Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  On a certain Saturday soon after the beginning of his twenty-eighth year, when the weather was so dry and so hot that the newspapers and the news bulletins on radio and television contained warnings that bushfires might break out in any district of Victoria, he and she set out in his motor car in mid-morning along a route that he had chosen without consulting her, which route had seemed likely, when he had studied it previously on a large-scale map used by the senior officers at his place of work, to lead him far into a district that was unquestionably part of the mountains that seemed always blue-grey from a distance. At about midday, he steered his motor car away from a certain red-gravel road that he had already followed for some distance away from a certain main road and began to steer the motor car along a track marked only by two wheel-ruts leading in among dense forest. At a certain point along the track just mentioned, he stopped his motor car a little to one side of the track, in the clearing that was mentioned in the eighth paragraph of this section of this story. The land was so steep on either side of the clearing and the trees around were so dense and so tall and he had travelled for such a distance from the nearest main road that he could not doubt that he was in a place that would have appeared from a distance as part of a range of blue-grey mountains. He and she ate and drank in that place and were alone together there, but the writer of this story will report no more of what passed between them than the writer of the book of fiction mentioned earlier in this section of this story would have reported of what passed between the characters known mostly as M. de Charlus and M. Jupien if he, the writer, had not contrived a means for himself, in the person of the narrator, to listen through a wall of the room where they were alone together in rooms opening off the courtyard where the orchid mentioned previously had been for so long exposed, which courtyard appeared in the mind of the chief character of this story, whenever he remembered his having read the first paragraphs of “Cities of the Plain,” as a clearing surrounded by ridges and slopes and valleys of blue-grey partly surrounded by a margin of green.

  On a certain Saturday morning in the autumn of the year mentioned in the previous paragraph, he and she went together into a jewellery shop in a city in the region of Gippsland and were met by appointment by a young woman who called herself the manageress and who was a stranger to him, the chief character, but who had been a schoolfriend of the young woman beside him. While she and he were in the jewellery shop, they accepted the congratulations of the manageress on having become engaged to be married and then chose one of the rings from a tray of engagement rings that the manageress had put in front of them, which rings she said she had set aside for the young woman because the stone in each ring was an emerald and because she, the manageress, had always considered that the young woman’s special gem should have been the emerald.

  More than twenty years after the events reported in the previous paragraph, when he was employed in a position such as he had looked forward as a young man to occupying, although he was in a different building and in a different department from those in which he had expected to remain and spent his days supervising publications to do with the restoring of salty soils by means including the planting of many thousands of trees in parts of inland Victoria, and when he went to a race meeting every Saturday and tidied the garden around his house every Sunday morning, he would spend most Sunday afternoons sitting in front of his bookshelves and trying to see in his mind the titles and the authors’ names and even some of the contents of the books that would have comprised his library if he had been sitting at that moment in his home on the grasslands of Helvetia. He was not an unhappy or a disappointed man, but he believed his wife, who often went with him to the races and who always worked with him in the garden, and their son and daughter, who were successful as students and seemed stable and contented persons, would have been surprised to know what he thought about on Sunday afternoons.

  Even to his wife and children he had sometimes said that Sunday afternoon was the saddest time of the week: the time when you had to admit that you were no more than the person you were. To himself he would have added that Sunday afternoon was the time when he tried to understand how he had come to be who he was and where he was rather than someone else in some other place. And to himself he might have added further that Sunday afternoon was the time when he was sometimes for a moment, and despite everything that had happened to him in the course of what he called his life, a much published and much renowned poet in Helvetia.

  Many a child had learned the trick, so he supposed, of saying his name aloud again and again until it seemed no longer his and he wondered what his true name was. The same child had surely also stared at his image in a mirror in order to confuse himself, he thought. And he believed he was only one of many who could hardly recognise their own drab backyards when they looked at the ordered greenery in a corner of the backyard of some family snapshot. But not so many people, he thought, might have learned his trick of bringing to the foreground of his mind an image that had been for long in the background of his mind but had often taken his notice and of then watching the image until it became another image, which other image was often of something Helvetian and might have been for long in the foreground of his mind if he had lived in Helvetia. One of the first images that he watched in this way was the image in his mind of the green stone in the engagement ring that his wife sometimes wore and sometimes kept in her wardrobe, which image would always become, as it approached the foreground of his mind, an image of a zone of green surrounded by a broad margin of grey-blue.

  In the Heytesbury Forest

  All around the large town in the south-west of Victoria where his unmarried aunts and his bachelor-uncle lived and where he visited them every year as a boy and as a young man and occasionally during later years before the last of them had died, the countryside was mostly level and grassy. In any view of paddocks or farms from a road or a railway line, one or more plantations of cypress would appear as a green-black stripe or stripes against the yellow-green of the grass, but he often travelled for several miles without seeing a gum tree. All through his childhood, he supposed that the countryside where his father claimed to belong had been hardly less bare of trees when the first Europeans had arrived there a hundred and a few more years before. His father often said that he preferred his native district to all others, but he never spoke as though the grassiness or the levelness had sometimes moved him; he seemed to be attached to that district only because his grandfather had chosen to settle there in the 1870s. He, the chief character, from the first years that he could remember until he was almost in his middle age, felt attached to his father’s district, but he, the chief character, believed he had loved the sight of the level and mostly grassy countryside since the time when he had visited as a small child the so-called old house, which had been on a treeless plain with the cliffs of the Southern Ocean as one horizon and a horizon of grass in every other direction except for a quarter in the south-east, where a distant line of trees was visible.

  First his father and then his mother died while he was still not fifty years of age. He felt as though he knew much about his father’s childhood from having seen the house surrounded by grassy paddocks where his father had lived until he was twenty years of age and from hearing from his, the chief character’s, unmarried aunts and bachelor-uncle accounts of his father as a boy. But after his, the chief character’s, mother had died, he began to reflect on how little he knew of her early years. He knew that she had been born and had spent her first twelve years in a small town surrounded by grassy countryside on the main road leading inland from the large town mentioned several times previously in this story. She had occasionally told him, when he was a child himself, of something that had happened to her at home or at school in the small town, and even though he had only once travelled through the small town in his bachelor-uncle’s utility truck, he, the chief character, had easily imagined the small town in the wide, bare countryside while his mother was talking to him. But whenever he
tried to think of his mother from the age of twelve onwards, he became aware of a strange fault in the image that he had in his mind of the south-west of Victoria.

  In every image in his mind of the grassy countryside that extended far around the large town mentioned earlier, he saw the countryside as a topographical map with the viewer looking from west to east, or from the vicinity of the large town towards Melbourne, which was, however, some 250 kilometres away. In every such image, the grassy countryside ended in the far background at a line of trees, and these trees seemed always as far away from the viewer as the line of trees had seemed far away from him, the chief character, in the view that he remembered having seen from the so-called old house of his father’s family. He understood that these trees were the nearest to view of the trees of a huge expanse of forest. He understood that he had heard this forest talked about often when he had visited his father’s relatives—they called it mostly the Bush, although his father sometimes called it the Heytesbury. He, the chief character, understood that the forest was far larger than the expanse of grassy countryside that he considered to be the surroundings of the large town mentioned previously or to be his father’s native district. He, the chief character, understood that he had often seen in his mind an image of the western half of Victoria as though he was looking at it from a point in the upper air above Bass Strait, and that the forest in this image was a huge zone of a blue-black colour whereas the grassy countryside was a narrow margin of yellow-green on the far side of the blue-black. He understood that he had visited several places in the forest on several different occasions while he was a boy and that he had kept in his mind ever since a number of images of meaning. He understood all these matters, but he could never remember anything of the several journeys that he must have made from the grassy countryside into the forest. He would have been interested to remember how the forest had appeared from the nearest grassy paddocks or how he had felt as he passed from countryside into forest or out again from the forest afterwards but he could only remember being far inside the forest or far out in the grassy countryside. And in his memories of being far inside the forest, he seemed unaware that the forest gave way in certain quarters to grassy countryside, just as in his memories of being out in the grassy countryside the forest was no more than a line of trees on the horizon.

  In his middle age, and at a time later than the last of the events that will be reported in this section of this story, he remembered that he had seen, while he travelled through the forest, paddocks and whole farms cleared of trees and scrub and sown with grass and that he had passed through several small towns in the forest but that he had always remembered the farms and the towns afterwards as mere glades. He remembered likewise that he had sometimes seen in the grassy countryside a patch of scrub along a roadside or a stand of trees in a corner of a paddock, but that he had never thought of these as remnants of larger areas, preferring to suppose that seeds from the forest were sometimes spread by the wind or by birds. At the time when he remembered that he had thought thus, he remembered also one of the few remarks that his bachelor-uncle had ever made to him on the subject of sexual morality. His uncle had said something such as that if he had not been lucky enough to have had a Catholic upbringing, he would have dashed into the nearest scrub with one or another young woman as soon as he had become old enough, just as the other young men of the district were doing. When he, the chief character, remembered this remark at the time mentioned in the previous sentence, he wondered why he had not wondered at the time of his hearing the remark why his uncle had spoken as though a patch of scrub grew conveniently close to the homes of each young couple who wanted to dash into it whereas according to his, the chief character’s, image of the countryside, any such couple might have had to travel for many miles in search of the scrub they needed unless they had used for their purposes what he had always supposed were used for such purposes, namely the places where the grass of the countryside grew longest.

  From the age of twelve, his mother had lived in the forest. Her father, who had been until then a share-farmer or a farm labourer, had obtained in the year 1930 a block, as it was called, of several hundred acres from the Government of Victoria, together with a grant of money to buy stock and tools and a simple house as soon as he had cleared the first of his land, which had at first been covered by scrub and timber. He was expected to pay for the land and to pay back in the future the grant of money, but no repayments were due for the first ten years. He, the chief character, learned none of these details from his mother. All that she had told him was that she had lived for some years from the age of twelve on a bush block at a place that she named, which place he had learned from a map was deep inside the forest mentioned earlier. He did not learn the details of the obtaining of the block until he read a few months after the death of his mother a book that he had bought fifteen years earlier but had only looked into during those fifteen years, which book will be mentioned again before the end of this story.

  He had never known how long his mother had lived in the forest. He had never learned where or when his parents had first met. This event could have taken place in the forest, since his father had sometimes worked there as a young man, as will be mentioned later in this story. Or, they could have met in the large town surrounded by grassy countryside, where both his father and his mother stayed from time to time as young persons with uncles and aunts. Or, his mother and his father might not have met until two or three years before he was born, in which event they would have met in a certain inner western suburb of Melbourne where each of them worked in one or more factories during the late 1930s.

  One or another reader may have been surprised not to read any reference in the previous sentence to the marriage of the parents of the chief character of this story. The wife of the chief character and one or another of his friends had sometimes been surprised when he told them that he had never been told by either of his parents when or where they had met or any details of their courtship or when or where they had been married. He had never doubted for a moment that his parents, who had been faithful Catholics for as long as he had known them, had been married in a Catholic church. And he had understood for most of his life that he could have obtained from the appropriate office of the Government of Victoria a copy of his parents’ certificate of marriage. But he had decided as a young man that he was not going to pay a group of strangers to impart to him information that his parents should have been able to impart to him free of charge. He had decided further that he was not going to ask either of his parents to impart to him information that most parents, so he believed, would have been pleased to impart to a child without having first to be asked. And so, he was able to say after he had seen to the burial of both his parents before he had reached his fiftieth year, that he had still not learned how those two had become his parents and that he expected to know no more of the matter before one or both of his own children or his widow, as she would then be, saw to his own burial.

  He had sometimes speculated that his parents might have been ashamed of the poverty of their wedding, but his mother had not been reluctant to talk about her poverty as a young woman: about how she had bought second-hand shoes and dresses during the first years after she had arrived in the inner western suburb from the south-west. His father had told him, the chief character, of how he, the father, had worked for two years without pay on his father’s farm when the price of butter fell to sixpence per pound during the Depression and of how the trousers of his only suit of clothes had been so short around his ankles and the sleeves of his jacket so short around his wrists at that time that he had kept away from the dances in his district and had slunk into the back seat of the church each Sunday. Both parents had told him, the chief character, that they had been renting a room with a double bed in a boarding house when he had been born and for six months afterwards. After his parents had died, he thought of their silence about their courtship and marriage as something he would never be able to explain to him
self any more than he could explain why he could never remember having approached the forest from the grassy countryside or the grassy countryside from the forest or having passed from one into the other.

  His mother had told him a few things about her life in the Bush, as she had called it. She had been taken away from school at the age of thirteen, even though she was required by law to attend until she had turned fourteen. The school had been so remote and the teacher so careless of his duties that several children had left early to work on their parents’ blocks. His mother had worked for six days each week and for some years doing what was regarded by the settlers on the blocks as the lighter clearing tasks; her job was to search the cleared paddocks for seedlings of trees or for young shrubs and the outer margins of those paddocks for roots of bracken that had crept through from the forest on the other side and then to grub out the intruding plants with a pick and to make heaps of them in certain places and later, when the heaps had dried, to set fire to them. His mother’s only recreation as a girl and a young woman, so it seemed to him from the little that she told him, was to attend a dance that was held on many a Saturday evening in the school that she had formerly attended. On the evening of a dance, she and her brothers and sisters would walk together to the school, which was three miles from their home. They would take turns to carry a lantern and a sack containing each person’s shoes and socks and some rags. They walked barefoot along the roads, some of which were mere ruts filled sometimes with dust and at other times with water. Outside the school, they would wipe their feet with the rags and would then put on their socks and shoes for the dance. What troubled the young persons most on their way to and from the dance were leeches and prickly Moses. Sometimes the lantern would be blown out by the wind, or the person holding the lantern would hold it so that it failed to shine on the road. At such times his mother had more than once cut her feet on the sharp vine that they called prickly Moses or had stepped into a rut filled with water and had had a leech fasten itself to her skin without her knowing it.