In the last paragraph of that book I read the words:
Yet it is his exaltation that has brought us the perfume of the hawthorn trees that died long years ago; that has made it possible for men and women who have never seen, nor will ever see, the land of France, to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring lilacs.
Each year I take down fewer books from the shelves around me. I leave many shelves of books untouched while I look at the same few books. Of these few books the book that I look at most often is an atlas, and of all the pages in that atlas I look most often at the pages of the United States of America, which I call for convenience America.
Day after day I study the map of America. My right hand holds a reading-glass half-way between my eyes and the page while the index finger of my left hand travels across the page. My index finger travels slowly.
America is a huge country with many grasslands. Each state of America has so many counties, and each county has so many townships and streams, and the names of these counties and townships and streams are also the names of so many other places that I expect to spend the rest of my life tracing with my finger in the space between the town of Pysht, in Clallam County, in Washington State, and the town of Beddington, in Washington County, in the upper north-east of Maine, a summary of the lives I might have led. But if some man who is not myself stood a little to one side of me and looked from the sides of his eyes at the streams and roads between Pysht and Beddington, he might see his native district.
Four times during his life my father tried to escape into grasslands.
In the second-last year of the Second World War, when he was forty years old and living with his wife and three small sons near the east bank of Darebin Creek, he decided he was so deeply in debt that he would have to run away. Most of his debts were owed to unlicensed bookmakers who would do no more than write off my father’s account when they learned he had run away.
My father travelled with his family by train across the grasslands north-west of the city of Melbourne, then through a gap in the Great Divide just west of Mount Macedon, then through hills and grasslands to the inland city of Bendigo.
My father and his wife and sons lived for four years in three different rented cottages between Bendigo Creek and Huntly Race. My father had probably intended to give up betting when he moved to this new district, but he became friendly with trainers of horses and with professional punters and bookmakers both licensed and unlicensed. At the age of forty-four, when his eldest son was nine years old, my father was once again so deeply in debt that he decided to flee.
This time my father fled south-west towards the coast. He and his wife sat in the front seat of a furniture van beside the driver while the three sons sat in the back of the van on the faded cushions from the couch and the two chairs that the family called their lounge suite.
The man drove his crowded van carefully through the hills to the inland city of Ballarat and then out into the grasslands known as the Western District. The family travelled for most of the afternoon through these grasslands. At dusk they stopped a few kilometres short of the ocean at the house my father had arranged beforehand to rent from a farmer for ten shillings a week. This was in the district between Buckley’s Creek and Curdies River and only a few kilometres from where my father had been born.
The house was in a corner of one of the farmer’s paddocks. No one had lived in the house for nearly a year. It had no bathroom or laundry and no sink or stove in the kitchen. When the van-driver saw the inside of the house he said without being asked that he would drive the family free of charge back to Bendigo that same night if they wanted to go back. The driver did not know that my father could not go back.
In 1951 my father was as old as I am today. He was living with his wife and their three sons in the district where the eldest son had been born. My father was living for the first time in a house that he could say was his own, but he was once again deeply in debt.
By the first week of November 1951 my father had arranged to become the manager of a farming property in a district of grasslands between the Ovens River and Reedy Creek, east of the inland city of Wangaratta. My father had not seen the property, and he had only met the owner for an hour while the man was visiting the city of Melbourne. My father was so anxious to get away that he left with his family and their furniture before the house had been sold. The sale was placed in the hands of an estate agent who was one of my father’s racing acquaintances.
The family travelled in early November from the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri along the Hume Highway to Wangaratta. The three sons sat in the back of the van on the same cushions that they had sat on three years before. The dog Belle sat beside them, chained to a leg of the upside-down kitchen table. The boys took turns at holding on their knees a cylindrical biscuit tin full of water. In the water was a pair of goldfish, thought to be one male and one female.
In the morning while the furniture van was being loaded, the sky had been filled with clouds and the wind had been cool. But around midday the van crossed the Great Divide and the sky was suddenly clear. The Hume Highway at that time was a winding road with only two lanes for traffic. The slow-moving furniture van was followed by motor-cars around most of the winding sections of the road. The boys in the back of the van looked down through the windscreen of each motor-car and studied the faces of the people.
If the faces seemed friendly the boys waved. Sometimes the two younger boys lifted up the dog Belle and forced her to wave her paw. This made the people in the motorcars wave wildly. The two young boys wanted to devise more tricks to amuse the people. But the eldest boy, who was almost thirteen, had begun to feel somewhat ashamed that he and his family should be seen with all their belongings heaped up in a truck and the first home they had ever owned far back on the road behind them.
By mid-afternoon the sun was hot. The eldest boy recognised the dry heat of the inland that he had not felt since he had left Bendigo three years before. When the van turned aside from the empty back-road in the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek, the faces and clothes of the boys and the fabric of the cushions were covered with golden dust as fine as face-powder. In the biscuit-tin the water had a creamy scum.
Half a kilometre back from the back-road, a house stood among fruit trees and green lawns. The house looked to have at least six large rooms under its broad roof of dark-green iron. The doors and windows of the house were deep in shadow beneath a veranda that ran along the front and one side of the house. Much of this veranda was hidden behind the green leaves of creepers.
The eldest boy got to his feet in the back of the van. When he stood up, dust fell out of the folds of his clothes. He looked at the sprawling house of brown-red weatherboards under a dark-green roof and a cloudless sky of deep blue. He saw that this could well have been one of the houses he had dreamed of himself living in after he had married and gone to live in grasslands.
A woman came out from among the green creepers at the side of the house. She had grey hair, and she seemed old to the boys in the back of the van, but she would have been no older than I am today. She handed an orange to each of the boys and said a few friendly words. The boys thanked her from out of their masks of golden dust.
The woman went to the front of the van and introduced herself to my father, who had stepped down from the cabin. She was the wife of the owner of the property, and she lived in the house with the creepers on the veranda. If my father would direct the van-driver around the next corner in the driveway and then on towards the farm buildings, he would find the farm-manager’s house empty and waiting with the key in the door.
The woman went back in among the creepers. My father climbed back into the van and the driver drove on.
The house that was waiting for us was a weatherboard cottage of four small rooms. The rooms were clean, and the kitchen had a sink and a stove, but what astonished my father and mother and the van-driver an
d even the three boys was that the cottage was adjoined on two sides by sheep yards.
At the front of the cottage and at one of its sides a small lawn grew – a patch of green grass two or three paces wide. The lawn was fenced around with a strong wire and timber fence that was clearly meant to keep out wandering cattle. But on the other two sides of the cottage no fence stood and no grass grew; the brown weatherboard walls of the cottage itself served as part of the outer fence of a maze of sheep yards connected with the silver-grey shearing shed about forty paces away.
When the parents looked inside the cottage they learned that one of the walls adjoining the sheep yards was the wall of the room that would be their lounge room. The single window of this room looked out at the sheep yards and the shearing shed. My mother stepped across the bare boards of the empty room and pushed open the single pane of the window. She put her head through the window and looked across the yards. The surface of the yards was finely trampled dust and dried sheep-dung. The sill of the window was low enough for a sheep to have rested its front feet there and to have looked inside in the same way that my mother had looked out.
The driver of the van did not offer to drive the family back to the city of Melbourne; and even if he had offered, my father would not have gone back. My mother, however, announced to my father that she would not live in that house. She would consent to store the furniture in the house and to eat and sleep there until my father had arranged to get the family back to some district near Melbourne; but she would unpack only what was needed for cooking and eating meals, because she was not going to live in the cottage by the sheep yards.
The driver and my father and the three boys unloaded the van. My mother unpacked the tea chests that contained crockery and cutlery and pillows and bed-coverings. But for two weeks while the family lived in the cottage nothing else was unpacked – except that the three boys took out the glass fish tank that their mother had bought for them in their last days in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. They rested the glass tank on a nailed-down tea chest in the lounge-room under the window that looked out onto the dirt and the dried dung, and they carried jugs of water from the rainwater tank outside the house and filled the fish tank and poured in the water from the biscuit tin and the two red fish that had survived in it.
Fifteen days after the family had arrived in the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek, they loaded their belongings into another van. Most of the tea chests had not been opened since the day when a van had brought the family and their belongings inland from the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. The fish tank had been emptied again and the fish poured into the biscuit tin.
The house with the fish pond on the back lawn had been sold. The father had not even considered going back. The family was going to live in a district where none of them had been before – the district of swamps and tea-tree scrub between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek. A racing acquaintance of the father was a builder of houses in that district. He would build a cheap house for the family on a cheap block of land among the tea-tree and the stands of watsonia lilies and the prickly manuka scrub. But the building of the house might take six months. In the meanwhile the family would live separately with relatives in districts on three sides of the city of Melbourne. The eldest son would be sent to the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri.
In 1960, when he was nine years older than I am now, my father made his last attempt to escape into grasslands.
He was still living in the district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek, but only his wife and his youngest son were still living with him. He was not in debt. He had fallen deeply into debt four years before, but at that time he had chosen not to run away. Instead he had gone to work by night as well as by day to pay back his debts to bookmakers.
For four years my father had worked at two jobs. On many nights during those four years he slept for only two or three hours. At the end of the four years he had paid his debts but he was tired. He sold his house in the district between Scotchman’s Creek and Elster Creek, and he and his wife and his youngest son went to live between Sutherland’s Creek and Hovell’s Creek, on the edge of the plains known as the Western District. He told his friends that he wanted not to work so hard in future.
In the winter of that year my father bought a motor-car. He drove in his motor-car all around the district between Hopkins River and Buckley’s Creek where he had been born and had spent part of his childhood. Then he returned to his home on the edge of the plains and fell ill and died quietly, after which his body was buried on the west bank of the Hopkins River, near where that river flows into the sea.
Maps of my native district nowadays show a small dead-end street named Ryland leading west from the Hume Highway near the North Coburg tram terminus. Thirty-five years ago the land now covered by the street and its houses was one of the last few grasslands in my native district.
I arrived on that grassland in November 1951, and I lived there for two months in a large weatherboard house with a veranda at the front and along one side. I was brought to the weatherboard house in a motor-car. My parents had told me to travel there by tram from the furniture-storage depot where the van-driver had set us down on the afternoon when we returned from the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek. But the people from the weatherboard house had called for me in their motor-car after they had learned I would be carrying not only my suitcase but a biscuit-tin with two goldfish.
The people in the weatherboard house were related to my father by marriage, but until I went to live with them I had hardly known them. My father had told me they were kindly people but religious maniacs. He was a loyal Catholic himself, but he disliked any public show or ceremony.
The old weatherboard house had been built as a farm-house fifty years before. Of the farm, one paddock of grass still remained, as well as a row of tumbledown sheds and one other building of a kind I had never seen before.
About thirty paces from the back door of the house, and about half-way from the house to where the dairy had once stood, I found what my relatives called the coolroom. From the rear or from either side, the coolroom seemed an artificial hill rising abruptly from the backyard: a hill of white flowers with tufts of grass showing between them. From the front, I saw an open doorway flanked on each side by a slope of the flowery hill and looking like the entrance to a symmetrical tunnel in the papier mâché landscape around a model railway.
The doorway had once been filled by a heavy door, but when I saw it the doorway was only an opening with darkness behind it. When I walked through the doorway I was in a curving tunnel paved and walled and roofed with blocks of blue-black basalt. The tunnel was about two metres from floor to ceiling and its plan was a simple curve: about one eighth of the circumference of a circle. The tunnel was always empty; the people of the weatherboard house had no use for it. When I had walked to the end of it and turned around, I found I was just out of sight of the entrance. I stood in mild twilight, with the bright summer daylight just around the bend in front of me.
Blue-black basalt is the rock that underlies the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. I would never have dared to go down a mine or a well to see into the heart of my native district, but the coolroom behind the former farmhouse seemed a safe and inviting place. I stood for two or three minutes every day with my back against the end of the short tunnel and my hands against the basalt blocks. While I felt the stone against my palms and against the back of my head and the calves of my legs, I thought of someone looking out just then from a window of one of the trains that passed all day between Batman and Merlynston stations.
The trains passed close beside the weatherboard house. The view from the railway line was across the paddock of grass and into the backyard of the house, but the coolroom faced away from the railway line. I thought every day of a passenger looking across the paddock and seeing the small abrupt hill rising from the grass. I thought of a passenger who happened
to be interested in grasslands and who thought that the flowers growing in clumps on the small abrupt hill might have been the last few of a rare kind of flower that had once flourished in the district. That passenger would never have thought, I thought, of myself hiding all the while under the flowers and the tufts of grass and inside my dry well.
One of the women from the weatherboard house helped me to find in the long grass of the backyard an old laundry trough. I cleaned the soil out of the trough and dragged it into the shade of a tree and filled it with water and kept the two goldfish in it for as long as I stayed in the weatherboard house.
The same woman told me that the flowers growing on the sides of the coolroom were called Chinese mignonette. She told me other names of flowers that I had not known before. The name that most interested me was love-in-a-mist. I would have liked to meet the person who had looked sideways at a few green feathery strands and had seen a mist and who had looked sideways at a blue-petalled flower and had seen love.
The namer of love-in-a-mist would have understood, I thought, why I looked every day from the sides of my eyes at a small plant with bunched leaves of glossy dark-green and red. A row of these plants formed a border by a path.
The woman who had earlier named the flowers for me saw me looking one day at the row of plants by the path. The woman told me that the plants were a sort of begonia. She must have thought I was interested in the pink flowers of the begonia rather than the green and red leaves, because she took me to the bookshelves in the room she called the parlour and opened the glass doors and reached down a book by W. H. Hudson. The woman then showed me two passages from one of the essays in the book.
I have found today in my own copy of the same book what I believe were the passages I was shown in the weatherboard house.
...the expression peculiar to red flowers varies infinitely in degree, and is always greatest in those shades of the colour which come nearest to the most beautiful flesh-tints...
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