Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement sees strange creatures in coloured glass

  When the sun is low in the sky west of Bassett a peculiar light shines in the panel of greenish-gold glass in the Killeatons’ front door. Creatures neither green nor gold but more richly coloured than any grass or sun try to find their way home through a land where cities of unpredictable shapes and colours rise up on plains of fiery haze, then vanish just as quickly while some of their inhabitants flee towards promises of other plains where cities may appear whose glancing colours will sometimes recall for those few who reach them certain glimpses of the places that have gone, and others still make their way across familiar vistas not knowing that the towers and walls they are looking for no longer stand. Past all towns and plains is a region where the green of the peopled countries can barely be recognised among richer nameless colours and towards which a few creatures sometimes set out, mostly alone but sometimes in little bands that are often driven apart but always try to come together again, struggling to keep their own distinctive lines and outlines, even near the last edge of the land and sky where they used to belong, where the boy watching them suspects that for all the luminous expanses before them, where whole mountains or countries unfold within tinctures that were no more than single roofs or tree-tops in the cities far away or from behind brief coruscations that may once have been sudden gestures among the wandering creatures, those creatures far from home still try to carry into that place whose every landscape seems to lead back to countless places farther off, each as vast as the land that is supposed to contain them all, traces within them of some almost-spent glow that recalls a play of light on a few inches or miles of a plain that may never be seen again. One evening it happens again that a creature, whose radiance has persisted through many lands and whose journeys have taken it across levelled hills and buried valleys where it alone might have paused and wondered about the true history of those deceptively empty places, keeps the boy watching and hoping and urging it almost aloud through pale-green insidious mists and past tranquil hinterlands until, as it nears the land that may not really be a land where he has wanted it to go, he sees it waver and flicker and has to narrow his eyes and tilt his head but cannot see it across those last slopes or cliffs and loses sight of it, so that he will never know whether it is lost forever in some capricious wilderness that was never its true destination or whether, like a few others that he has watched on other afternoons, it has turned back after all towards lands it may still remember, and if so whether he may one day catch sight of it in a strangely altered shape arriving back among places that resemble those where he first discovered it and trying to enact again some of those first great journeys that now no longer have any purpose. While Clement watches the creatures, the sun moves away from Bassett but not before it has exposed across every plain and beneath every hill and through every city and within every creature, and even perhaps in the inaccessible region beyond all countries, streaks or tinges of a colour that none of the creatures seems to have seen although it alone might easily obliterate them all and countries they love. As the very last light leaves his front door the boy realises that if only the creatures had discovered this colour things might have gone differently with their journeys.

  Bernborough comes down from the north

  Long after the war is over, the people in Bassett and inland Victoria go on looking northwards towards America where the Yank servicemen are home again kissing their sweethearts on porches or in drugstores or night clubs and singing without missing a single word the songs Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdie, I’ve Got My Captain Working For Me Now, Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats and Little Lambs Eat Ivy, My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time, Give Me Five Minutes More, that the people of Bassett have to learn as best they can by listening to the hit parade program on Station 3BT. While they stand looking, a small cloud of dust comes south towards them. A huge field of horses is racing on an immense track whose curves sweep inland, enclosing hundreds of miles of arid country, and whose mighty straight runs down the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range parallel to but out of sight of the east coast and all its cities. Bernborough, a six-year-old stallion from a provincial city in Queensland, gallops easily at the very rear and so far back that the leaders are out of sight of his rider. Along the farthest back stretches of the course a mob of wild brumbies tries to keep up with the field. Augustine points them out to his son and reminds him how much stronger and faster they are than the stunted ponies that pass for wild horses in American films. But even brumbies are not meant for racing, and the riderless horses soon give up chasing the racehorses and go back to their waterholes. Clement shows his father two photos on the front page of Wednesday’s Sporting Globe. One picture shows more than twenty horses strung out around the turn into the straight in the Doomben Ten Thousand. A white arrow points to Bernborough, barely distinguishable among the tail-enders. The second picture shows the finish of the same race with Bernborough clearly in front, having passed twenty and more horses in the short Doomben straight. Clement puts his hand over the arrow in the picture and asks his father to guess which horse is Bernborough. He hopes to astonish Augustine with the sight of the horse’s incredible finishing run. But Augustine has already studied Bernborough’s history and announced to his racing friends that a greater horse than Phar Lap is coming down from the north. He has backed Bernborough to win the Caulfield and Melbourne Cup double and keeps his eyes on the dust cloud which is now crossing western New South Wales. Clement asks his father how the race is going. Augustine describes how the field sweeps down into northern Victoria and tells Clement that the boy will probably catch a glimpse of the horses on the turn into the straight which will take them not many miles from Bassett. He warns the boy to look for Bernborough near the rear of the field, just beginning his famous finishing run. Clement sees boys playing racing games in St Boniface’s schoolyard. As usual they all try to lead all the way in their races. Many of them have called themselves Bernborough after the horse whose name their fathers have probably mentioned to them.

  Clement watches a play about gypsies

  Clement goes to school again and sits in his desk that has a map of a desert in the grain of its varnished top. He grips the iron bar near his knees to take his mind off his thirst and the heat. He stares at the occasional patches of green in the pictures in his reader, then at the long trailing fronds of maiden-hair fern in the pots along the window ledge. Two girls who are the nun’s pets stroll out to the taps to fill the watering can with cool water for the plants. Through the open door Clement sees the girls in the shady shelter shed drinking daintily from the bubble taps and dabbing at their mouths with their crumpled white hankies. He stares for a while at the blackboard, where precisely ruled columns and paddocks enclose what the nun calls their most important work. One Friday afternoon Clement hears the nun say that she will probably put up a whole lot of new work over the week-end. All Sunday Clement looks forward eagerly to the Monday morning when he can spend his hours in school exploring a maze of coloured streets and yards, loitering with pleasure by green and blue pools and following admiringly the perfect arcs and circles of the rarer numerals and letters. On Monday he marches to his desk, lifts his head slowly and deliberately, and sees the same old pattern of work with its usual film of dust. He puts up his hand at once and asks the nun what happened to the new work, but she tells him not to worry about it. In December Clement realises that the blackboard will keep the same pattern until the very end of the year. He traces well-known pathways among dots of yellow, brown, orange and a lime-yellow that he tries to believe is true green, looking in vain for some unexpected thicket that might disclose a tunnel or a clearing as refreshing as cool water. After lunch his skin is still so hot from the running he has done in the yard that every new place he rests on along the smooth wooden seat only chafes and irritates him more. The nun tells the grade they are going to the Albert Theatre to practise for their Christmas concert. Outside, the whole school is lining up in pair
s on the gravel and stirring up a cloud of fine white dust. The long file of children moves off down Lucknow Street past a view of the creek between pepper trees whose green branches sweep the dirt, then steeply uphill between the huge elms of Cecil Park, where there is little trace on the bare ground of the grass that looks so green in the coloured postcards of Bassett the City of Gold. They pass fewer people as they near the top of a great hill. By the time they reach the first of the long flights of wooden stairs that zig-zag up the rear wall of the theatre they seem to have come a long way from the frequented streets of the city, although those children who know that part of Bassett say that on the other side of the theatre is one of the best-known streets of the city. Just before he goes in out of the sunlight Clement turns and discovers that he is looking down on Bassett from its highest hill. Before the press of children forces him inside he has a glimpse of motionless tree-tops standing against the slow onset of a far-reaching yellow-grey plain of haze, and wonders how many hours or days it might take him to read from their rows and clumps and scattered groups the shape of the hot city out of sight beneath them. In the unvarying twilight of the cavernous theatre Clement slips out of his place in the line so that he can sit next to Desmond Hoare, the boy he has chosen only that morning to be his best friend. While a troupe of girls sways to and fro on the stage high above them holding baskets of vivid flowers and singing – as I was going to Strawberry Fair, Desmond Hoare whispers to Clement that as soon as school has broken up he is going to Melbourne for the whole of the long summer holidays. In a long street in a Melbourne suburb named after a tree or a flower, in a house with lawn between the footpath and the gutter, his little sweetheart waits for him. Desmond will play every afternoon with her between the shrubs on the lawn. On the hottest days they will catch the tram to the beach. An old nun with networks of wrinkles all over her face overhears Desmond Hoare whispering and tells him fiercely to be quiet. She says – talking about girlfriends when you’re hardly out of the cradle. Clement tries to hide his face from her but Hoare does not seem embarrassed. The girls in white leave the stage and a group of girls from the seventh and eighth grades comes out to rehearse their play Little Gypsy Gay. Therese Riordan, dressed in fiery green silk, is Gay’s mother. Her skin is a faultless golden-creamy colour in the subdued light. From where he sits Clement sees the first few inches of smooth pale skin above her knees, but it worries him to think that every other boy in the hall can see it too. Therese steps to the front of the stage and speaks in a voice that carries to the obscurest corners of the theatre, so that even the dull-eyed drowsy grade-one children sit up to watch her. Clement whispers to Desmond Hoare that the big girl in green is his girlfriend and that he visits her in her big house on the hill near his place every Sunday. Hoare looks at him once briefly then turns to the boy on his other side and whispers to him to pass it on that Clem Killeaton loves the big girl with the green stuff on up on the stage. The message moves down the row to the aisle, then leaps back to the row behind. As it passes behind Clement someone kicks his legs beneath the seat. High up at the end of yet another hill, and far back in the great painted landscape behind the gypsies and the girls whose silken thighs have brought gasps from hundreds of drooping mouths, a lemon-yellow road leads past hollyhocks and festoons of crimson roses towards a tall marble fountain among lawns as perfect as green plush. There, in the country of Jacky Hare and the wheatear and bullfinch, after he has endured one last trying summer among harsh hills and leaves tasting of dust, a boy who has waited for years for a sight of his true home among cool lanes and hedges climbs to the last vantage point of all from which he knows he will see what he has always been hoping for. As she leaves the stage, and while the rows of children break off their whispering and fidgeting to applaud her, Therese Riordan carelessly brushes one white hand and wrist down across several acres of fields as cool and green as emeralds seen through water. A tremor crosses the lofty landscape, and even the far fountain seems for a moment like a mere layer of paint on a tottering screen of canvas. Someone in the seat behind Clement says quite audibly – wave ta-ta to your girlfriend Killeaton – the gypsies have taken her away.

  Clement organises a concert

  It is summer again as usual in Bassett, the largest city for a hundred miles in any direction. Under the one tall gum-tree among the fowl sheds behind 42 Leslie Street, Clement Killeaton arranges a concert. He calls on Gordon Glasscock to present the first item. The tall boy stands awkwardly on a platform of palings and logs from the woodheap. His almost-white hair stands out stiffly from his head where his mother has clipped it short for the holidays, and on his top lip is a weeping scab that he calls his cold sore and that Clement’s mother has said will not heal properly because the Glasscocks don’t get the proper foods to eat. Gordon mumbles to his audience that he will recite a poem. He takes a deep breath and says with barely a pause for breath The Land I Love by Cecilia Ballantyne My mother loved a gentle land with dove-grey drifting sky with woodlands green beneath the rain and flowers that soothed the eye – she saw beneath her favourite hill the fields as trim as lawns and through the bosky coppices she heard the hunters’ horns. Clement stops him and asks where he found the poem. Gordon says – it’s in the grade six reader at school. Clement tries to explain that the words have a sad hopeless sound there beneath the ragged strips of bark and the moistureless leaves in an obscure corner of Bassett, Victoria, Australia. Someone has mistakenly included in the school reader a poem about places that no boy with running sores on his mouth and dangling patches on his pants will ever discover among lonely trees in backyards that the far green world has never heard of. Gordon argues feebly that the thing is only a poem and not true or real anyway. Clement allows him to start his recitation again. Near the top of the last of all the hills that surround a few shallow gullies where a spent creek lies between beaches of flaking rocks and pebbles of a hundred nameless colours, a band of exhausted Englishmen hears no sound of chaffinches or great tits as they struggle upwards. They console each other with descriptions of a land not far ahead where birds with garish feathers but traditional names come down tamely to rippling watercourses. One of them describes a park-like city named Hartlepool or Basingstoke where cockatoos dangle from elm twigs and passing children look fondly into the birds’ cosy nests. Another tells how he has heard the peculiar silence of a whole district of uncomplicated hills that few people have ever passed but where someone will one day stroll at ease, giving a name to every dell and gap and edge and thorp and combe and crag so that the next people who pass by may spend hours guessing why such a name was given to such a place and in what order the man who named them all passed over the cluster of hills and discovered their peculiar features and the differences between them. Still another talks of how his children will teach their children a thousand stories about the towns that they can see on what was once a dull plain and put into their hands books with pictures of a country they may not return to but which they will never forget is the place where robins and scarps and Glastonburys are seen in their true shapes. Gordon Glasscock stumbles on until he reaches a turning point in the poem – such was the land she wandered in and neath whose soil she lies here within stark horizons I scan far different skies – I watch the parched ranges where cattle roam at will in damp green ferny gullies I stand and look my fill. When Gordon has finished, Clement asks him whether the poet was Australian or English but the boy cannot say. Clement asks whether he prefers Australian or English birds and Gordon answers without hesitating – Australian birds of course. Clement asks him to name his favourites. He names magpies and blackbirds. When Clement tries to explain that blackbirds are not Australian birds Gordon Glasscock challenges him to put on an item of his own. Clement mounts the platform of palings and sings all the words he can remember of two of the most beautiful songs that he has heard on the wireless – There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall and Home on the Range. Clement’s sweet girlish voice compels the others to listen. As he sings he half-closes his eyes an
d tries to see the blue-green immensity of America and the heroic journeys of its horses and men.