Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  I phoned my friends Andy and Clare Robertson. Yes, they would be happy to show me and my Melbourne visitors around Pleasant Banks. The visitors and I drove a few kilometres along the road that leads to South Australia. I had driven often past the huge property of Pleasant Banks but had never seen the homestead, which is far back from the road. I had never seen the sprawling stone building, with its long verandas overhung by wisteria and grapevines, but it was exactly as I had seen it in mind when I had looked north-west from the coast sixty years before, imagining the way of life of the border dwellers.

  After morning tea, Andy and Clare offered to show us around the many-roomed house. The visitors from Melbourne followed Clare around, but I got no further than the first room along the hallway. It was called the billiard room, but I took no notice of the green-topped table or the rack of cues. I went from wall to wall, peering at the dozens of framed photographs. Six generations of the Robertson family have farmed in this district, first on the old Mortat pastoral run and later at Pleasant Banks. They were not only farmers but breeders and owners of racehorses. On the walls of the billiard room were pictures taken at racecourses all over southwestern Victoria and south-eastern South Australia and showing winner after winner owned by Andy’s father, Peter, and other family members. The family colours went back for several generations—Gold, purple sleeves and cap. In later years, the Robertsons’ trainer had been K. G. Davis from Naracoorte in South Australia. And yes, in answer to my hesitant question, Andy had assured me that his father had liked a bet, preferably at each-way odds.

  I had long ago admired the connections of Sir Flash for their daring raid on Warrnambool. The Robertsons of Pleasant Bank had raided as far away as Melbourne. I saw a black-and-white photograph of a hurdle racer owned by Andy’s grandfather. The photographer had caught the horse in midair, soaring over an old-style batten hurdle. It was the last hurdle of the race, and the Robertson horse had a winning lead at Flemington ten years before my birth and in the great days of the Borderers.

  23. Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo

  SURELY A DOZEN years at least have passed since I last saw Bendigo. Maybe I’ll never see it again. If I do, though, I’ll be sure to spend some of my time there as I’ve spent some of my time whenever I’ve visited the city since I left it nearly seventy years ago—I’ll call at the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Golden Square; I’ll enter the building from near the main entrance in Wattle Street; and I’ll sit for a few minutes in one of the back pews, not meditating and certainly not praying but just watching whatever images occur to me. And, if no images occur to me at once, or if an overly long interval occurs between the appearance of one or another image and its successor, then I’ll simply look around me at the amazing light inside my favourite building.

  I’ve sometimes wondered whether my childhood experiences in Bendigo are largely responsible for my never having wanted to travel. How else to explain why I’ve never been on aeroplane—why I’ve never been further from Melbourne than Murwillumbah, in New South Wales, to the north; Kettering, in Tasmania, to the south; and Streaky Bay, in South Australia, to the west? My wife and I had serious differences in many matters, but she and I were united in our dislike of travel or tourism. Sometimes, after our three sons had left home, and when the month was January and half the people of Melbourne seemed to have found somewhere better to be, Catherine would ask me whether we should go away for a few days. Even if we failed to enjoy our few days away, she would explain, we could at least tell our friends and neighbours that we had been away, instead of having to explain, as we usually had to, why we never took holidays. My answer was always the same: the only place that I had any desire to visit, apart from the racecourse that was the venue for the next Saturday meeting in Melbourne—the only place that tempted me to leave my desk was Bendigo.

  Occasionally, we did take a daytrip to Bendigo. Catherine had a friend there, a woman who had been widowed in early middle age. Catherine’s friend sometimes offered to show us around the city, but I would always put her off. All I wanted to do in Bendigo was to sit for twenty minutes in Sacred Heart Cathedral. Once, I consented to stroll with Catherine and her friend under the elms in Rosalind Park, the same trees that I had walked beneath on memorable days of my childhood. Yes, the trees were the same, but the motor traffic in Pall Mall and View Street and Williamson Street kept me from feeling any connection with the mostly quiet city where I had lived from 1944 until 1948.

  Even the ordinary sunlight on a fine day in Bendigo could set me daydreaming, but the light inside Sacred Heart Cathedral was something else again. It was a refinement or a distillation of the light outside. On the day when I first arrived in Bendigo in January 1944, I made a fanciful connection between the strange new light all around me and the gold that had been responsible for the founding of the city and its continuing prosperity. I supposed that the special quality in the light above Bendigo was somehow the result of the sunlight’s having been reflected from the countless specks of yellow in the quartz pebbles strewn on the footpaths of all the back streets of the city.

  In earlier years, I could not have found words to account for the influence on me of the light in the cathedral; I was only able to feel a sort of pleasant suspense, as though about to experience something that was more than daydream but not so unalterable as actuality. In more recent years, my way of responding to the light has been to hear in mind, or to see in mind, as though on the page where I was startled to read them for the first time when I was nearly forty, the words attributed to Paul Éluard: There is another world, but it is in this one. And then, because no abstraction, no matter how seemingly profound, can satisfy me for long, my mind is occupied by imagery. I sometimes wonder what sort of imagery was in Paul Éluard’s mind whenever he pondered on his profound statement. It was probably very different from the stuff that fills my mind on such occasion. I’ve never read that Paul Éluard was the least bit interested in horse racing.

  One Sunday morning in September 1948, I was kneeling at intervals and at other times standing or sitting while solemn high mass was being celebrated in Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo. My father was beside me. My mother and my two younger brothers were at home. Perhaps they were attending one of the masses at St Kilian’s, which was our usual church. I don’t remember. Two things should have puzzled me that morning, but I seem not to have given them much thought. First, I should have wondered why my father and I had walked two kilometres from our house in Neale Street to the cathedral when St Kilian’s was only half that distance away. The other matter was that my father had often declared that he disliked the tedious ceremony of a high mass. My father was a faithful Catholic but hardly a devout one. The nearest he ever came to advancing a theological argument was his occasionally arguing that God was surely more pleased to be honoured by the simpler ceremony of the so-called low mass than by the music and incense and the bowings and scrapings of a high mass. He also lacked the docility and the obsequiousness that so many Catholics of that era accorded the clergy. He approved of priests who visited the sick and the poor but had little admiration for those who hobnobbed with the doctors and lawyers of their parishes.

  And yet, there we were, he and I, on that fine spring morning, sitting through a high mass that was interrupted often by the organ and the choir and by the to-ings and fro-ings of the several sumptuously robed co-celebrants, one of whom might have been the bishop himself—probably not frail old McCarthy but his truculent coadjutor Stewart. (I should never speak harshly of Stewart. He was derided in later years as an archconservative but it was he who oversaw the work that made the cathedral complete. When I lived in Bendigo, and for many years afterwards, the building still awaited its spire.) I was sometimes devout as a child but more often lax, although never tempted to rebel or to disbelieve. During my devout periods, I would try to pray during mass; during my lax periods, I would daydream. I was daydreaming for much of the morning while my father and I were in the cathedral.

  My daydream took th
e form of a narrative. I had read few books at the time. The sort of narrative most familiar to me was the radio drama. On many a night, after having asked my mother’s or my father’s permission, I was allowed to listen to a fifteen-minute or thirty-minute program on 3BO in which the voice of a narrator and two or three other voices enacted a dramatisation of what had probably started as a chapter in a book of popular history or an item in an encyclopaedia. I can recall hearing a dramatised account of the mystery of the Mary Celeste and another of the discovery of anaesthetics. Medical history seems to have been a fertile source of such dramas. I recalled just now my hearing an account of William Harvey’s cutting up of the family parrot in his search for proof that blood circulated rather than lay around as one of the four humours. Anyway, while the bishop sat in his canopied chair beside the altar, or while the other two priests were wielding the thurible or the aspergillum, I was composing a radio drama having as its subject my father, Reginald Thomas Murnane, of whom I was rather fond and whose many flaws and faults had not yet become apparent to me.

  Music was an important part of every radio drama, and I may even have been moved to set about composing my own drama after having heard some especially plangent passage from the huge cathedral organ. My theme was my father’s progress from an insignificant babe-in-arms to a person of considerable importance, which was what I took him for at the time. I knew hardly anything of my father’s life story. I knew he had been born at Allansford, which is now almost a suburb of Warrnambool but was then a mere township on the Hopkins River and the last station on the railway line from Melbourne to Warrnambool. I knew he was the third of nine children and the oldest boy among them. His younger brothers had never left the district around Warrnambool, but my father had left home and had travelled all over Australia before marrying in his mid-thirties. When I, his oldest child, was born, he had been a warder at Pentridge Prison. He had moved to Bendigo to be the Education Department’s attendance officer for the city and for much of northern Victoria. It was a modestly paid post, but it required him to visit many large schools, to inspect the attendance rolls, to confer with head teachers, and to interview the parents of truants. Many of these he had to summons to court, and on the day of their court appearance he had to act as prosecutor. He was a talkative, affable man who made friends easily. Another sort of man might have crept into and out of the head teacher’s office in the many schools that he visited but my father enjoyed taking morning tea with the whole staff in most of the many schools in his jurisdiction. There was also his career, so to call it, as a racegoer and punter. I knew hardly anything about his losses, but I recalled the many evenings when he had come home with crayfish and ice-cream and the family had feasted after one of his big wins. While I passed the time in the cathedral, I merely noted rather than organised the wealth of subject matter available for my radio drama and tried to imagine the powerful impression it would make on its many listeners. As I’ve said, I was daydreaming.

  My dramatised story would have followed an upward trajectory, so to speak. I did not learn for many years afterwards that the man beside me in the cathedral that morning was at one of the lowest points in his life. My parents had been hinting for some time that we might soon leave Bendigo for the Western District. My brothers and I were warned to say nothing of this at school. We were actually excited by the prospect of a move to the region where we spent our holidays. Although, for much of my later life, I’ve thought of Bendigo as a lost golden paradise, I was not at all dismayed, in 1948, at the prospect of leaving it forever. And after we left, only a few weeks after the morning of the solemn high mass in the cathedral, our moving into a dilapidated house from which my brothers and I had to walk more than three kilometres to school seemed more an adventure than any sort of family tragedy.

  I learned the simple truth many years later from my mother. I should have worked it out long before, but where human behaviour is concerned I’m the least perceptive of persons. I should have understood long before that my father’s moving from Bendigo to the Western District at the age of forty-five could never have seemed anything but an admission of utter failure, either to himself or to his siblings and his parents and to those who had known him as a young man. He had left his father’s dairy farm more than twenty-five years ago. He was not going to follow the gruelling life of a dairy farmer, even if it should lead, as it led for his brothers, to his one day acquiring his own farm. Who knows what exactly he looked forward to when he left home—travel? adventure? a wife and children? new friends? wealth? He certainly gained the first four but not, alas, the fifth. Whatever pretences he might have adopted, it would have been absolutely clear to his family and to anyone in the district who gave any thought to the matter that my father’s arrival in Mepunga East from Bendigo was no triumphal homecoming but its stark opposite. The house we moved into was on the way to becoming derelict, the sort of house that passing children throw stones at or nickname the Ghost House. My father could not afford a car. While even the poorest farmer in the district chugged around in some sort of 1930s jalopy, my father’s sole means of travel was an old pushbike that he had found in the junk room of his parents’ farmhouse. He rode the bike five kilometres every morning before daylight to the farm of a widow whom, as it happened, he had known since childhood and who would have been well able to appreciate his comedown. He milked her cows morning and evening and did labouring jobs between times. He was a share farmer, on the lowest rung of the social ladder as it was envisaged by all in the district.

  And why had he come to this? Because he had bet beyond his means—not once or twice but again and again while he chased his losses, and not in cash, which might have been bad enough, but on credit and with a pair of bookmakers who could almost have been called friends of his: the Bourke brothers, my father’s fellow parishioners at St Kilian’s, on the corner of Chapel Street and McCrae Street in Bendigo.

  Dear old St Kilian’s! If, during a word-association exercise, someone should fire at me the word church, I would fire back the words St Kilian’s. But that’s part of another story. In Tamarisk Row, the boy Clement sometimes begged his father for the price of a malted milk so that he, the boy, could enjoy his frothy drink in the shop across the road from the church and could escape the boredom of having to stand in the shade of the date palms in the churchyard while his father and a half-dozen racing men talked endlessly about races already run and races still to be run. Among the half dozen were fictional versions of the Bourke brothers. I have a vague recollection of two ginger-haired, easygoing men. How was I to know, on the morning when my father led me by a roundabout route well clear of St Kilian’s to the cathedral in Golden Square, that his sole reason for doing so was that he could no longer face the Bourke brothers? How could I have known, while I idled away my time in the cathedral, that the hero of my radio drama had led me to that place of golden light and soulful music only in order to hide from his bookmakers, the men that he was soon to welsh on?

  24. Mary Christian Murday of the Same Address

  I’VE MENTIONED ALREADY in this book that I’ve hardly ever enjoyed watching a film. The notion that people reveal their true selves by talking, shouting, rolling their eyes, or otherwise gesturing seems absurd to me, who have tried all my life to use speech and body language in order to conceal rather than reveal. I have long believed that a person best explains himself or herself when writing to a reader, either real or imaginary. Nevertheless, and although I’ve probably watched fewer films and stage plays than anyone of my age and cultural background, I can still recall a few images that I’ve watched and I’ll admit that those images have been of value to me.

  It may have been as long ago as the 1970s when my wife, who did not share my poor opinion of film and the theatre, persuaded me to watch a film version of what had been originally a stage play. The title was Separate Tables, and the playwright was, I think, Terence Rattigan. I recall that the plot was intricate—far too intricate for me. The characters were mostly residents of s
ome sort of boarding house or guesthouse. Some, I seem to recall, were singles while others were couples. While the action went forward, all manner of tensions arose among the various characters. Only one resident of the place seemed unaffected by these tensions. This character was a mannish-looking woman who sat alone every morning while the others arranged themselves in different groups according to the subtle dynamics of the play. Whenever the camera picked her up, she was sitting alone and taking no notice of her fellow guests or even of the food that she was eating, and all the while she was putting pencil marks on a newspaper, which the viewer had previously learned was the paper that published form guides every day for every race meeting in Great Britain.

  I know nothing of the craft of writing scripts for film or live theatre, but I soon understood that the woman hunched over her form guide was a foil to the main characters. While they were falling in or out of love or forming or breaking down alliances, she was utterly removed from their concerns. She was a marginal character, but she came into her own in a brief scene towards the end. By then, the tensions between the leading characters would have been palpable for a discerning viewer such as my wife. I would have lost the plot long before—literally. The guests were at breakfast, and some sort of confrontation, resolution, denouement, whatever seemed about to take place. But the tension was briefly relieved, as it is sometimes relieved in a play by Shakespeare when a pair of yokels score points off one another before the hero and his antagonist confront each other in the final scene. Just before the climax in the breakfast room, the student of form guides got up to leave—for the nearest race meeting, presumably. As she was leaving, one of the main characters detained her for a moment, perhaps offended by her detachment from the others and their concerns. He said something to her along the lines of ‘Could you not say something kind to Cynthia in her time of turmoil?’ or ‘Surely you’ve sensed this morning the burden that Ralph has to bear?’ My plain-faced heroine, for that’s what she became for me as soon as she had delivered her reply, waved her form guides in the face of her questioner and said words to the effect of, ‘Give me horses rather than people any day. Horses are so much more predictable!’