Somewhere today in a suburb of Melbourne is a man who calls himself a writer of fiction but who writes, in fact, a sort of diary of the man he wishes he could be. The man I am writing about likes to pose as an eccentric. Before an interview he will always ask to be asked about his odd habits and preferences. And he especially likes to be asked if he has done much travelling lately.
When that question is put to him, the man says he hardly ever travels, and certainly never to the places that other people choose as their destinations. He says he has never been in an aeroplane and he has only once crossed the River Murray in a northerly direction. And while his interviewer pauses to wonder about all this, the man adds that he does all the travelling he needs to do in his mind – in his dreams. (It is quite in character for the man to use words such as mind and dreams loosely like this. He has very vague notions of what he consists of. His inner life, if it could be so called, is a continual wandering through a maze in which the walls are images of the places he has never travelled to.)
If the people who are always declaring that God is dead are really yearning deep down for God to appear and to put his arm around their shoulders, then the man who keeps on telling the world that he never travels must be secretly waiting for a well-wisher to present him with a passport and a sheaf of travellers’ cheques and to tell him to sit back and relax because he’s going to be whisked away to all the places his nomadic heart has always yearned after.
Where would the stay-at-home choose to go if this journey of a lifetime was put in his way? What means of travel would he use? And would he travel alone, or would he have a companion when he crossed the Great Dividing Range?
I see that I have answered one of my questions already. The man of this story has always thought of travel as taking him first northwards across the Keilor Plains towards Mount Macedon.
Since he does not own a motor car, our man will have to take a Bendigo train on the first leg of his long-awaited journey. And he thanks you politely, but he wouldn’t dream of putting anyone to the trouble of wandering off with him, or even saying goodbye. Just write down your address and slip it to the traveller before he sets out, and you might find yourself from time to time reading a rambling report of his travels.
Like most children of my time and place, I travelled on passenger trains drawn by steam locomotives across the countryside of Victoria in the years just after the Second World War. I would like to be able to describe the look and the feel of the carriages that I sat in from early morning until far into the hot afternoon. But lately I read again part of the story ‘First Love’ by Vladimir Nabokov, which always reminds me that I have no memory for furniture or fabrics or interiors.
The narrator of ‘First Love’ travelled on the Nord Express from St Petersburg to Paris in the years just before the First World War. The author of that story, looking across the same number of years that I now look across to my own railway journeys, wrote in the 1940s of the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, the tulip-shaped reading lamps, the tassel of the blue, bivalved night light… As against all that, I can only recall the mild stickiness of the dark-green leather seats and of the bulbous armrests that had to be pulled out and down from recesses between the shoulders of the passengers.
I seem to have no memory for interiors. I am so little aware today of the insides of all the houses I have lived in that the rooms of those houses might have been only shelter from the wind, or shade from the sun, or places to hide in while I wrote and read. And instead of trying to remember railway compartments, I might as well complain about all the blank spaces that stayed in front of my eyes when I should have seen landscapes all around me on my travels across the countryside of Victoria.
But there is one other detail from the Melbourne-to-Bendigo or the Melbourne-to-Port Fairy: just one grey and brown memory to sit drably beside the tasselled night light or the mitre-folded napkins in the dining car of the Nord Express. In each compartment, above the green leather backrest and just below the metal latticework of the luggage rack, the wall was inlaid with three photographs behind glass of scenes from Victoria.
The weather outside the compartment was nearly always the heat of January, but the skies in the photographs seemed anything but blue, and I was glad not to be tending towards them. Even beach scenes (Cowes, Lorne, Frankston) with crowds in the water and well-defined shadows under the Norfolk Island pines could not convince me. There was only the sunlight around me and the sunlight I was headed for; there was no other sort.
It would be too easy to say that the photographs made me gloomy because they were old. Of course the canvas-topped motor cars and the moustached men in waistcoats were from my father’s childhood, and one of the clouds high above was likely to be a tobacco-juice colour where dampness or something worse had got through a crack in the glass and had spread. Yet the word old meant hardly anything to me. What saddened me was to think how far from me those forests closed over the roads; those matchstick piers tapered away into milk-white seas without waves. I must have been seeing already in its simplest form the map of the world that has since grown in front of my eyes from just a few translucent panels like coloured glass prettifying my path to something so elaborate that I hardly remember any other sights behind it – any other world that these winding corridors and confusing windows might have been copied from.
The map grew out of one simple proposition. I speak of it tactfully as a proposition, but it has always seemed self-evident to me. In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.
Before I begin to explain what follows from this, someone reading these traveller’s notes is sure to remember a neat little sentence from an advertisement for a motion picture of a few years back. (If I were writing exclusively for those who understand the secret dominance of place, I would have put the word away instead of back in the previous sentence. My world has no forward and no back, only a place here and a million million other places near or further away.) Someone will remember the neat little sentence and will think I am only repeating what that sentence says.
The sentence actually comes from the book of fiction that the film-makers got their story from. The past, says the neat little sentence, is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
How poetic, and how promising this must have seemed to people preparing to watch a motion picture. Just when the movie-watcher might have thought all the countries in the world had been thoroughly photographed, here was a new sort of foreign country waiting to welcome camera-people and sightseers and tourists. How wrong we were to think of history as lost to sight, the movie-watchers would have said; history is really a folk-festival in an exotic country, and history books are just a more wordy sort of travel brochure.
I went to my bookshelves just now and found a Penguin edition of The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley. On the front cover is a picture of a hard-faced woman wearing a long white frock and holding a parasol and standing on mown grass among green branches. On the back cover is this sentence (among others). The cover shows a scene from the MGM-EMI Film Distributors Limited Release The Go-Between starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, also starring Margaret Leighton.
After I had read the sentence on the back cover I looked again at the picture on the front. I am looking at the picture now. I ask myself: this woman named Julie Christie or Margaret Leighton – is she in a foreign country? And if she is, I ask myself, do they do things differently there? And if the answer to each of these questions is ‘yes’, should I call the foreign country the past?
These are questions I cannot answer. As soon as I look at the woman named Christie or Leighton, I see her strolling among the trees and flicking her parasol impatiently about her. Now she speaks; and although she looks anywhere but in my direction, I know her words are aimed at me.
Granted, she says, she is in my power to some extent. But I have power only over what I see. And all I can see is the long frock, and the parasol being flicked in anger, and the haughty and unsmiling face; whereas she can see the house behind all these lawns and trees, and she sees the people of the house, who are her equals as I can never be.
I look around me at this shabby room, and then through the window at the unkempt cotoneasters and the long sodden grass that was once a lawn, and I have no doubt that the woman who speaks to me – for all her haughtiness and her parasol and her long, elaborate frock – is in my own country.
But of course she is in my country, someone will object. She is in my country because she is not a woman named Christie or Leighton but an image of a woman – in fact an image of an image of a woman, or something even more complicated.
Instead of answering my objector just now, I turn from the picture on the cover to the text inside the book. According to the log that I keep of my reading, I read the text of The Go-Between in January 1977. But of all the text, I can only remember today about ten words spoken by a man to a boy. I remember none of the characters and nothing of the action. I could open the book at any page today and read it as though for the first time. But to prove to my own reader that this investigation is without bias, I hereby announce that the passage I will now read is the passage beginning on the seventh line of the seventy-seventh page.
And the heat was a medium which made this change of outlook possible. As a liberating power with its own laws it was outside my experience. In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature.
These are the very words I read when I opened the book at the place chosen entirely by chance. The book is supposed to be about a foreign country called the past, yet every word in the passage I found belongs to the story I am writing at present. The reader will find every one of those words in context towards the end of this story. The words happen to describe something from the most memorable afternoon of my life.
I have nothing further to do with any objections. Not only is there no such thing as the past; there is almost certainly no such thing as a foreign country. Now, instead of wasting precious space with speculations about theoretical countries, I will go on writing about the here-and-now.
And I am going to write in the language of this world instead of the jargon of an imagined world ruled over by those invisible and sinister science-fiction tyrants Time and Change. It is the present now all over the world. It has always been the present and it always is the present. I use the word present only for old time’s sake. What I should write is not It always is the present but It always is.
What is? All this scenery, of course: all this scenery multiplied endlessly around me wherever I look.
I am writing to you from the compartment of a railway carriage. In front of me, and somewhat above the level of my eyes, part of a pale road crosses a sandy hilltop. A motor car is stopped on the road – a motor car with a canvas roof and with side-windows of something tough and yellowish that is not glass. A man stands beside the motor car; the man has a thick moustache and wears a waistcoat and a watch-chain beneath the jacket of his suit. The man stands between me and a blur of sand-dunes and distant sea and hazy clouds. Across the width of the road at the man’s feet are the words: Warrnambool with Lady Bay.
I am writing to you from the compartment of a railway carriage. In front of me, and exactly level with my eyes, a yellow-brown grassland rises and falls, bulges and sags, and moves continually from left to right. At its right-hand side the grassland is disappearing, bulge and hollow by bulge and hollow, behind the grey felt hat with the peacock feather in its band and the clean-shaven face and the three-piece suit of a man seven years younger than myself. At its left-hand side the yellow-brown grassland is being continually renewed, but the man with the peacock feather in his hatband is saying to me that from where he sits he can see the end of the Keilor Plains and the beginning of Mount Macedon.
I am writing, as usual, from the compartment of a railway carriage. In front of me, and somewhat above the level of my eyes, the sky is pale blue at its lower level and even paler at the upper edge of my view. The sky is moving from left to right. At its right-hand side, the pale blue is disappearing behind the grey sea and the grey-white sky of Warrnambool with Lady Bay. At its left-hand side, the pale blue is being continually renewed.
I am still writing from my railway carriage. The man in front of me, with the peacock-blue in his hatband, is my father, who was born at Allansford, Victoria, in 1904 and died at Geelong, Victoria, in 1960. His grave is in the Warrnambool cemetery, which overlooks the estuary of the Hopkins River at the eastern end of Lady Bay. From my father’s birthplace to the site of his grave is a walk of perhaps two hours along the Hopkins, the most placid of rivers, from the shallow place of green rushes and smooth stones that was once a ford for the pioneers Allan to the wide, calm lake between grassy hills, cemetery, and sea.
From my father’s birthplace to the place where we buried him is an afternoon’s stroll, but the man with the rich blue in his hatband has travelled for most of his life in every State of Australia, and backwards and forwards across the Great Divide. He is sitting now, this endlessly travelling man, with the advantage that most travellers like to secure for themselves: he is facing his destination. I do not have this advantage. I am facing my father, and the man with the moustache and watchband, and Warrnambool with Lady Bay.
The man of the blue-green feather is telling me his travels are nearly over. He is taking me to a place we will neither of us want to leave. Today we have left Melbourne for good; from now on our home is Bendigo. And already from where he sits, my father says, he can see the end of the Keilor Plains and the beginnings of Mount Macedon. Soon we will cross the Great Divide and go on to live for the rest of our lives in Bendigo. I, of course, have not yet seen the Great Divide. I have still not even seen the end of the plains.
I am on my travels in this world of place after place, and my father is travelling with me, not to mention the old-timer on the road at Warrnambool with Lady Bay. The last of the plains have disappeared behind my father and his grey hat with the peacock-coloured feather.
The last of the sky over the plains has disappeared behind the man at Warrnambool with Lady Bay.
Where else would I be but in this railway compartment? In front of me, and level with my face, is a slope of Mount Macedon. The slope is covered with forest, which is being renewed continually on its left-hand side. I can see no sky. The lower slope of Mount Macedon is disappearing where the plains have disappeared – behind my father. And the upper slope of the mountain is going where the sky over the plains has gone – behind Warrnambool with Lady Bay.
I am in the railway compartment where I am always. The forest is not being renewed, any more than the plains were renewed in place after place. My father tells me we have crossed the Great Divide. He says our home now is a country of gentle hills scattered with ponderous trees. He says a new sort of weather is settling over us once and for all.
The sky in front of my eyes is blue only. The sky is so blue and so far-reaching that I have never seen it disappear behind my father or behind any scenery.
Please assume that I am still in the railway compartment for as long as I go on writing about my travels. And please do not ask how I can be in two places at once. If the wooden-faced woman in the white frock is allowed to be waving her parasol not a thousand miles from where the little Russian boy stares at the blue night light somewhere on the plains of Europe, then I too am somewhere on my travels.
I am lying on my back and looking at sky. I am lying among dark-green glossy stems of rye-grass on the unmown land beside a small weatherboard hall in Neale Street, Bendigo. Under my head and body the soil is trustworthy. Even through the thick grass the feeling reaches me that this soil deserves to be trusted. I have learned to trust absolutely the strong, gravelly soil of Bendigo.
At the moment I am not thinking of soil. I am looking at the sky and wondering what to make of its blueness.
From where I lie, I can see more deeply into this sky than I have seen into any other. I seem to be looking at a part of the sky so deep it is not meant to be looked at. I am looking at a blue so blue it is turning continually, far inside itself, into another colour.
My father is standing near me, but I cannot see him because I will not take my eyes away from the sky. My father is grazing his chestnut gelding, which is still a maiden after a long career in racing. I cannot see the horse, but I can hear its teeth tearing at the rye-grass.
My father tells me the sky is the blue that it is because we are on the other side of the Great Divide. He says the sky over the places where he and I were born is not the true colour. Over Melbourne and Warrnambool the sky has been watered down; the sea has drained the true colour out of the sky. But here at Bendigo the sky is its true colour because it has nothing but land beneath it – and not just any land but soil and grass that are mostly golden orange, which of all colours brings out the richest from blue.
I discuss with my father the true name for the colour of this sky of the inland. My father finds rather conveniently near his feet a few small flowers of a kind I have always taken for weeds. He tells me that these are cornflowers and the sky is cornflower blue.
I cannot quite see in the sky overhead the blue of the flowers my father calls cornflowers. Yet I am pleased that my father has claimed to see that sort of blue. I understand that I am free myself to see in the sky a colour from earth.
I have to admit that the sky here, north of the Great Divide, is an incomparable blue, but its colour makes me sometimes uneasy. The deep, pure blue is a little too deep and too pure. I would lie more comfortably on the soil of Bendigo if I knew that the powerful blue is not all there is to the sky.
And so, privately, I decide that the sky over the inland leads back to a layer of lilac. Although no such thing has yet appeared to my eyes, I declare my belief in a delicate lilac underlying the deep blue. With my head resting against the soil, I trust that the sky will ultimately give way to the colour I see in the clusters of small flowers (each cluster shaped like a half-opened parasol) on the roof-high shrub behind my house each year when the first north winds blow.
I am standing on the solid soil of Bendigo and staring at the sudden shining or dulling of tiny creases and rumplings in a silk jacket as they catch or lose the light from high in the darkness above the Showgrounds trotting track. The silk jacket is worn by a man with a faintly Chinese face. His name is Clarrie Long, and I wish I had used that name instead of Harold Moy for the jockey in the first work of fiction I ever wrote, and the name Bendigo instead of Bassett for the city in north-central Victoria where that work of fiction is set.
Clarrie Long’s jacket and the jackets of the five other drivers are the first racing colours I have seen, but I know already that I am going to study racing colours for the rest of my life. I will still stare at skies and lilac bushes, but only to help me understand racing colours.
I am sitting at my table in a room of a house in a suburb of Melbourne. On the south wall of the room, just to the right of the window, a page of a calendar shows rows of black numerals in white squares below a picture with the caption: Snow gums on the Gorge Nature Trail, Mount Buffalo National Park.
A week ago I asked a man who has lived for much of his life at Kangaroo Flat, on the south-west outskirts of Bendigo, what he remembered of the photographs in the old country trains. He said without hesitating that he remembered mostly pictures of snow and ice and granite boulders and the Chalet at Mount Buffalo. That man has never seen this room. He had no way of knowing that I would sit down one day to write about the interiors of compartments on the Bendigo train in a room with a scene from his own railway journeys above me on the wall.
The father of the man from Kangaroo Flat, by the way, died as my own father died – suddenly in his fifties. Each of the two men was, in his own way, a good Catholic; so each body lies now – the body of my father beside the calm, brown Hopkins and under a pale-blue sky, and the body of the man from Kangaroo Flat in the trusty soil of Bendigo and under that unforgettable blue – waiting, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, for the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
I am sitting at my table, with my back to Bendigo, and facing the window in the south wall. The sky outside the window is the colour of the water in Bass Strait, with grey-white clouds appearing continually from behind the calendar-picture of Mount Buffalo. I am wondering how I have come at last to be staring at a sky no different from the sea after all the richness I have seen in skies.
I am sitting at my table and reading a letter from a man who has gone to live in Tasmania. For the sake of those people who have to read a story about the past as though they are watching a motion picture, I will mention here, and in each of the remaining scenes of this story, a calendar with the ordinal number of a year showing on it or else a scrap of newspaper with the date showing in the corner. In this scene, the page of a calendar marked 1986 is visible. (I am not scornful of the people who want to know this sort of detail. Even though time has been abolished from my world, some of the old words have been left in place, like signposts pointing to towns long since submerged under man-made lakes.)
In his letter from Tasmania, the man writes about the peculiar colour of the sky over the place where he now lives. He writes that some of the pale blue has drained away into the green of the plain around his house. I wonder how anyone could write in this way about Tasmania. But then I look through my collections of maps, and one map is drawn to such a scale that I see the man now as having found the one district in all Tasmania that can rightly be called plains.
The man who wrote the letter was born in the hills near Hurstbridge, Victoria. This is the district that I called Harp Gully in a work of fiction. The narrator in that work of fiction looked forward to spending the last part of his life at Harp Gully.
The man who now lives in Tasmania has written a work of fiction of his own set in a place called Harp Gully. Before he wrote his fiction he asked me if I would allow him to use the name Harp Gully, but I told him no one should claim to own the name of any place in a true work of fiction.
I am standing at my table in the room with a window on its south side. The sky is a watery colour, but I am not wondering whether the blue has been lost to Bass Strait or to the green plains of Tasmania.
I am looking at two rhombuses, each measuring diagonally about 1.5 centimetres, cut from silk of the same colour as the sky outside the window at my back. I am holding one of the pieces of pale-blue silk between a pair of tweezers and trying to fit the piece into a collage of pieces of silk. When this and the other rhombus of silk are in place, the pattern of the collage will be complete and I will then cover all the pieces of silk carefully with a sheet of transparent and adhesive plastic. All the pieces of silk have been cut with a blunt razor blade from ribbons of silk bought at Myer Northland.
The shopping centre known as Northland is built on what was once the first patch of open grassland I saw and afterwards remembered having seen. The grassland was visible from the windows of the yellow bus that travelled between Bundoora and the East Preston tram terminus when I lived at Bundoora in my third and fourth years and just before I was taken to live at Bendigo.
The finished pattern of coloured silk, held firmly under the clear plastic, is the best likeness I have prepared of the colours that represent me.
I do not own a racehorse or a share in a racehorse. Even if I had the money to buy the least share in a horse, I would use the money instead to buy ten or twenty sets of racing silks, each of which would be a slight variation of the colours I have almost decided on in this room with the south-facing window and the calendar showing the numerals 1-9-8-2. Having bought the racing colours, I would spend the rest of my life studying each of the different patterns in different lights. I would study the patterns in this room in June or July, with a watered-down sky behind me. I would study the patterns in a room facing east in March, when the light of summer has begun to soften and I can make out separate dark-blue treetops on the first of the folds of hills between here and Hurstbridge. And I would study my patterns by a window facing north in September, when the first hot wind blows over Melbourne. (‘Please do not close the window,’ said the Reverend Doctor Backhaus to his housekeeper in Brighton, Victoria, on a hot afternoon in the last year of his life. ‘That wind is the north wind,’ said the exile. ‘It comes from Bendigo.’)
Only one room in this house has a window that looks north, and before this calendar in the corner is taken down from the wall, men shouting day after day in a foreign language will have torn down the old garden outside that window and built things called units in the bare dirt. But the sunlight in September will still reach the window, and the north wind will still flap the orange-gold holland blind.
One day, all the other people in this house will have gone away and left me to do what I have always wanted to do. For most of my life I used to think I would spend my days, after I had been left alone, draping over beds and chairs and floors all the variously coloured jackets and sleeves and caps from the collection of racing-silks bought with the money that a different sort of man would have called his life’s savings. I used to see myself walking backwards and forwards in every room, always with my eyes on the silks, and stopping suddenly at any one of twenty different places to study some combination of colours in yet another light. The man I used to see in all the rooms of this house, in the light of windows looking towards all the places where the sky or the soil or the flowers or leaves of plants have mattered to me – that man is (I write is rather than was, because he is present to my eyes again) about to choose after fifty or sixty years of study the pattern of colours that has always been his own, although he has taken a lifetime to recognise it.
This is the man I used to see, especially in the room facing north, where masking-tape holds the edges of the blind against the window frame, and the light through the blind is the same light which is all that Doctor Backhaus sees now of the place he wants to go back to before he dies, because his housekeeper has drawn the blind against the sun and closed the window against the wind from the other side of the Great Divide.
This is the man I used to see. But now, at this moment against a backdrop of 1-9-8-2, with a tiny patch of sky-blue silk between my tweezers, I wonder why I have to put this sky-blue in the place reserved for it high up on the sleeve, so that the brown sleeve will have a sky-blue armband.
Clarrie Long leans comfortably back in the seat of the sulky behind the horse Great Dalla near the fence around the outside of the gravel track for bike races or trotting races at the Bendigo Showgrounds. Clarrie Long is talking to my father, who is a spectator on the other side of the fence from Clarrie. No calendar is conveniently near, but my father probably has in his hand a program for the Easter sports meeting. Or someone seeing all this as a scene in a foreign country might notice a scrap of the Advertiser blown along the gravelly ground with the numerals 1-9-4-6 on a corner.
Clarrie Long and my father are talking, but I am not listening. I am beginning to feel a grave lack of something.
In many other places with many other calendars on view, I will feel this same lack. I will then believe I have to look into the face of woman after woman (preferably when her eyes are not on me), as though I might see there what I lack. Here, however, under the lights around the Bendigo Showgrounds, I believe I lack a silk jacket and cap of my own colours.
Clarrie Long’s jacket is brown with pale-blue stars. Under the lights of the Showgrounds, the pale blue is unevenly silvered like many a sky in all the years I am going to spend away from Bendigo.
I am aware of more than colours. A row of buttons runs down the front of Clarrie Long’s jacket, with each button wholly wrapped in silk and most buttons brown but some, because the stars of the pattern are scattered at odd intervals, silver-blue, and one unforgettable button parti-coloured: a border town with differing flags on either side of the main street; or a poor mulatto brindled and haunted by his separate links with earth and sky.
The spread of the pattern over buttons and seams tells me that devisers of racing silks take no account of garments – or even, perhaps, of the men who fasten the colours onto themselves. The man and the garment are meant to be hidden behind the colours and the pattern. And the man and the garment I may never see again, but the pattern I will go on seeing.
In all the places where I feel my lack, with calendar after calendar by window and sky, I try to see my own pattern. Mostly I see Clarrie Long, with faintly Chinese features, and the wife of Clarrie Long, the first woman I have seen who looks like a film star and the woman who appears as Mrs Harold Moy in the book in which Bendigo is called Bassett. I see the pattern of colours of the man whose wife is the first woman I have seen wearing sun-glasses. I see the wife watching a trotting race by daylight at another Bendigo Easter Fair, with images in her dark glasses of the man in the brown with pale-blue stars: the man who has fitted the colour of sky into the colour of soil.
I ask my father what he sees in the sky, and he turns to the small symmetrical shapes of the cornflowers.
In place after place, in front of every sort of calendar throughout my life, I scrape coloured pencils against white paper. I make one or another of nearly a thousand small sketches of a pattern suitable for my racing colours, and then I take each sketch to the open window, or I draw the blind, or I stare with my eyes wide open, or I cock my head and squint at the colours and the pattern.
Now, at last, I am here in this room with a window looking towards the sky over Tasmania, and the sky itself being continually renewed from the direction of Warrnambool. I have a scrap of blue ready to insert into the last of the thousand patterns I have made in place after place. I have decided on my colours at last. I am no longer sketching with pencils. I am about to make a pattern of silk pieces under clear plastic and to keep my colours where I can see them every day.
My colours are lilac and brown with two small patches of what I call sky-blue.
But before I insert the sky-blue to complete the pattern, I stop to wonder why my father looked down at the cornflowers instead of looking more deeply into the sky.
I am standing, or I am lying on my back, or I am sitting in a railway compartment. Wherever I am, I am staring into the sky and waiting for the blue to turn into some other colour. And now I hear the voice of a woman.
A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies…too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon – or is it around the rims of the eyes?
I hear these words in many places, wherever I stop to look at the sky and to wonder what I can learn from blue. The words were written by Elizabeth Bishop, but I have lost the piece of paper telling me where she first wrote them. I found the words in the book pages of the New York Times, which are sent to me by ship across the blue half of the world.
No matter what colour the sky, I can nearly always hear the scream behind it. I hear the scream, and I think how easy it would have been for my father to tell me the sky is the colour of the mantle of Our Lady.
I see myself looking high above me in Saint Kilian’s Church, Bendigo, or in the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo. I am looking among the colours of windows for the blue which is Our Lady’s colour. I am whispering to Our Lady that she is my mother and that I love her, but secretly I am looking in the glass around me for colours other than the mournful blue of Our Blessed Mother. At heart I dislike the hunched woman, and I dread to hear her sniffling and moaning, and to see her white tunic or shift, or whatever she calls the thing under her blue mantle, all stained and damp from her sorrowing.
But my father does not name Our Lady. And just now I notice for the first time in my life that my father in all his life never mentions Our Lady or any such woman.
I hear the scream where I lie on the utterly reliable soil. I hear the scream, but I have to see many more places beneath many more calendars before I understand that what I hear is the scream.
I get up from the grass, and I climb the fence from the yard behind the hall into my own backyard. I kneel down on the bare soil under the lilac bush and I go on with my task of building a dream-racecourse and naming dream-horses to race on it and devising for the owners of dream-horses jackets and sleeves and caps of dream-silk patterned with dream-colours.
I go on with the task that occupies me for the rest of my life.
The patch of sky-blue drifts down from my hand, down past the page of a calendar showing a month in 1982, and down to the carpet, which happens to be an earth-brown colour. I leave the patch of sky-blue lying on the brown where it fell, and I pick up the other patch that was going to be the other sky-blue armband. I drop this patch too from the height of my upraised hand, and this sky-blue, like the other, drifts down past a month of 1982 and settles on the earth-brown.
The patches of blue are far apart on the brown carpet, and each patch is a rhombus, which is not a conventional star-shape. But I leave the patches where they have fallen, and I even press them – firmly, but not fiercely – with my shoe deep into the earth-brown.
I stand at the table with swatches of silk and a razor blade, and I cut out and fit together and seal under the transparent plastic the lilac and brown colours that have satisfied me since. I have no more to do with the colour of screams or of sorrowing women. All that matters of sky has drifted down and has settled on the brown of Clarrie Long’s jacket. I no longer feel my old lack. Now I can stand in my dream-colours beside Clarrie Long. And if the wife of Clarrie Long should happen to look at me once again from behind her dark glasses after all these years, she would see the two men as equals – he in his soil-and-sky, and I in my soil-and-lilac.
In the railway compartment the lights have come on – yellow-white and dull. We are in the tunnel under Big Hill, which my father assures me is the last outcrop of the Great Divide. In the windows is an image of our compartment with darkness around.
In the story ‘First Love’, which I still read every year or so for its railway journeys, the narrator is travelling towards Biarritz. From my reading I understand Biarritz to be such a place that if brown-white photographs were fitted to the walls of compartments of the Nord Express, more than one of those scenes would show the plage, the straw-hatted children, the ladies with parasols (all these are in Nabokov’s story), and a grey-white mist or sea-spray or cloud drifting over the land like a curtain blown inwards by a warm wind (this is not mentioned by Nabokov).
I am sitting in semi-darkness in an inner suburb of Melbourne, watching one of the last motion pictures I will see. A man has persuaded me to watch this motion picture because one of its scenes is of cliffs and valleys richly coloured and said to be unlike any landscape on earth.
I watch the oily colours being continually replenished, and I remember the glass marbles I used to hold up against the sunlight in Bendigo. But the colours in front of my eyes are daubed on some kind of pane, while the colours in Bendigo were in the deepest part of the glass.
When the artist wanted a glass marble to photograph for the jacket of my first book of fiction, I allowed him to handle a few of the marbles that I first collected in Bendigo beneath a calendar showing the ordinal number preceding by two the number on the calendar described in the first sentence of the book of fiction with the glass marble (and the shadow of a second glass marble) on its jacket. I have kept my collection of marbles with me since I was taken away from Bendigo in the fourth year after I arrived there.
The artist chose for the photograph for the jacket of my book a marble of the sort called rainbow.
Much more than the coloured oils and dyes on glass, a scene near the end of the motion picture stays in my mind: a scene in which a very old man sits alone in a room coloured white and pale shades of brown.
I am sitting on a wooden seat on a patch of lawn outside Bendigo railway station. My father and I have reached the end of our journey. Nobody has come to the station to meet us, but by father was expecting nobody, and now he has left me here on this patch of dead grass while he goes to look for a telephone.
I look at the strange blue of the sky and I feel the hotness of the wind. I am only a small child, but I understand what it is to have arrived in a foreign country.
And the heat was a medium which made this change of outlook possible. As a liberating power with its own laws it was outside my experience. In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature.
I tell myself I am living from now on in Bendigo. I will never again live in Melbourne, where I was born. I tell myself this while I wait for my father to come back to this patch of dead grass and dry soil and then to take me into the heart of the city which some sign or some printed caption has already told me is known as the Golden.
My hair is thin and my skin is wrinkled; I have come to the end of my travels. I am sitting on a wooden seat on a patch of dead grass and dry soil outside Bendigo railway station. I have just arrived by train. No page of any calendar is conveniently nearby. It would be unthinkable for any such page to be in sight.
Alfred Jarry once wrote that in order to dwell in eternity, one has only to experience two separate moments at the same moment. I believe this is true whether a moment is a unit of something called time or a unit of place.
I am among the very last, gentle hills to the north of the Great Divide. The place where I am I have called for most of my life the other side of the Divide, but it is here.
Before I opened the book at random, I remembered only one detail from my reading in 1977 of The Go-Between. A boy on holidays from school is attending a gathering, where songs are being sung. One of the leading men at the gathering, trying to encourage people to sing, calls on the boy to sing the latest from school.
I remember no details of the love affair and not even the names of the lovers. But I have not forgotten the oddity of a grown man, with a full and busy life spread out around him, asking a schoolboy what can be seen from the edge of the world.
Long after I had finished, so I thought, the writing of this piece of fiction, ‘First Love’, and only one week before I saw the final proofs of ‘First Love’, a man who has lived for much of his life at Kangaroo Flat, as one of the characters in ‘First Love’ is said to have lived, gave me a copy of a booklet, ‘Goldfields Shepherd: The Story of Dr Backhaus’ by Frank Cusack, published by the Diocese of Sandhurst. (Sandhurst was once the official title of the place that has always been called by its inhabitants Bendigo.) I found in the booklet four sentences that clearly belong in ‘First Love’. Those sentences now form the following paragraph. When I had first read about Dr Backhaus’s wanting in Melbourne to feel the north wind from Bendigo, I had supposed that he died in Melbourne.
‘…already Dr Backhaus was very weak. However, weak as he was, he insisted on returning to Sandhurst. It was there he wished to die and be buried. He rallied; somehow the long, slow trip by train was accomplished, and he was taken to the house of his old friend John Crowley in Wattle Street. There he lingered a day or two…’
The title of the story by Vladimir Nabokov refers to a small girl the narrator meets on the beach at Biarritz. I first thought of mentioning Nabokov’s story in this story when I remembered the blue, bivalved night light, which is the sort of thing I myself can never remember. I thought that was the only connection between the two stories, and I was bothered by a certain untidiness.
As I explained much earlier in this story, I used to read only the early part of ‘First Love’; the railway journeys interested me much more than the coastal city. All the while I was writing my own story, I thought of Nabokov’s story as leading only towards a small girl under the white sky overhanging Biarritz in the years on the other side of the First World War.
Today I read carefully to the end of ‘First Love’. I read, in the second-last sentence, of the narrator’s remembering something about the clothing of the girl that reminded him of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble. I read, in the last sentence, of the narrator’s holding the wisp of iridescence, as he calls it, and not knowing where to fit it into his story. And I read, in the space beneath the last words of the story, the word Boston and the inscription from a calendar 1948 which tells me the author was wondering where that rainbow belonged in the same year in which I packed my glass marbles in a cloth bag in a tea-chest to be loaded onto a furniture van, because my father was taking me back towards Warrnambool and taking me, as he told me then and as I believed for long afterwards, away from Bendigo forever.