Gerald Murnane - Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Invisible yet enduring lilacs

Invisible yet enduring lilacs

Essays Gerald Murnane

First published 2005, reprinted 2007

from the University of Western Sydney

by the Giramondo Publishing Company

PO Box 752 Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia

www.giramondopublishing.com

Gerald Murnane 2005

Designed by Harry Williamson

Typeset by Andrew Davies

in 11.25/14 pt Garamond 3 & Italia bold

Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers

Distributed in Australia by Tower Books

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Murnane, Gerald, 1939 .

Invisible yet enduring lilacs.

ISBN 978-1-920882-09-9 (pbk)

I. Title.

A824.3

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover detail: Noel McKenna

Horse and Jockey (1993)

Ceramic plate, 29cm diameter

Acknowledgements

These essays were published over a period of twenty years, from 1984 to 2003, in the Age Monthly Review, Meanjin, Verandah, Brave New Word, Scripsi, Meridian, Tension, Tirra Lirra and HEAT, and are collected here for the first time.

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

Other books by Gerald Murnane

Tamarisk Row

A Lifetime on Clouds

The Plains

Landscape with Landscape

Inland

Velvet Waters

Emerald Blue
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Barley Patch

A History of Books

A Million Windows

Something for the Pain

Border Districts

Collected Short Fiction

Authors Note

One of the least useful tasks that a person of my years might undertake is to ask how differently he or she should have done this or that in the past.

Even so, the author of the second-last piece in this book, when he was hardly younger than I am now, chose to ask himself just that question. He answered it by declaring that he should never have tried to write novels or novellas or short stories but should have allowed each piece of his fiction to find its own way to its natural end.

The authors conjecturing is futile, of course, but it has inspired me to make an even bolder declaration. I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or even anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.

Contents

MEETINGS WITHADAM LINDSAY GORDON

I remember an unseasonal cold in the air, an almost wintry sky, and mutterings around me from people I thought must have known the truth about the place. I knew little myself; and my father beside me was anxious, as usual, to be away.

I remember looking briefly through more than one window, but what was on the other side of the glass I do not remember. Yet I recall my childish sadness that day for things lost or detained far from their rightful surroundings. I imagined that the house itself had been shipped many years before from Britain. Hearing that a man had composed poetry behind the locked doors, I thought of the poet as a sort of prisoner there, writing to pass the months or years of his sentence or exile. And a strange chain of confusions made me think that the poet was Robert Burns, whose verses I had already chanced on and found, of course, unreadable.

I saw Adam Lindsay Gordons house in Ballarat only that once, on an afternoon in 1946 while I waited with my parents for the bus that would take us across the Western Plains on the second leg of our holiday journey from Bendigo to the coast. Twenty years later I looked at a photograph of the house and saw not a poets cell or a trans-planted bit of the Old World but the house where I had spent the Bendigo years of my childhood. Distracted on that grey summer day by mutterings about the poet and his unhappiness, I had not recognised the two front windows, the central front door, and the hooded iron verandah roof the same pattern that was repeated over and over among the gravel footpaths and picket fences and pepper trees of Bendigo and every other goldfields town.

I had failed to notice that the glass I peered through for signs of my first poet was part of the same symmetry that always appeared to me in the streets of Bendigo as a pair of eyes and a nose under a frowning forehead. Those were the eyes of all the people detained where nothing could ever be a subject for poetry or fiction. I would have seen myself as one of those blankly staring people except that my father talked often of taking us for good where we went every Christmas south-west to his native district on the coast. Indoors on hot afternoons I never peeped around the drawn blinds of my own twin windows because I was thinking of our journey through the hills to Ballarat and then out over the plains.

I could never handle any of the Victorian Readers, published by the Education Department, without imagining a single personage as their compiler. It was a male, the son of a Methodist minister, with two grandparents from Birmingham, one from Aberdeen, and one from Belfast. In his youth he had worked briefly as a jackaroo. Later he had been wounded at Gallipoli. In his mature years, apart from compiling the readers, he was a bushwalker, a lay preacher, and a student of British and Imperial History and Greek and Roman mythology.

In 1949, at a two-roomed school in a forested district a little east of Warrnambool, my teacher actually looked and talked like the Compiler of Readers. And on a certain February afternoon, with his back to a window where deciduous shrubbery framed a sky hazy with bushfire smoke, he took us (his words) for poetry.

Hark! the bells on distant cattle

Waft across the range,

Through the golden-tufted wattle,

Music low and strange;

Like the marriage peal of fairies

Comes the tinkling sound,

Or like chimes of sweet St. Marys

On far English ground.

These and forty other lines from Ye Wearie Wayfarer were printed in our Reader (with a new title and their stanzas altered to make them seem like a message of simple optimism). Girls who could be relied on to put feeling into their voices read aloud a stanza each. Then the composite overseer of my childhood explained that although the poets love of beauty was apparent, still Gordon was not quite a poet to be proud of. He had not quite become an Australian. Just when the cattle-bells and the wattle should have made him appreciate the true beauty of Australia, Gordon had felt homesick for England.

I did not think it odd that Gordon should be blamed for Englishness by the same authority who taught loyalty to Empire. There were appropriate times for an Australian to think of England: during (Protestant) church services; on Shakespeares birthday; at the funeral of a civic or military leader. In general an Australian thought English thoughts indoors and when solemnity was called for. Out of doors one could be Australian, and more light-hearted. Yet I felt a certain sympathy for Gordon. I suspected in those days that a secret meaning was hidden in the landscapes of Australia; and I thought Gordon with his simple home-sickness might have been closer to that meaning than the Compiler of Readers with his breadth of outlook.