Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.

The plains that I crossed in those days were not endlessly alike. Sometimes I looked over a great shallow valley with scattered trees and idle cattle and perhaps a meagre stream at its centre. Sometimes, at the end of a tract of utterly unpromising country, the road rose towards what was unquestionably a hill before I saw ahead only another plain, level and bare and daunting.

In the large town that I reached on a certain afternoon, I noticed a way of speech and a style of dress that persuaded me I had come far enough. The people there were not quite the distinctive plainsmen I hoped to find in the remote central districts, but it suited me to know that ahead of me were more plains than I had yet crossed.

Late that night I stood at a third-storey window of the largest hotel in the town. I looked past the regular pattern of streetlights towards the dark country beyond. A breeze came in warm gusts from the north. I leaned into the surges of air that rose up from the nearest miles of grassland. I composed my face to register a variety of powerful emotions. And I whispered words that might have served a character in a film at the moment when he realised he had found where he belonged. Then I stepped back into the room and sat at the desk that had been specially installed for me.

I had unpacked my suitcases some hours earlier. Now my desk was stacked high with folders of notepaper and boxes of cards and an assortment of books with numbered tickets between their pages. On top of the stack was a medium-sized ledger labelled:

THE INTERIOR

(FILMSCRIPT)

MASTER KEY TO CATALOGUE OF

BACKGROUND NOTES

AND INSPIRATIONAL MATERIAL

I pulled out a bulky folder labelled Occasional Thoughts—Not Yet in Catalogue and wrote in it:

Not a soul in this district knows who I am or what I mean to do here. Odd to think that of all the plainsfolk lying asleep (in sprawling houses of white weatherboard with red iron roofs and great arid gardens dominated by pepper-trees and kurrajongs and rows of tamarisks) not one has seen the view of the plains that I am soon to disclose.

I spent the next day among the labyrinths of saloon bars and lounges on the ground floor of the hotel. All morning I sat alone in a deep leather armchair and stared at the strips of intolerable sunlight bordering the sealed venetian blinds in windows overlooking the main street. It was a cloudless day in early summer and the fierce morning sun reached even into the cavernous verandah of the hotel.

Sometimes I tilted my face slightly to catch the draught of cooler air from a fan overhead and watched the dew forming on my glass and thought with approval of the extremes of weather that afflicted the plains. Unchecked by hills or mountains, the sunlight in summer occupied the whole extent of the land from dawn till sunset. And in winter the winds and showers sweeping across the great open spaces barely faltered at the few stands of timber meant as shelter for men or animals. I knew there were great plains of the world that lay for months under snow, but I was pleased that my own district was not one of them. I much preferred to see all year the true configuration of the earth itself and not the false hillocks and hollows of some other element. In any case, I thought of snow (which I had never seen) as too much a part of European and American culture to be appropriate to my own region.

In the afternoon I joined one of the groups of plainsmen who strolled in from the main street and sat at their customary points along the enormous bars. I chose a group that seemed to include intellectuals and custodians of the history and lore of the district. I judged from their dress and bearing that they were not sheep-men or cattlemen, although they might have spent much of their time out of doors. A few had perhaps started life as the younger sons of the great landed families. (Everyone on the plains owed his prosperity to the land. Every town, large or small, was buoyed up by the bottomless wealth of the latifundia around it.) They all wore the dress of the cultivated, leisured class on the plains—plain grey trousers, rigidly creased, and spotless white shirt with matching tie-clip and armbands.

I was anxious to be accepted by these men and prepared for any test they might make of me. Yet I hardly expected to call on anything I had read in my shelves of books on the plains. To quote from works of literature would go against the spirit of the gathering, although every man there would have read any book that I named. Perhaps because they still felt themselves encircled by Australia, the plainsmen preferred to think of their reading as a private exercise that sustained them in their public dealings but could not excuse them from their obligation of cultivating an agreed tradition.

And yet, what was this tradition? Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker’s peculiar usage of it.

On that first afternoon I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves and others. This was the very opposite (as the plainsmen themselves well knew) of the common urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other cultures. A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

*

I continued to keep to the hotel but almost every day I drank with a new group. For all my note-taking and drafting of plans and outlines, I was still far from sure of what my film would show. I expected to be granted some sudden strength of purpose from meeting a plainsman whose perfect assurance could only have come from his having just that day finished the last page of his notes for a novel or film to rival my own.

I had by then begun to speak freely in front of the plainsmen I met. A few wanted to hear my story before they divulged their own. I was prepared for this. I had been ready, if they only knew, to spend months of silent study in the libraries and art galleries of their town to prove I was no mere tourist or sightseer. But after a few days in the hotel I had devised a story that served me well.

I told the plainsmen that I was on a journey, which was true enough. I did not tell them the route I had followed to their town or the direction I might take when I left it. They would learn the truth when The Interior appeared as a film. In the meantime I let them believe I had begun my journey in a distant corner of the plains. And, as I had hoped, no one doubted me or even claimed to know the district I had named. The plains were so immense that no plainsman was ever surprised to hear of their encompassing some region he had never seen. Besides, many places far inland were subject to dispute—were they part of the plains or not? The true extent of the plains had never been agreed on.

I told them a story almost devoid of events or achievements. Outsiders would have made little of it, but the plainsmen understood. It was the kind of story that appealed to their own novelists and dramatists and poets. Readers and audiences on the plains were seldom impressed by outbursts of emotion or violent conflicts or sudden calamities. They supposed that the artists who presented such things had been beguiled by the noises of crowds or the profusions of shapes and surfaces in the foreshortened landscapes of the world beyond the plains. The plainsman’s heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat—or the man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated farmhouse for fear that he would not recognise the place if he saw it from the distant vantage points that others used.

There were historians who suggested that the phenomenon of the plains themselves was responsible for the cultural differences between the plainsmen and Australians generally. The exploration of the plains had been the major event in their history. What had at first seemed utterly flat and featureless eventually disclosed countless subtle variations of landscape and an abundance of furtive wildlife. Trying to appreciate and describe their discoveries, the plainsmen had become unusually observant, discriminating, and receptive to gradual revelations of meaning. Later generations responded to life and art as their forebears had confronted the miles of grassland receding into haze. They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains.

*

One afternoon I noticed a faint tension in the saloon bar that had become my favourite. Some of my companions kept their voices low. Others spoke with an uneasy stridence as though hoping to be overheard from a distant room. I realised that the day had come for me to test myself as a plainsman. Some of the great landowners had come to town, and a few of them were even then in the hotel.

I tried not to look agitated, and I watched my companions closely. Most of them too were anxious to be called into the distant inner lounge for a brief interview with the men they wanted for patrons. But my companions knew they might still be waiting at sundown or even at midnight. The estate owners on their infrequent visits cared nothing for the hours that townsmen observed. They liked to settle their commercial affairs in the early morning and then ensconce themselves in their favourite hotel lounges before lunchtime. They stayed there for as long as they pleased, drinking extravagantly and calling for snacks or entire meals at unpredictable intervals. Many stayed on until the morning or even the afternoon of the following day, with never more than one of the group dozing in his chair while the others talked privately or interviewed their petitioners from the town.

I followed the custom of sending in my name with one of the townsmen who happened to be called early. Then I learned what I could about the men in the remote lounge and wondered which of them would surrender a portion of his fortune and perhaps his own daughter in return for seeing his estates as the setting for the film that would reveal the plains to the world.

I drank sparingly all afternoon and checked my appearance in every mirror that caught my eye. My only cause for anxiety was the paisley-patterned silk cravat bunched in the open neck of my white shirt. By every rule of fashion that I knew, a cravat at a man’s throat marked him out as wealthy, refined, sensitive, and possessed of ample leisure. But few plainsmen wore cravats, as I suddenly reminded myself. I could only hope the landowners would see in my dress the sort of paradox that discerning plainsmen delighted in. I wore something that was part of the despised culture of the capital cities—but only to distinguish myself a little from my fellow-petitioners and to assert that the way of the plains should be to avoid even the proper gesture if it threatened to become merely fashionable.

Fingering my crimson paisley silk before the mirror in the toilet, I was reassured by the sight of the two dress rings on my left hand. Each was set with a prominent slab of semi-precious stone—one a cloudy blue-green and the other a subdued yellow. I could not have named either stone, and the rings had been made in Melbourne—the city I preferred to forget—but I had chosen those colours for their special significance to plainsmen.

I knew a little of the conflict between the Horizonites and the Haremen, as they had come to be called. I had bought my rings knowing that the colours of the two factions were no longer worn in a spirit of partisanship. But I had hoped to learn that one or the other colour was sometimes preferred by plainsmen who regretted the spiritedness of past disputes. When I found that the practice was to wear never one colour alone but both, intertwined if possible, I had slipped the two rings onto separate fingers and never afterwards removed them.

I planned to represent myself to the landowners as a man from the very edge of the plains. They might comment on my wearing the two colours and ask me what traces of the famous dispute still survived in my remote homeland. If they did, I could tell them any of the stories I had heard of the lingering influence of the old quarrel. For I knew by then that the original issues survived in countless popular variants. Almost any opposite viewpoints that arose in public or private debate might be labelled the Horizonites’ or the Haremen’s. Almost any duality that occurred to a plainsman seemed easier to grasp if the two entities were associated with the two hues, blue-green and faded gold. And everyone on the plains remembered from childhood the day-long games of Hairies and Horrors—the frantic pursuits far into the paddocks, or the insecure hiding-places in the long grass.

If the landowners wanted to talk at length with me about ‘the colours’ (the modern name for all the complex rivalries of the past century), there was nothing to prevent me from offering them my own erratic interpretation of the celebrated conflict. By late afternoon I was no longer so eager to show them how close I was to their own ways of thinking. It seemed just as important to give them evidence of my imaginative prowess.

And then the door from the street was flung open and a new group of plainsmen came in from the dazzling sunlight with their afternoon’s work done and settled themselves at the bar to resume their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth. I felt a sudden elation at not knowing what could be verified in the history of the plains or even in my own history. And I even began to wonder whether the landowners might prefer me to appear before them as a man who misunderstood the plains.

*