The two were an account of the drowning of a young woman in a well and the author’s penetrating as a man the libraries and drawing rooms of the same manor houses that had seemed awesome fastnesses when he had been the son of oppressed farm labourers.

  After I had read People of the Puszta, but before I had begun to write Inland, I read A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. I began the book knowing that the author as a young man in 1933 had set out to walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul. I believed A Time of Gifts would describe all the stages of that journey, but then I noted that the last chapter was called ‘The Marches of Hungary’. I was to be conducted to the border of Hungary and no further. And so I was. A Time of Gifts ends with the author on the bridge over the Danube at Esztergom.

  At the end of the text were the words TO BE CONTINUED. I began to inquire after the sequel. This was several years after A Time of Gifts had been first published, but I was told that no sequel had appeared.

  In 1985 I was still looking out for the book that would take me into Hungary, but I did not even know whether Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had been born in 1915, was alive or dead. By then I had begun my own book about the grasslands of Europe. At some time in 1986, while I was finishing Inland, Between the Woods and the Water was published in England. I was aware of this event, but by then I would not have dared to read Fermor on Hungary. I wanted Inland to be my own book of my own images of my own country.

  The narrator of the first part of Inland is a man in a library of a manor house on a grassland rather like the puszta. If I had read Fermor while I was writing that section of Inland I might have been led into thinking that the narrator of my book ought to resemble some man who had actually lived in Hungary, whereas I wanted my narrator to be the sort of man who could only appear in a book written by a man who knew very little about the country that Patrick Leigh Fermor had walked across.

  Yet sometimes, while I wrote, I could not help thinking about the country that I was going to read about when Inland was finished and when I opened my copy of Between the Woods and the Water. At one such time I was thinking of writing that the man in the library of the manor house was thinking of bustards. I was thinking that the man might have remembered having seen bustards as a child on the grasslands near his estates. Perhaps the father of the man had found the nest of a bustard while the two of them were out riding one day. Or the man in the library might have remembered having tried to tame bustards on the lawns around his manor house many years before. But I wrote about no bustards in Inland. I remembered that I had once supposed that the Great Bustard no longer inhabited the grasslands of Europe. And I remembered that I had written about bustards in my third book of fiction, The Plains. In that book a young woman feeds a flock of half-tame bustards while a man watches her from the windows of a library.

  This piece of writing began as a review of Between the Woods and the Water, but it has turned into something else. Perhaps it will seem more like a review if I end by quoting a long passage from Fermor’s book. I could have quoted from almost any page of the book in order to show that Patrick Leigh Fermor is a superb writer. But I am quoting from a certain passage in order to show that some books are magical.

  I half-wished, when I set off, that my plans were leading me in another direction… But I had been swayed by the old maps in the library the day before and there were satisfactory hints of remoteness and desolation in the south-eastern route I was actually taking. A hundred years ago this stretch of the Alfold resembled a vast bog relieved by a few oases of higher ground. Hamlets were grudgingly scattered and… many of these were nineteenth-century settlements which had sprung up when the marsh was drained. The air of desolation was confirmed by those tall and catapult-like sweep-wells rearing their timbers into the emptiness…

  I found him strolling in the avenue that led to the house. He must have been about thirty-five. He had a frail look, a slight tremor, and an expression of anguish – not only with me, I was relieved to see – which a rather sorrowful smile lit up. A natural tendency to speak slowly had been accentuated by a bad motor-crash brought about by falling asleep at the wheel. There was something touching and very nice about him, and as I write, I am looking at a couple of sketches in the back of my notebook; not good ones, but a bit of this quality emerges.

  German was his only altern
ative to Magyar. He said, ‘Come and see my Trappen!’ I didn’t understand the last word, but we strolled to the other side of the house where two enormous birds were standing under the trees. A first glance suggested a mixture of goose and turkey but they were bigger and nobler and heftier than either and, at a closer look, totally different; the larger bird was well over a yard from beak to tail. His neck was pale grey with a maroon collar, his back and his wings a speckled reddish buff and strange weeping whiskers swept backwards from his beak like a slipstream of pale yellow Dundrearies. Their gait was stately; when our advent sent them scuttling, Lajos made me hang back. He approached them and scattered grain and the larger bird allowed his head to be scratched. To Lajos’s distress, their wings had been clipped by the farmer who had found them the month before, but when the larger bird opened his, and then spread a fine fan-shaped tail like a turkey’s he looked, for a moment, completely white, but then turned dark again as he closed them. They were Great Bustards, rare and wild birds that people wrongly relate to the Ostrich. They love desolate places like the puszta and Lajos planned to keep them till their feathers had grown enough for them to fly away again. He loved birds and had a way with them, for these two followed him up the steps with a stately pace, then through the drawing-room and the hall to the front door and, when he shut it, we could hear them tapping on it from time to time with their beaks.

  Some books are not to be murmured against.

  (Scripsi, vol. 5, no. 1, 1988)

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  ‌Pure Ice

  One hot afternoon in the summer of 1910, or it may have been 1911 or even as late as 1917 or 1918… one hot afternoon in one of those years when my father was still a schoolboy at Camperdown in the Western District of Victoria or at Crabbes Creek in the Murwillumbah district of New South Wales or at Allansford on the Hopkins River and back again in the Western District of Victoria (you will notice that my father, like the father of one of the characters in Inland, led a wandering life)… one hot afternoon in the summer of one of those years more than seventy years ago, it was a freezing night on the other side of the world.