Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  The married woman in early middle age who was the mother of at least four children but who had once been a young woman whose face had been the face of one of the wives-in-his-mind lived in a small town in the south-west of Victoria. He had never seen the small town. During the first fifteen years and more of his life, when he and his family used to travel each year to the south-west of Victoria for a week of holidays, the small town just mentioned did not exist. At that time, the place where the small town later stood was part of what he had thought of during his childhood as the forest—the only forest that he had known and the only forest that he had ever lived in.

  At a certain moment on the day when he had been with his father in the place on the bush block where his father was felling trees, his father had looked all around him and had said that they were surrounded by miles of virgin forest. He, the chief character, had not known what his father had been thinking at that moment, and his father had soon afterwards begun to fell the next tree that he wanted to fell, but he, the chief character, had sometimes remembered during the following forty years and more of his life that he had only twice been in a place surrounded by virgin forest.

  At different times during the years from the early 1960s onwards, he had read in newspapers or magazines or he had learned by other means that almost all of the Heytesbury Forest had been cleared and that grassy countryside and small towns had taken the place of what he had called as a child the forest or the bush. He had taken promotions in the State Public Service to branches unconnected with forests and Crown lands, and so he had nothing officially to do with the work of the Rural Finance and Settlement Commission. When he learned during the years mentioned above some further detail of the changing of the forest into grassy countryside, he had tried to remember the few details that he could remember of the forest, as he called it, and he had felt, while he had tried to remember those details, just as he had felt many times during his life whenever he had tried to see in his mind some detail of a landscape in Helvetia.

  On a certain day in the early 1990s, several years after the latest event reported in this section or in any other section of this story, he attended the funeral of a cousin: the man who had been the boy-cousin mentioned in the first section of this story. During the 1980s and the 1990s, he, the chief character, had almost given up visiting his relatives on both his mother’s and his father’s side and had failed to attend the funeral of many an aunt or uncle or cousin. If anyone had asked him the reason for his seeming thus to have turned away from his relatives, he would have answered that he had become unable to travel. He could have justified this answer by pointing out that he had never travelled further than to Sydney and Adelaide, each of which cities he had visited only twice and many years ago; that he had never been in an aeroplane or a sea-going vessel; that he had not owned a motor car for many years; and that he had not left the suburbs of Melbourne since he had attended his mother’s funeral in the far south-west of Victoria and that he did not expect to leave them again. He kept to the suburbs of Melbourne, however, because he chose to do so. He was hoping to take early retirement from the State Public Service and afterwards to spend his days in writing the book that would confirm his reputation as the leading man of letters in Helvetia. He had come to recognise that the only subject he was able to write about was his own mind—and only in such a way that the only place where his writing might be found suitable for publication was Helvetia. In that country of paradoxes and enigmas and lacunae was his true readership. He had been preparing for many years to write the definitive work on his mind. At the time of the funeral mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph, what he called his notes filled several hanging files in a filing cabinet. The notes did not consist of consecutive paragraphs or pages of prose. He had done much writing, but it was all in the form of labels or detailed annotations for a series of more than a hundred maps. Each of these maps was itself an enlargement of one or another detail on an earlier map in the series, and the first map, from which all the other maps and all the text arose, was a simple representation looking more like a coat of arms than a map of any place on earth. The first map was an area of land roughly square in shape and divided per bend sinister into two triangles. The upper triangle was coloured a light green and the lower triangle was coloured a dark blue. Later maps were almost covered with paragraph after paragraph of his handwriting, but on the first map only four words were written. Beside the area of light green were the words GRASSY COUNTRYSIDE, and beside the area of dark blue were the words VIRGIN FOREST. He expected the literary critics of Helvetia to place many interpretations on his book and to find many themes running through it, but no reader could fail to understand, so he thought, that the chief character of the book often thought of his father’s family as being, among other things, bachelors and spinsters in their minds if not in their lives whereas he often thought of his mother’s family as being, among other things, early marriers and prolific breeders. He attended the funeral mentioned earlier in this paragraph because the church and the cemetery were both in an outer eastern suburb of Melbourne and because he had visited his cousin’s home often as a child.

  After the funeral, he spent an hour in his cousin’s house in the outer eastern suburb mentioned above, which was in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges. The house was filled with mourners, but he recognised few of them. Some of the middle-aged persons around him, he knew, would have been among the many first cousins on his mother’s side that he had not seen for forty and more years. He was able to identify the men and women who had been the boys and girls when he had visited the farm in the forest mentioned earlier in this section of this story. The cousins recognised him, and each of them spoke a few polite words to him, but only one of them was willing to talk at length with him. He, the chief character, learned from this cousin, who had been a boy of about his own age on the day in the 1940s when he had visited the farm in the forest, that he, the cousin, could remember that his father had shot many rosellas and other birds that had come out of the forest and had eaten the fruit on his trees although he, the cousin, could not remember any doll’s house that his sisters had played with on the veranda of their house. In answer to a question from the chief character, the cousin said he and all but one of his brothers and sisters had married and had become the parents of at least four children each, although several of those who had married had since become separated or divorced. The exception was one of his sisters, a woman of about the same age as the chief character, who had never married or had a child but had lived with her parents while they were alive and now lived alone in the house where they had lived during their last years, which house was in a small town not previously mentioned in this story, which town was in the south-west of Victoria and far inland from the large town mentioned often previously.

  In the Plenty Ranges

  In a certain year in the late 1980s, the bachelor-uncle of the chief character died in a hospital in the large town where he had lived for the last forty years and more of his life. The chief character of this story did not attend the funeral of his uncle, which began in the Catholic church with the stained glass window containing the areas of blue and green mentioned earlier, but he had travelled by train to and from the large town two weeks before his uncle had died and had visited his uncle for an hour and more in the hospital where he was dying. During his visit, his uncle said that he, the chief character, had seemed like a son to him years earlier, when they had sat together in the bungalow and had talked about racing.

  During the year after his bachelor-uncle had died, he, the chief character, received a legacy of several thousand dollars from his uncle’s estate. He, the chief character, paid half of this money into his and his wife’s joint account at the branch of a certain bank in their nearest shopping centre, which branch was the place where he and she had all of their bank accounts, after having told his wife that the value of his uncle’s legacy was half of the sum mentioned above. The other half of the legacy he hid as cash be
tween the pages of one of the books on his shelves before he did with it what he is reported in the next paragraph as having done.

  For many years, he and his fellow-workers in the State Public Service had been working according to a system whereby a person might work, for example, long hours on four days and then be free to work for only half of the fifth day. This was what he himself did every week. On his free half-day he was often alone in his house while his wife was at work and his children were at school. At such times he would sit in the room that he used as his office and would pull down the blinds and would put on a pair of earmuffs and would stare at the spine of some book the title of which he could not make out in the dim light and would try to think of himself as sitting in the library of his country estate in Helvetia. Soon after the events reported in the previous paragraph, he began to take his free half-day on each Friday afternoon. On the first such afternoon, he took the bank-notes mentioned earlier out of his book, put the notes in his pocket, and walked eastwards for two kilometres to the shopping centre in the suburb adjoining his own suburb. There, he went into the branch of the same bank that he had used for their own banking. He stood at the counter under the sign NEW ACCOUNTS. On the other side of the counter, a young woman wearing the grey-blue uniform of the bank got to her feet from behind her desk and walked towards him. What he thought when he saw the young woman’s face will be reported in the next paragraph. What happened between him and the young woman at the counter just mentioned was that he opened a new savings account, using his correct name and address and paying into the account all but a few hundred dollars of the cash from his uncle’s legacy, which he took out from his pocket in front of the young woman and counted in front of her. When the young woman asked him whether or not he had any other account with that bank, he told her the details of an account in his name alone at the branch in the suburb where he lived, but he did not tell her that he had two joint accounts with his wife at that branch.

  He had kept up his interest in horse-racing, although he had stopped betting during his son’s and his daughter’s school days, when the family had often been short of money. During those years, he had devised a way of betting that he believed would return him a regular profit if ever he could acquire the thousand dollars and more that he needed for a betting bank. On the Friday afternoon when he walked to his neighbouring suburb, he intended only to use his uncle’s money to test the way of betting just mentioned without his wife’s protesting that the money could be put to a better use. Any profit that he made he intended to put back into his betting bank so that he could increase his stakes. If he continued to make a profit and to increase his stakes in this way, he would reveal to his wife what he had been doing and would retire early from the public service, using his income from racing to supplement his superannuation pension. When he saw the young woman who came to attend to him in the bank, he fell in love with her face at once and hoped while she was setting up his new account that she had taken him for a bachelor who had recently moved to that suburb, perhaps to live with his ageing parents, and whose chief interest was horse-racing. He watched her from under his eyebrows while she leaned forward to write and he decided that if she was working as a teller on any Friday afternoon when he came into the bank he would withdraw a large amount so that she would think of him as a fearless punter. He foresaw himself as keeping always in his pocket when he left for the bank on each Friday afternoon a large sum from his household account—not that he would use his or his wife’s salary for betting but so that he could deposit a large sum in his private account if he happened to find himself at the teller’s window where the young woman in front of him was working, and so that she would think of him as having won that money from betting. The things that he foresaw at the time just mentioned and the things that he decided at the same time to do in the future—these things he did from time to time during the next two years until he had failed to see the young woman mentioned above on so many consecutive Fridays that he had to conclude that she could not be merely on leave but must have left that branch. (He did not think of her as having transferred to another branch. He had not failed to notice that she had been promoted during the two years while he had watched her; he supposed that she had gone into the head office of the bank in Melbourne.) His way of betting proved neither profitable nor unprofitable; he would win for several weeks and would then lose what he had won before the cycle began again. But on the day in every month or more when he happened to meet at the teller’s station the young woman whose face he was in love with, he made either a large withdrawal or a large deposit. He had always assumed that a young female bank employee of ambition would never have set foot on any racecourse, and so he assumed that the racecourses where she sometimes saw him in her mind were imaginary. He felt entitled, therefore, whenever he was in her presence, to consider himself a professional punter of Helvetia.

  He had never intended that the young woman mentioned in the previous two paragraphs should be in the least aware of any thought that he entertained in connection with her. When he first saw her and fell in love with her face, he felt as though he was no older than she and perhaps even a few years younger, but when he had recollected himself a few moments later, he was well aware that he was a man of almost fifty years while she was in her early twenties and not much older than his own daughter. During all the times when he was within sight of her, he tried never to have her catch him looking at her, but she sometimes seemed to know what he was about. He was afraid at first that her knowing he admired her would make her angry or embarrassed, but she seemed always calm when he was near her and watching her surreptitiously. Sometimes, when she was the teller who happened to serve him, she seemed to go out of her way to give him some extra piece of information about the symbols in the entry in his passbook or to explain to him some recent change in the routine of the bank. While she told him such things, she would look him in the eye and he would look at her as though this was one more dull moment in the business of his day, but in his mind he would be in Helvetia and listening to his wife-to-be while she declared herself to him.

  Even when he was approaching the main street of the neighbouring suburb on the Friday afternoon mentioned previously, he had felt alert. He had travelled by motor car through the neighbouring suburb a few times previously, but he had never approached the suburb on foot. Both his suburb and the suburb he was approaching were filled with streets of houses and would have looked to many people indistinguishable. But as he walked he was aware that the land was rising. And when he reached the main street mentioned above, he saw that the street followed a slight ridge running from north to south. He stopped and looked around. He was still very much in a northern suburb of Melbourne, but when he faced north he seemed to be on the dividing line between two sorts of country. All around him to his right were valleys and hills, and even though suburbs whose names he knew covered both hills and valleys, the trees in the streets and the gardens of those suburbs and on the still unoccupied land were so thick that the whole landscape seemed more forest than suburbs. Across the horizon ahead of him was a steep blue line of mountains and hills that he had seen on nearly every day since he had come to live in the northern suburbs more than twenty years before—the Kinglake Ranges. Away to his right he saw a mountain that he had hardly ever seen from the suburbs of Melbourne. He had not known it was so clear to view from so near to his own home. Mount Dandenong was also clearly visible almost behind him to his right, but the mountain to his right was longer and higher and more impressive than Mount Dandenong, even though it was further away and its colour more grey-blue than the rich, dark blue of Mount Dandenong. The mountain to his right was Donna Buang. When he had looked all around him from the main street in his neighbouring suburb, he said in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story.

  The four words just mentioned are from a note by the author at the front of the book An Afternoon of Time, by D. E. Charlwood, first published in 1966 by Angus and Robertson. He, t
he chief character of this story, had read the book soon after it was first published but had forgotten soon afterwards all of the experience of reading it except that he remembered for long afterwards that certain passages in the book had described the forests of the Otway Ranges and the countryside of the far west of Victoria. The forests of the Otway Ranges are the continuation of the east of the Heytesbury Forest, and the countryside of the far west of Victoria is the continuation to the west of the countryside in the south-west of Victoria. The only other words that the chief character of this story remembered afterwards from the book mentioned above are the four words quoted at the head of this section of this story. Soon after he had first read the words, the chief character looked at a number of maps of Victoria but could not see in any of those maps the words just mentioned. For many years afterwards, the chief character would look into any map of Victoria that he had not previously seen and would try to find the words just mentioned but would never find them. And yet, he remembered those words on the afternoon in the late 1980s when he stood for the first time in the main street of his neighbouring suburb and looked all around him.

  In the note at the front of the book mentioned in the previous paragraph, the author of that book explains that he began to think of writing that book on a day in the mid-1950s when the temperature was 108 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale and when he was playing cricket in the Plenty Ranges. The heat of the day together with other circumstances reminded the author, so he explained, of other days in the 1930s when he had lived in the far west of Victoria. When the chief character of this story said in his mind the words at the head of this section of this story, he supposed, among other things, that the cricket ground where the author of the book mentioned above had been reminded of his earlier life must have seemed in the 1950s to be a clearing in a vast forest.