Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  The man who had lived as a child in the place named Sedgewick North had believed as a child that his district lacked what he called a true centre. Sometimes he used instead of the words true centre the word heart.

  For some of the time while I was writing about the district around Sedgewick North, I saw in my mind some of the places around Mepunga East.

  * * *

  For most of his life my brother was said to be backward, but he was able to do some things that I have never been able to do.

  Many times during his life my brother was able to travel in an aeroplane, which is something that I have never been able to do. My brother was able to travel in aeroplanes of different sizes. The smallest aeroplane that my brother travelled in contained only my brother and the pilot. My brother paid the pilot to take him through the air above part of the southern boundary of the mainland of Australia. While my brother was in the air he recorded by means of a camera and a roll of colour-film some of what he saw around him. I did not know that my brother had been in that air until after he had died. After my brother had died, the prints from that roll of colour-film were given to me.

  Whenever I look nowadays at those prints I wonder whether my brother had become confused while he was in the air above the southern boundary of the grasslands of Australia, or whether the pilot of the aeroplane had tried to amuse or to frighten my brother by causing the aeroplane to travel sideways or even upside down through the air, or whether my brother had simply pointed his camera at what any man would see if he stood at the place in the air where the grasslands of Australia obviously have a mind to go.

  When I look at those prints I seem sometimes to be looking at a place all of pale blue and sometimes to be looking at a place all of dark blue and sometimes to be looking at a place all of yellow-brown. But sometimes I seem to be looking from an impossible vantage-point at dark-blue water and, on the far side of the dark-blue water, the endless yellow-brown grasslands and the endless pale-blue sky of America.

  Land Deal

  After a full explanation of what my object was, I purchased two large tracts of land from them—about 600,000 acres, more or less—and delivered over to them blankets, knives, looking-glasses, tomahawks, beads, scissors, flour, etc., as payment for the land, and also agreed to give them a tribute, or rent, yearly.

  —JOHN BATMAN, 1835

  We certainly had no cause for complaint at the time. The men from overseas politely explained all the details of the contract before we signed it. Of course there were minor matters that we should have queried. But even our most experienced negotiators were distracted by the sight of the payment offered us.

  The strangers no doubt supposed that their goods were quite unfamiliar to us. They watched tolerantly while we dipped our hands into the bags of flour, draped ourselves in blankets, and tested the blades of knives against the nearest branches. And when they left we were still toying with our new possessions. But what we marvelled at most was not their novelty. We had recognised an almost miraculous correspondence between the strangers’ steel and glass and wool and flour and those metals and mirrors and cloths and foodstuffs that we so often postulated, speculated about, or dreamed of.

  Is it surprising that a people who could use against stubborn wood and pliant grass and bloody flesh nothing more serviceable than stone—is it surprising that such a people should have become so familiar with the idea of metal? Each one of us, in his dreams, had felled tall trees with blades that lodged deep in the pale pulp beneath the bark. Any of us could have enacted the sweeping of honed metal through a stand of seeded grass or described the precise parting of fat or muscle beneath a tapered knife. We knew the strength and sheen of steel and the trueness of its edge from having so often called it into possible existence.

  It was the same with glass and wool and flour. How could we not have inferred the perfection of mirrors—we who peered so often into rippled puddles after wavering images of ourselves? There was no quality of wool that we had not conjectured as we huddled under stiff pelts of possum on rainy winter evenings. And every day the laborious pounding of the women at their dusty mills recalled for us the richness of the wheaten flour that we had never tasted.

  But we had always clearly distinguished between the possible and the actual. Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud or the waterfall, any faery race inhabit the land below the ocean’s edge; any new day might bring us such a miracle as an axe of steel or a blanket of wool. The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.

  It might be asked whether our individual or collective histories furnished any example of a possibility becoming actual. Had no man ever dreamed of possessing a certain weapon or woman and, a day or a year later, laid hold of his desire? This can be simply answered by the assurance that no one among us was ever heard to claim that anything in his possession resembled, even remotely, some possible thing he had once hoped to possess.

  That same evening, with the blankets warm against our backs and the blades still gleaming beside us, we were forced to confront an unpalatable proposition. The goods that had appeared among us so suddenly belonged only in a possible world. We were therefore dreaming. The dream may have been the most vivid and enduring that any of us had known. But however long it lasted it was still a dream.

  We admired the subtlety of the dream. The dreamer (or dreamers—we had already admitted the likelihood of our collective responsibility) had invented a race of men among whom possible objects passed as actual. And these men had been moved to offer us the ownership of their prizes in return for something that was itself not real.

  We found further evidence to support this account of things. The pallor of the men we had met that day, the lack of purpose in much of their behaviour, the vagueness of their explanations—these may well have been the flaws of men dreamed of in haste. And, perhaps paradoxically, the nearly perfect properties of the stuffs offered to us seemed the work of a dreamer, someone who lavished on the central items of his dream all those desirable qualities that are never found in actual objects.

  It was this point that led us to alter part of our explanation for the events of that day. We were still agreed that what had happened was part of some dream. And yet it was characteristic of most dreams that the substance of them seemed, at the time, actual to the dreamer. How, if we were dreaming of the strangers and their goods, were we able to argue against our taking them for actual men and objects?

  We decided that none of us was the dreamer. Who, then, was? One of our gods, perhaps? But no god could have had such an acquaintance with the actual that he succeeded in creating an illusion of it that had almost deceived us.

  There was only one reasonable explanation. The pale strangers, the men we had first seen that day, were dreaming of us and our confusion. Or, rather, the true strangers were dreaming of a meeting between ourselves and their dreamed-of selves.

  At once, several puzzles seemed resolved. The strangers had not observed us as men observe one another. There were moments when they might have been looking through our hazy outlines towards sights they recognised more easily. They spoke to us with oddly raised voices and claimed our attention with exaggerated gestures as though we were separated from them by a considerable distance, or as though they feared we might fade altogether from their sight before we had served the purpose for which they had allowed us into their dream.

  When had this dream begun? Only, we hoped, on that same day when we first met the strangers. But we could not deny that our entire lives and the sum of our history might have been dreamed by these people of whom we knew almost nothing. This did not dismay us utterly. As characters in a dream, we might have been much less at liberty than we had always supposed. But the authors of the dream encompassing us had apparently granted us at least the freedom to recogni
se, after all these years, the simple truth behind what we had taken for a complex world.

  Why had things happened thus? We could only assume that these other men dreamed for the same purpose that we (dreamers within a dream) often gave ourselves up to dreaming. They wanted for a time to mistake the possible for the actual. At that moment, as we deliberated under familiar stars (already subtly different now that we knew their true origin), the dreaming men were in an actual land far away, arranging our very deliberations so that their dreamed-of selves could enjoy for a little while the illusion that they had acquired something actual.

  And what was this unreal object of their dreams? The document we had signed explained everything. If we had not been distracted by their glass and steel that afternoon we would have recognised even then the absurdity of the day’s events. The strangers wanted to possess the land.

  Of course it was the wildest folly to suppose that the land, which was by definition indivisible, could be measured or parcelled out by a mere agreement among men. In any case, we had been fairly sure that the foreigners failed to see our land. From their awkwardness and unease as they stood on the soil, we judged that they did not recognise the support it provided or the respect it demanded. When they moved even a short distance across it, stepping aside from places that invited passage and treading on places that were plainly not to be intruded on, we knew that they would lose themselves before they found the real land.

  Still, they had seen a land of some sort. That land was, in their own words, a place for farms and even, perhaps, a village. It would have been more in keeping with the scope of the dream surrounding them had they talked of founding an unheard-of city where they stood. But all their schemes were alike from our point of view. Villages or cities were all in the realm of possibility and could never have a real existence. The land would remain the land, designed for us yet, at the same time, providing the scenery for the dreams of a people who would never see either our land or any land they dreamed of.

  What could we do, knowing what we then knew? We seemed as helpless as those characters we remembered from private dreams who tried to run with legs strangely nerveless. Yet if we had no choice but to complete the events of the dream, we could still admire the marvellous inventiveness of it. And we could wonder endlessly what sort of people they were in their far country, dreaming of a possible land they could never inhabit, dreaming further of a people such as ourselves with our one weakness, and then dreaming of acquiring from us the land which could never exist.

  We decided, of course, to abide by the transaction that had been so neatly contrived. And although we knew we could never truly awake from a dream that did not belong to us, still we trusted that one day we might seem, to ourselves at least, to awake.

  Some of us, remembering how after dreams of loss they had awakened with real tears in their eyes, hoped that we would somehow awake to be convinced of the genuineness of the steel in our hands and the wool round our shoulders. Others insisted that for as long as we handled such things we could be no more than characters in the vast dream that had settled over us—the dream that would never end until a race of men in a land unknown to us learned how much of their history was a dream that must one day end.

  The Only Adam

  It was the afternoon of the thunderstorm when A. finally decided to fall in love with Nola Pomeroy or try to shag her or do something special with her in some out-of-the-way place.

  The clouds began piling up late in the morning. Storms in summer usually came from the south-west, where the ocean lay. But this one appeared from an unlikely quarter. A. watched it almost from its beginnings through the north windows of the school. Its black bulk was bearing down on Sedgewick North from the plains far inland.

  After lunch the sky over the school showed nothing but bulging clouds that tore away continually and drifted like smoke on turbulent currents. A. had just seen the first of the lightning when Mr Farrant told the seventh grade that their film strip on Major Mitchell was ready in the cloakroom and asked them what they were waiting for. They filed out through the door. Mr Farrant called after them: “You, A., turn the projector and read the text and send the wrigglers and gigglers back to me.”

  The cloakroom was so dark that A. could not see who had gone into the lovers’ corner. But the darkness made the pictures more sharp and clear than any he had seen before. He showed the map of south-eastern Australia with a wide blankness over nearly all of Victoria. He went on turning the knob. Mitchell’s dotted line left the Murray River and thrust southwards. A.’s audience was unusually quiet and solemn. He supposed they were waiting for the first heavy drops of rain on the iron roof.

  A. read aloud from the screen. Mitchell was so impressed by the rich and pleasant land that he named it Australia Felix, which meant Australia the Blessed. A. looked hard at a picture of level country with grass knee-high and huge gums grouped like trees in a botanical garden. It was hard to believe that such a landscape was part of his own State. Yet in the next frame Mitchell’s dots had reached deep down into western Victoria. A. might even have said they were heading for his own district if he could have been sure where Sedgewick North should have been on the featureless map.

  Still no one tried to joke or howl him down. There was not even a sound from the lovers’ corner. A. wondered whether his own grade had at last found some history that took their fancy. Perhaps, like him, they were amazed to see an explorer approaching their own district—a famous man from their history course bearing down on their dairy farms and gravel roads.

  The rain started. And a boy came up behind A. with some news that might have explained why everyone seemed quiet and thoughtful. It was not only the eighth-graders who were privileged to shag after school. One of the couples in the cloakroom at that moment had gone into the bush somewhere and tried it only the night before. A. hadn’t caught their names for the noise of the rain on the roof. But he would find out soon enough because they were going to take up shagging every afternoon. And some of their friends might be joining them.

  The storm was on top of them. The thunder and rain were so loud that A. gave up reading the captions. The scenes from Mitchell’s journey passed over the screen without comment. The explorer had gone deep into Australia Felix, but there was still no mark on the map to show how near he might have been to any place that A. knew. The boy could only look at the land on the screen and wonder what he himself could discover to compare with it.

  But he had to think, too, about the couple who had taken up shagging. The senior boys had always insisted that no one in A.’s grade was old enough to do it properly. A. had to admire the two, whoever they were, for sneaking off on their own to become pioneers. No doubt they had discovered a place where none of the older shaggers could disturb them or offer them advice. A. thought that all couples—lovers and shaggers—ought to do their own exploring and establish themselves in cosy nests all around the district. If he could have reserved Pomeroys’ scrub for himself he would have enjoyed thinking of Sedgewick North as a network of concealed trails leading to hide-outs for enterprising couples.

  The prolonged roaring of the rain died away. A. wound the film strip until it showed the familiar insignia of the Education Department of Victoria on a field of murky grey. No one booed as they usually did to complain that their film had ended. In fact, A. heard no sound from the darkness behind him. He thought what a fool he would seem if all the others had crept quietly away to plan their shagging in all the best landscapes of the district while he was still staring at what was left of the film strip.

  But at least Nola Pomeroy was still in her usual place near the projector. A. glanced back and saw her looking as though she hadn’t taken her eyes off the screen.

  * * *

  In the last half-hour before home-time the sky began to clear over the inland. There was even a shaft of sunlight pointing down at some lucky district near the horizon. Mr Farrant told A.’s grade to open their readers at the extract “On Pyramid Hill, Victo
ria, 1836,” from Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia by Thomas Livingstone Mitchell.

  The pupils read by turns, and A. fidgeted while some farmer’s son from Sedgewick North stumbled down the long rolling sentences that led to vistas of plains. Then it was Nola Pomeroy’s turn. She was given the passage that A. had been hoping to read himself. But she was a good reader and, being a girl, she delivered her words with an earnestness that would have seemed ridiculous coming from a boy.

  We had at length discovered a country for the immediate reception of civilized man, and fit to become the abode of one of the great nations of the earth. Unencumbered with too much wood, yet possessing enough for all purposes, with an exuberant soil under a temperate climate, bounded by the seacoast and mighty rivers, and watered abundantly by streams from mighty mountains, this highly interesting region lay before me with all its features new and untouched as they fell from the hands of the Creator. Of this Eden it seemed that I was the only Adam; and indeed, it was a sort of paradise to me.

  A. kept himself from looking across at Nola. He watched instead the plains of Australia Felix projected onto the map of Victoria like an image from some memorable film strip. He watched himself reach a hand towards the waving grasses and scattered trees. But then a shadow fell on the map, and meaningless patches of light and darkness mottled his own skin. His outstretched arm had come between the source of light and the image he was after. And Nola herself might have been still behind him in the darkness.

  * * *

  In the last week of the school year even the rowdiest pupils were quieter and more decorous. Each morning before classes, the room was locked and the blinds were pulled down while Mr Farrant wrote up their final tests on the board. In the afternoon, while their teacher marked their test-books at his table, the upper grades filed into the infant school on the other side of the folding doors and practised for their Christmas Tree. Mrs Farrant played the piano, the upper grades sang the carols, and a select few of the younger children went through the actions of their nativity scene. Lolling against the infant-room walls under loops of coloured paper chains, A. and his friends sensed that the year was approaching some sort of climax.