Tamarisk Row Read online

  Gerald Murnane was born in a northern suburb of Melbourne in 1939. He spent part of his childhood in country districts of Victoria, moved back to the suburbs of Melbourne in 1949, and has never since left. He is the author of seven books of fiction, including Tamarisk Row (his first novel), The Plains, Landscape with Landscape , Inland and Velvet Waters . His most recent book is the collection of essays Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. He is a recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award and in 2007 was awarded an Emeritus Fellowship by the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

  Tamarisk Row

  Gerald Murnane

  First published 1974

  by William Heinemann Australia Pty Ltd

  This edition published 2008

  for the Writing & Society Research Group

  at the University of Western Sydney

  by the Giramondo Publishing Company

  PO Box 752

  Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia

  www.giramondopublishing.com

  © Gerald Murnane 1974

  Designed by Harry Williamson

  Typeset by Andrew Davies

  in 11.25pt/14pt Garamond

  and 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– .

  Tamarisk Row.

  ISBN 978-1-920882-39-6 (pbk)

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  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 permission of the publisher.

  Other Books by Gerald Murnane

  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 Millions Windows

  Something for the Pain

  Border Districts

  Collected Short Fiction

  Foreword

  Tamarisk Row, my first book of fiction, was first published in 1974. I was already thirty-five years of age at the time, and I had been trying to write such a book since early 1964, ten years before.

  The earliest abandoned fragments hardly resemble the published text. Sometimes my projected book had a title quite unlike Tamarisk Row. That title first occurred to me in 1968, and almost at once I was able to foresee the contents of the book and to outline the shape of it. For the first time in five years, I felt confident of completing a work of fiction.

  During the five years when I was able to write no more than a few thousand words before giving up, I sometimes supposed I was incapable of writing a book-length work of fiction. I believe nowadays that I was incapable of writing what seemed to me a conventional book of fiction: a novel with a plot, with characters deserving to be called credible, and with numerous passages of direct speech.

  As a boy at secondary school, I had had much trouble writing critical essays about novels. Ten years later, as a mature-age student of English at university, I had, if anything, more such trouble. Even after I had seemed to myself to have grasped something of the literary theory then fashionable, that theory remained wholly unrelated to my experiences as a reader of fiction, let alone a would-be writer of it.

  I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading. I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read.

  The personages that I seemed to move among while I was reading were not only what other readers would have called characters. Often the personage whose presence most awed me would have seemed to me to exist on the far horizon of the place where the fictional events were taking place. (And yet the awesome personage sometimes seemed to loom beside me – we two were looking out from almost the same vantage-point.) The awesome personage, as I might have called him or her long ago, I call nowadays the Narrator or the Implied Author, and I still find myself often nowadays as much affected by him or by her as by any fictional character alleged by him or by her to exist.

  The notebooks or journals that I kept during the early 1960s include pages of speculation about the way in which I ought to write the latest draft of my first book of fiction. A recurring question was ‘How much should I claim to know?’ Another matter that troubled me was the distance that should lie between myself-as-narrator and the nearest character in the fiction. While I was writing about these matters, I sometimes thought of myself as dithering or as needlessly agonising over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my much younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so.

  I have my own term for the sort of narration that I used in Tamarisk Row. I call it considered narration. It might be said of some works of fiction that they bring to life certain characters. I would hope that the text of Tamarisk Row could be said to have brought to life the fictional personage responsible for it: the narrator through whose mind the text is reflected.

  Some persons have supposed that the image on the dust-jacket of the first hard-cover edition of Tamarisk Row shows a part of the planet Earth. In fact, the image is of a part of the surface of a coloured glass marble. It was not my decision to have on the dust-jacket of my first book of fiction an image of a glass object the defining features of which lie within the object. And yet, I believe no image could have been more apt. The text of Tamarisk Row may seem to a hasty reader to be an account of so-called actual events on the surface of a well-known planet, but my hope was always, from the time nearly fifty years ago when I made my first notes, that an appreciative reader of my book would seem to be viewing fictional scenes and personages as though through coloured glass.

  The text of the first edition of Tamarisk Row contained several misprints, and these have been corrected for the new edition. As well, the last two sections of the book have been restored to their original positions. ‘The Gold Cup race is run’ is now at the very end, where I had always intended it to be. The editor of the first edition insisted that the book should not end with the account of the race. I, still unpublished, meekly gave way to her.

  Over the years, several readers have told me that they consider ‘The Gold Cup race is run’ an example of so-called stream-of-consciousness prose. It is no such thing. What is now the last section of the book consists of five very long compound sentences, each comprising a main clause and numerous subordinate clauses, together with a description of part of a horse-race. These six items are interwoven, so to speak. The first sentence begins; soon afterwards the second sentence begins; later the third begins, and after it the fourth followed by the fifth. Finally, the race-commentary begins. Soon afterwards, the first sentence continues, only to be interrupted by the continuation of the second sentence, followed by the continuation of the third sentence, and so on. In due course, the five sentences come to an end, one after another. The race-comm
entary, however, does not quite come to an end. The very last words of the book are the words of the race-caller as the field of horses approaches the winning-post.

  Gerald Murnane, 2007

  Tamarisk Row

  Clement Killeaton looks at a calendar

  On one of the last days of December 1947 a nine-year-old boy named Clement Killeaton and his father, Augustine, look up for the first time at a calendar published by St Columban’s Missionary Society. The first page of the calendar is headed January 1948 and has a picture of Jesus and his parents resting on their journey from Palestine to Egypt. Below the picture, the page is divided by thick black lines into thirty-one yellow squares. Each of the squares is a day all over the plains of northern Victoria and over the city of Bassett where Clement and his parents set out and return home across the orange quartzy gravel of footpaths and the black strips of bitumen in the centres of streets, only seldom remembering that high over a landscape of bright patterns of days the boy-hero of their religion looks out across journeys of people the size of fly-specks across paper the colour of sunlight in years he can never forget.

  Bassett hears music from America

  While the calendar for 1947 hangs out of sight beneath the new one, Clement Killeaton lifts a sheaf of pages and sees in the yellow squares the familiar shape of late-afternoon sunlight that he crosses to reach Mr Wallace’s corner store. All around the blistered weatherboards of the Wallaces’ shop and attached house are brightly painted signs whose consistent colours and unwavering lines are the work of a people who live far away beyond the blur of dust or haze at the farthest end of Killeaton’s street, in the labyrinthine mansions with peacock-studded lawns that slope down towards dark-blue ponds. There in a room with enormous windows a man with a polka-dotted bow tie broadcasts radio programs to listeners all over the plains of northern Victoria, telling them about America where people are still celebrating the end of the war. He plays for his listeners a record that has just arrived in Australia. The last words of the song are – in the hills of Idaho in the hills of Idaho. While the record is still playing, the man walks to a window through which someone, perhaps an American soldier, once looked out, across a great distance, towards a few faint ridges of the real Idaho. Tears fill the man’s eyes. When the music stops, thousands of people in Bassett and the country for miles around hear him blowing his nose and clearing his throat.

  The Wallaces’ marvellous aviary

  Clement opens the door of the grocer’s shop and almost catches Mr Wallace doing something shameful behind a stack of biscuit-tins. The boy buys groceries for his mother and then asks politely may he look at Mr Wallace’s aviary. The man shows him out through the back door. Past the crates of empty soft-drink bottles and the brittle tops of dead spear-grass are the towering walls of fine wire-netting. Behind the wire the dense shrubs and trees are planted in the shape of landscapes from every part of Australia. Hidden among the grasslands and scrub and forests and swamps and deserts are the nests of nearly every species of Australian bird. Somewhere past the dangling black and yellow of regent honey-eaters and the elusive crimson and turquoise of paradise parrots Margaret Wallace, a girl no older than Clement, is building a bower like the satin bowerbird’s – a velvety resting-place enclosing more secrets than any dome-shaped nest of wrens or burrow of pardalotes but open to the sky so that whatever is done within its walls will be remembered as happening by sunlight. But Clement is not able to search for the place. Behind him in the yard Margaret Wallace calls out to him to visit her in her playhouse made of boxes and cardboard. She sits under the sign Old Dutch Cleaner Chases Dirt, cramming into her mouth the lollies she has stolen from her father’s shop. Clement peers through the door into the dim playhouse. He still hopes that one day the two of them will pull down each other’s pants and stare at each other in a secluded place like an aviary. Margaret is more friendly than on other days. She offers him humbugs, musks, and Tarzan jubes. Her hands are brightly stained and sticky with sugar. Clement asks her has she noticed any birds mating and breeding in the aviary lately, but Margaret wants to talk about how soon her parents will have saved enough money to buy a house in a better part of Bassett and get away from their shop.

  Clement builds a racecourse

  One Saturday morning in 1946 when the unsteady posts and rusted wire-netting of the lean-to back veranda at 42 Leslie Street are buried deep beneath a blue hill of wistaria blossoms, Clement Killeaton walks out through the back door and begins to collect small twigs and chips from all round the yard. When he has gathered a small bundle he takes them to the space between the lavatory and the lilac tree. Kneeling, he uses the sides of his hands to level and smooth the fine dirt and gravel. With a piece of brick he hammers the first of the tiny lengths of wood upright into the hard earth. By lunchtime he has marked out an elliptical shape with two straight sides. After lunch he surrounds this with a second circuit of little posts parallel to the first. Late in the afternoon he searches for a longer, regular piece of wood. He chooses one of several likely pieces and drives it firmly into the ground at one end of the straight sides, between two posts of the inner series. As the shadows of the dense suckers of lilac reach the far side of his cleared space, Clement forms loose dirt into a long low mound beside the straight that is marked by the one taller post. Just before his mother calls him inside for the night he scratches with his fingernails in the hard-packed earth at the edge of his cleared place, shaping the first few yards of a road that will lead from the racecourse under the lilac tree, by way of leisurely loops and confusing junctions, past many unkempt shrubs and through tangles of weeds to the farthest corner where the tamarisks lean. He gouges out something that he thinks at first is a lump of gravel. It proves to be a whole round marble that must have been lying in the ground since before the Killeatons came to live in Leslie Street. While Clement is washing the marble at the gully trap, his mother calls him in for tea. He asks who might have owned the marble. She supposes that some boy who lived there before Clement must have lost it or just left it outside and forgotten it until the rain or the dust came and covered it up for all those years. Clement takes the marble to the kitchen window and holds it up against the setting sun. Far away in the heart of a silvery-white skein that seems to have no beginning and no end is an orange or scarlet glow. Next morning Clement shows the marble to one of the Glasscock boys from next door. The boy says – yes I remember that alley all right – it belongs to Frankie Silverstone the big kid that used to live here before you shifted here – he used to have hundreds of precious alleys and that one was his favourite – if you give it to me I’ll ask my mum where the Silverstones shifted to and post it to Frankie. Clement refuses to hand over the marble, but because he is frightened that Silverstone may hear about it he lets the Glasscock boy choose ten alleys to keep in return for saying no more about the one that turned up in the yard. Clement spends a long time near the lilac tree, wondering which parts of his yard he ought to build his roads across in the hope of turning up more marbles on the way from the racecourse to the tamarisks.

  The people beneath the tamarisks live for racing

  One hot day after his racecourse has been built, Clement walks across his backyard towards the corner where the tall horny trunks of the tamarisks curve upwards from lumpy boles. On the lee side of the very last tamarisk, Clement conceals one of the farmhouses he has prepared for the owners of racehorses. The people who first settled years ago on that farm chose the row of tamarisks because someone had told them how of all trees that are famous for their hardiness the tamarisk can endure the fiercest heat and the driest desert soils, and how people who are setting out to cross desert country always know that when they have passed the last tamarisks they are entering the most desolate land of all. The lonely place beneath the tamarisks is the farthest of all farms from the racecourse. The husband and wife who live there look up every day at the brittle green spikes that give no shade or the pink wisps of blossom that they sometimes mistake for dust drifting in f
rom the reddish land farther out. They remember how their grandparents, who must have travelled over great distances, stopped at last at a place from which their children and grandchildren could still look further out but only towards a place that they dared not settle in. If the children and grandchildren wanted to go to live in places even lonelier than the land of the tamarisks, they would have to retrace the journeys of their ancestors, hoping to discover pockets of desert or bush that the first travellers did not notice or perhaps a district that they crossed and marked with roads but which has since been neglected or forgotten and lapsed back into a wilderness. On the walls of their lounge-room are coloured photographs of the finishes of races. In one photograph a powerful black stallion thrusts his massive head with gaping nostrils and unseeing eyes out from between a bunch of brown and chestnut geldings. High above a confused mass of coloured silken jackets and caps the right arm of the rider of the black horse is raised in what might be a gesture of triumph. The green silk of the sleeve has fallen away from the man’s frail wrist. Gripped between his knuckles is a thin whip of dark leather that has curled itself backwards into a perfect arc. The writing under the picture explains that Journey’s End, a black horse six years old, was beaten by half a head in the Gold Cup of that year. Late on a summer afternoon the parish priest knocks at the door. Although the day is hot and the house is almost wholly hidden by trees and hedges, the husband and wife are both decently dressed. To show that they have nothing to hide the man lets the priest in at once. The three people soon begin to talk about racing. The married couple tell the priest about the horse named after their property Tamarisk Row. He is the son of the old unlucky stallion Journey’s End and they are training him carefully in secret for this year’s Gold Cup. The priest reminds them that racing is neither good nor bad, that it neither pleases nor angers God to look down and see His children spending all their time and money in planning to win a big race, that racing is only sinful when people are not content with the joy of seeing their horse get up in a close finish but use their winnings for other pleasures like eating and drinking huge meals in expensive hotels and night clubs or undressing their girlfriends or boyfriends in luxurious houses bought from the proceeds of successful plunges. The husband and wife assure the priest that they take their pleasure only from the racing itself. The husband even suggests that a married couple might get more joy from sharing in the ownership of a promising galloper than from any other pleasure of marriage, but the priest thinks that this would be giving to racing more importance than it really has in God’s plan for the world.