Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  While I stared I began to weep. I wept in a way that I have never wept for any person I have met during my life. I wept for only a few moments but violently, in the way that I weep sometimes for a man or a woman in a book that I have just read to its end.

  I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.