The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  4TH LANDOWNER: (Removes his jacket and rolls a shirtsleeve above his elbow. Stares at the skin of his forearm.) I have to admit that after all these years I know so little about my own skin. We’re all plainsmen, always claiming that everything in sight is a landmark of something beyond it. But do we know what our own bodies are leading us towards? If I made maps of all your skins. I mean, of course, projections like Mercator’s. If I showed them all to you, would you recognise your own? I might even point out to you marks like tiny scattered towns or clumps of timber on plains you’ve never thought of, but what could you tell me about those places?

  1ST LANDOWNER: I’m speaking of my ideal woman, remember—the only woman that any of us speak about.

  2ND LANDOWNER: Of course they can fly, and there are trees enough on the plains. But they nest on the ground. And the bustard doesn’t even make a nest— just a scrape or a little hollow in the dry soil. I’m not interested in arguments about evolution or instincts or that nonsense. All science is purely descriptive. What concerns me is the why of it. Why do some birds hide on the ground while their enemies threaten them? It must be a sign of something. The next time you see a bustard’s nest, ask yourself why. Lie down and try to hide on the plain and see what happens.

  5TH LANDOWNER: Surely we’ve neglected the first settlers—the men who stayed on the land they explored?

  3RD LANDOWNER: But even after years on the plains they might have remembered another sort of land or the land they’d hoped to find if only the plains hadn’t seemed to go on forever.

  4TH LANDOWNER: I’m trying to remember those lines from ‘A Parasol at Noon’—a neglected masterpiece; one of the greatest romantic poems to come out of the plains. That scene where the plainsman sees the girl from a distance with all the paddocks swimming in heat haze. And don’t bother to raise the old objection: that the poetry of that era turned us into parodies of ourselves, fixed in the posture of men forever looking into the distance.

  6TH LANDOWNER: That scene is the only scene as I recall the poem. Two hundred stanzas on a woman seen from a distance. But of course she’s hardly mentioned. It’s the strange twilight around her that matters—the other atmosphere under the parasol.

  4TH LANDOWNER: And as he walks slowly towards her he sees this aura, this globe of luminous air, under the parasol, which was silk, of course, and a pale yellow or green, and translucent. He never quite distinguishes her features in the glow. And he asks impossible questions: which light is more real—the harsh sunlight outside or the mild light around the woman? isn’t the sky itself a sort of parasol? why should we think nature is real and things of our own making less so? And of course he wants to know why men of his kind can only possess what they come upon in dim alcoves of libraries with windows facing south onto deep, leaf-shaded verandahs.

  2ND LANDOWNER: How much protection does the land offer us? We’re all bustards or quail in our own way, seeing the plains as no one else does.

  6TH LANDOWNER: Light of false suns informing works of art, / He always turned from. Yet a land apart, / Neither a plain of old nor yet a dream, / Had sometimes lured him with its secret gleam. / Now the frail silk directed to his eye / All the strange radiance of another sky.

  5TH LANDOWNER: The fact is that the first settlers stayed here, presumably because the plains were the nearest approximation to the lands they’d been looking for. I can’t believe that even our plains could equal that land we all dream of exploring. And yet I believe that land is only another plain. Or at least it must be approached by way of the plains around us.

  3RD LANDOWNER: Who was it argued once that the plains ought to contain all the cities and mountains and seashores that we could hope to visit? In his novel he had every Australian living at the heart of some kind of plain.

  6TH LANDOWNER: The parasol is the screen that each of us wants to keep between the real world and the object of his love.

  2ND LANDOWNER: We talk of the way of the plains, but each of us thinks of his wife and daughters as waiting for him at the heart of a mansion of a hundred dim rooms. Most of our grandfathers were conceived in nests like quails’ or bustards’.

  4TH LANDOWNER: We’ve spent most of our lives out in the wind. We’ve seen the shadows of whole clouds lost on the miles of our grass. But we each remember, don’t we, some afternoon on a verandah where the sunlight hardly reached through the leaves of creepers—or in a drawing room where the curtains stayed closed from early spring to late autumn. There were months when the plains seemed far away and we sat indoors every afternoon content to watch a certain pale face.

  1ST LANDOWNER: The poets say we all worship fair skin. But surely there are other reasons why we don’t allow our wives and daughters to dress in bathing costumes? We know that the sunlight in summer can blind a person to the possibilities that lie behind the plains. And when we happen to see the turbulent air swirling like water above our land at noon, don’t we turn away because it recalls the meaningless turmoil of oceans? In the hottest days of February we pity the poor coast-dwellers staring all day from their cheerless beaches at the worst of all deserts. We mock the poses they strike beside their oceans and profess not to understand their awe at a mere absence of land. Yet every man on the plains knows about those houses where the highest-priced women sit all day under lamps until every inch of their bodies is brown. Is there anyone here who hasn’t once visited them and pretended for an hour that the plains mean nothing to him?

  5TH LANDOWNER: You know the story of the man who was born too late to be the conventional sort of explorer. But he insisted that exploration was the only activity worthy of a plainsman. He marked out a square of his property and spent years drawing the most detailed maps of it. He named hundreds of features that you or I would have walked over without noticing. And he made notes and sketches of plants and birds as though no one before him had seen them. Then in his last years he locked away all his notes and maps and invited anyone who cared to explore the same place after him and write a description of it. When the two descriptions were compared, the differences between them would reveal the distinctive qualities of each man: the only qualities that he could claim as his own.

  3RD LANDOWNER: I happen to believe myself that we’re all explorers in our way. But exploration is much more than naming and describing. An explorer’s task is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land. Whether or not he finds that land and brings back news of it is unimportant. He may choose to lose himself in it forever and add one more to the sum of unexplored lands.

  4TH LANDOWNER: But the patrons of those places are mostly young men. Everyone here today can remember those other dreams that came to us in our hottest summers. Every plainsman has turned his back for a moment on the fernery or the summer-house, the white frocks and parasols, and stared after the north winds. The coast was always five hundred miles away, and most of us knew we might never see it. But that itch in our skin when we looked south—we told ourselves it could only be eased by salt breezes or tidal waters. And some of us even argued that the pallor of the women we had been promised in marriage would be even more desirable after we had enjoyed those brown bellies and thighs with coarse grit clinging to their film of transparent oil.

  2ND LANDOWNER: And all this talk of being true to the plains. We refused years ago to enrol our daughters in the great schools near the coast because they might be sent out half-naked in the sun to play hockey. And yet we’ve all seen the mating dance of the bustard. I’ve watched it for hours, lying on my belly in the tussocks. No other bird works itself into such a state. If we were consistent in our arguments about being true to the plains, wouldn’t we come out of our shadowy houses and couple on the grass with only the great distances to hide us?

  5TH LANDOWNER: And yet the plains themselves haven’t been thoroughly explored. Two years ago I retained a surveyor and an historian to prepare a map of all the strips of territory between the settled districts, all the pockets of scrub and timber on Crown lands, all the unfenced river fron
tages. We all see these places at the far ends of our properties, but we think of them as no more than the background to our characteristic landscapes. When the map is finished I hope to plot the route of a journey of a thousand miles. And when I make that journey I want to see, just once in the distance, some hint of a land that could be mine.

  6TH LANDOWNER: But in the most notorious houses there were always some girls who kept their last inches utterly white. And you took care never to learn beforehand which girls they were. So that sometimes— while you indulged the most absurd of your childish fantasies and lost yourself in some mad ritual of the coast—just when you were about to possess whatever it was that had brought you so far from your own country, you might see the very colour you had betrayed.

  3RD LANDOWNER: Send out your surveyors and plan your lonely journeys. You’ll spend your life looking for the wrong kind of plains. Every morning after breakfast I spend just ten minutes walking around my collection from the great age of landscapes. When I step back from any one painting I close my eyes until I’m standing in front of the next. After all these years I know exactly how many paces will take me from one to another. I’m trying to piece together a plain where nothing exists but what artists claim to have seen. And when I’ve fitted those landscapes together into one great painted plain, then I’ll step outside one morning and begin to look for a new country. I’ll go in search of the places that lay just beyond the painted horizons; the places that the artists knew they were only able to hint at.

  6TH LANDOWNER: Our fashionable poets tell us only of women swathed in silk against the sun. I read them too. I know that a distant figure, all in white, in the shadow of an immense house at the height of an afternoon, can give meaning to a hundred miles of grass. But I want to read those unpublished poems that surely have been written in rooms facing southwards. I want to read those poets who knew that their desires could lead them out of even the widest land. I’m not talking of those few fools who appear every decade or so urging us to set our passions free and to speak frankly before our women. There must have been many a man who knew, without leaving his own narrow district of the plains, that his heart enclosed every land he could have travelled to; that his fantasies of scorching sand and vacant blue water and bare brown skin belonged not to any coast but to some mere region of his own boundless plain. What did such poets discover in those palatial houses each night, walking ankle-deep in those gold carpets the colour of unlikely sand beneath mirrors prolonging the unsubtle hue of framed seascapes? I nodded to poets every week in long passageways of the house where I thought I was exploring some coast. But none of them has ever published his story. And yet only poetry could describe what we were really doing in those sweltering towns under skies filled with throbbing stars. All of those girls had been born on the plains. Most of them knew less than we did of the ways of the coast. But they struck those awkward poses that we demanded. When they lolled on the yellow carpet in their two-piece floral bathing costumes, and our fingers traced long, devious journeys across their burnt skin, we supposed we were escaping from the plains. And at the end, moaning to ourselves, we thought we had come into possession of something that only the coastdwellers enjoyed. But a poet would have recognised that no man of the coast had ever been so privileged as to see his petty pleasures from the vantage point of the plains. And there were nights, as I said, when we found between our fingers the same pallor that was always kept hidden from us on the plains. Then we suspected that we were being mocked—that even in that game of the coast, on pretended sand beside painted waves, our women kept something of the plains about them.

  2ND LANDOWNER: Who knows what a quail or bustard sees when it stands watching from the heart of its territory? Or when it struts for hours trying to impress its mate? Scientists have done experiments that make me wonder. They cut the head from a female and stuck it on a pole and the male went on dancing round it all afternoon, waiting for it to show some sign.

  5TH LANDOWNER: Every plainsman knows he has to find his place. The man who stays in his native district wishes he had arrived there after a long journey. And the man who travels begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey. I’ve spent my life trying to see my own place as the end of a journey I never made.

  7TH LANDOWNER: (Swings his legs over the side of the stretcher; strides to the bar and pours himself a whisky; begins talking as though he has missed none of the conversation so far.) A man can know his place and yet never try to reach it. But what does our petitioner think?

  The man turned towards me but avoided my eyes. The others stopped talking and refilled their glasses. From somewhere beyond the half-open door a shaft of rich light entered the room. A few mirrors, fortuitously placed, and perhaps a small, neglected window whose blind had been left undrawn, might have marked the route of the afternoon sunlight through the dim halls. The amber ray rested on the floor between the men, and some of them shifted their stools to make room for it. Then I stepped towards the centre of the bar to speak and the light was gone from among them. But for as long as I stood and talked, I felt myself distinguished by the sign of afternoon on my back.

  I spoke quietly and looked most often at the seventh man, who was half a head taller than the others and the most attentive—although he frequently pressed his hand over his eyes in the pose he had held on the stretcher. I told them simply that I was preparing the script of a film whose last scenes would be set on the plains. Those same scenes were still not written, and any man present might offer his own property as a location. His paddocks with all their long vistas, his lawns and avenues and fishponds—all these could be the setting for the last act of an original drama. And if the man happened to have a daughter with certain qualifications, then I would be pleased to consult her and even to collaborate with her in preparing my last pages. I made this offer, I said, because the end of my story depended on a female character who must appear an authentic young woman of the plains.

  All of them were listening. I knew from a faint quickening of interest that most of them were the fathers of daughters. I could even identify the men whose daughters complained often that all the vistas they saw in films seemed to end in far, wide places but never in plains like their own. It was these men I was trying to win over when I boasted that my film would show even the textures of grassblades in obscure hollows and of mossy rockfaces on bleak outcrops on a plain that any of them might recognise although none had seen more than fragments of it.

  Looking at the first of the six men, I remembered their talk from the hour just past. I told them that all their particular concerns—the themes they discovered in the history of the plains or in the stuff of their own lives—would appear in my film as an arrangement of simple but eloquent images. For I too knew that whenever I approached a woman I wanted nothing better than to learn the secret of a particular plain. I too had studied the ways of birds and wanted to occupy a territory with boundaries and landmarks invisible to all but my own scattered kind. And I believed that every man was called to be an explorer. My own film would be in one sense the record of a journey of exploration.

  Then I turned to the seventh of the great landowners and declared that of all forms of art, only film could show the remote horizons of dreams as a habitable country and, at the same time, could turn familiar landscapes into a vague scenery fit only for dreams. I would go even further, I said, and claim that film was the one art form that could satisfy the contradictory impulses of the plainsman. The hero of my own film saw, at the furthest limits of his awareness, unexplored plains. And when he looked for what he was surest of in himself, there was little more definite than plains. The film was the story of this man’s search for the one land that might have lain beyond or within all that he had ever seen. I might call it—without pretentiousness, I hoped—the Eternal Plain.

  The seventh landowner slammed his glass on the counter and turned away from me. He strode back to the stretcher and eased himself down on it. I said nothing more. I wondered whe
ther I had offended the one man I wanted most to impress. And then he began to speak.

  One hand was pressed again to his forehead and his voice was faint. I expected the six others to move towards the stretcher to hear him, but they seemed to have taken the man’s lying down as a signal that their long session was over. Even the few who bothered to empty their glasses were gone from the room while I was wondering what I ought to say to them.

  The man on the stretcher had kept his eyes covered. I coughed to let him know that I was still in the room, and leaned over him to catch his words. I recognised that I was meant to hear him, although he did not once acknowledge me. And for all his mumbling and pausing, I could not mistake his meaning.

  He found much of what I had said outrageous. I knew, surely, that no film had ever been made with the plains as its setting. My proposal suggested that I had overlooked the most obvious qualities of the plains. How did I expect to find so easily what so many others had never found—a visible equivalent of the plains, as though they were mere surfaces reflecting sunlight? There was also the question of his daughter. Did I think that by persuading her to stand against a vista of a few paddocks and to look towards a camera I would discover about her what I would never in fact learn if I followed her for years with my own eyes? He believed, nevertheless, that I might one day be capable of seeing what was worth seeing. If he could forget my young man’s eagerness to look at simple coloured images of the plains, he might concede that at least I was trying to discover my own kind of landscape. (And what mattered more than the search for landscapes? What distinguished a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?) Perhaps, young and blind as I was, I ought to present myself at his country seat at sundown on the following day. I would be treated as a guest for as long as I cared to stay. But I would do better to accept, in my own good time, a post in the household. My designation of this post would be for me to choose. He suggested ‘Director of Film Projects’ but expected that I would one day blush at it. My salary would be any reasonable amount over and above the expenses incurred in performing my duties. There would be, of course, no formal list of duties to restrict the scope of my work.