The Plains: Text Classics

by Gerald Murnane

It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain.

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.

one man had dissociated himself from the minority of Inner Australians and had taken up the most extreme of all positions. He denied the existence of any nation with the name Australia. There was, he admitted, a certain legal fiction which plainsmen were sometimes required to observe. But the boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men. And according to the projections of real, that is spiritual, geography, the plains clearly did not coincide with any pretended land of Australia. Plainsmen were therefore free to obey any parliament of State or Commonwealth (as, of course, they had always done) and even to participate in the New State Movement, which the secret societies had previously condemned as a farce.

Very Trumpy

The alternative was to upset a neatly poised complex of delusions and to have the borders of the plains beset by a horde of exiles from the nation that had never been.

Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes—one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.

This writer had argued that each man in his heart is a traveller in a boundless landscape. But even the plainsmen (who should have learned not to fear hugeness of horizons) looked for landmarks and signposts in the disquieting terrain of the spirit.

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.

(And what mattered more than the search for landscapes? What distinguished a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?)

How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?

They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.

But did they know that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness—an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the invisible.

And so, on those darkening afternoons, at those scenes whose scenery seemed more often pointed at than observed, whenever the camera in my hand put me in mind of some young woman who might see me years afterwards as a man who saw further than others, I would always ask my patron at last to record the moment when I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.