Landscape with Landscape Quotes

“My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.”
― Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape