The Plains

I made five trips to Europe, each an event in my life. The last was the longest; I went on my own, my children grown up, my working life behind me. My parents were dead and I’d seen them buried among other family graves. I’d made up my mind that I would not myself be buried there, when my time came. The idea of life as journey was too strong to let me attach myself to Father’s birthplace, though I was connected to it; my own travels had linked me to too many other places. It was possible, even if not for me, to love France, Canada or China as well, as strongly, as Father had loved the place where he grew up. This was so even though Father’s locale had entered me so deeply that I took the transition from red gum to black box trees, as one moved away from the Murray River, as a signal from the earth that in making do with less water, it had had to adjust its tree cover. Water birds, too, were less frequent, and yielded to the galahs, magpies and crows of the plains. I knew those plains well from drives with my parents when I was young, and trips with friends when I was older. They looked – though they weren’t – featureless, but they spoke with infinity on equal terms. As you drove across them you saw homesteads on the horizon, a mile or three from their ornamental, or crazily-bashed-together gates; the homes drew trees about them, and comforted themselves with sheds for shearing, storage, or simply that quirky need for company that buildings have when there’s nothing else around but wind, cloud, and sky …

Infinity, I think I said.

It meant a great deal to me. I took a trip to Hay, on the Murrumbidgee in south-west New South Wales, not long after I bought a new car, and I had with me a folding chair, because I knew what the plains would make me do. I drove, and when I got there, I pulled off the road, took out the chair and put myself in it. It was late on a spring afternoon and my canvas seat was as good as a throne. I sat, alone, happy, my car ready to take me into town. Another car came along, the driver wound down his window and called, ‘You all right?’ I waved, and nodded my head. I felt he understood. He drove off quietly, leaving me alone, except that I had my country all around. No Eagles had settled nearby, as far as I knew, but it was familiar. It had a history of wagons carting wool bales to the nearest railhead, of huge properties looking after their workers, of homesteads anywhere between rough and drunken to places of refinement and family values expressed in ways that led to the cities of my own country and beyond. The squattocracy were neither coarse nor refined, per se, but adaptable. The land had made them what they were, and they knew it. Why was I sitting there as the sky darkened? I thought of myself, foolishly enough, as being like a figure of Henry Moore, hands holding the arms of my chair, feet softly on the earth, feeling the distances softening my heart as I thought of those earlier times when I had crossed the plains, these or the southerly ones between the home my parents had made and the earlier one, when Father had been a boy and Australia had been that much more refined because its circumstances were rougher; as it eased, as it settled, Australia had loosened, let go much of its Britishness and become …

… whatever it was still becoming. I asked myself if I would like to live in Hay, a dignified town, hot as hell in summer, centred by its early settlement on the river, linked by trucks, these days, rather than rail, to the outside world. Would I live there, perhaps, yes or no? Was that what I had come to decide? Or was I simply soaking up the idea and turning it into freedom to become anything I liked, in the years to come?

The reader will perhaps sense that the latter was my answer, one I didn’t reach until several years later, but which planted itself in my mind that afternoon, on the plains a little west of Hay …

Years passed, and I visited France for the last time, though I didn’t know that then. As usual, I wrote travel notes every day. Here’s what I wrote in Rennes, on the ninth of February, 1994.

Today I took the bus (an hour’s drive) to Le Mont Saint Michel. The pictures and little statues of Saint Michael had him as a brilliant gold figure, trampling on and spearing a figure which I took to be the devil. Assuming I’m right, the statue reinforces one of my prejudices because it glorifies a figure making war on a despised aspect of human nature – those attributes which the church located in the figure who ruled the kingdom of evil. That the human race persistently does shocking things is apparent to us all, but the metaphor of defining the enemy as separate, and to be assaulted with frenetic violence, offends my increasingly quietist soul. Peace has to be sought within oneself, with self-understanding, great patience, and as full an awareness of life’s processes. I suppose I belong to those who think that an act of abstention from sexuality, commerce, or the rigours of a normal life, is not a good way to reach any sort of deeper understanding. One should always be aware of what it is one wants, and where one wants to go, but should rest easy – or otherwise – in the awareness that everything has to be known, seen, considered and possibly experienced, before we can say we are beyond it, and ready for another stage.

That, in very rough terms, and without the distinctions that a dialogue would enforce, is my reaction to the idea of a devil to be conquered. Fancy imagining that a ‘devil’ is ‘conquered’ by ramming a spear into his (his) ribs, or by hacking off his head with a sword. It seems to me that to define an enemy and then kill him is the surest possible way of becoming like the apparently detested enemy. The enemy is finally, oneself, and to fight the enemy is to reinforce, inside oneself, the characteristic which one apparently wanted to be rid of.

That can only come about through growth, and patience.

L’Ile Saint Michel loomed in the mist very late in the drive. We (four of us) got out. I advanced one step at a time. At first I was as repulsed as yesterday at Saint Malo. All these places wanting to sell you meals, or souvenirs on the basis of a Great Experience which you haven’t yet had. What pressure they put you under!

I kept on going and soon discovered – one of the first principles of climbing – that I was already starting to get a look, views, and some distance from the point of origin. I reached a turn in the stairs which I felt led to La Merveille, a name which has, by imposing a superlative on your thinking, almost as harmful an effect as the hotels, et cetera. I looked at my watch, and, reassured by the woman in the ticket box that a ticket bought was for la journée, I went on. And within minutes I’d experienced the cloister, the church, the refectory, and the wonderful space in front of the church where one could look at the sea, the bay, the mud flats, the other island, the waterbirds, all those things that told you where you stood.

I stood, today, in the middle of cloud, gloom and drizzle, and loved it. Le Mont was always meant to be an introspective place, and today was perfect. Men were working on the outside of the chapel. They had a window out, and when they wanted to move one of the repaired (re-cut) stones into position, that is, from within the church to the outside, a little engine was set whirring, clicking, and the stone moved, under control, a few centimetres. I liked this patient, careful way of working. The place had been there for centuries!

I took it all in once, and went down, just as one of the organising women began to close up. With a brightness and warmth that I loved, she told me that it was closed la bas, where the tickets were bought, but not ‘up here’ where the great vision of sea and sky was available on the forecourt.

I went down and spent some time in the second of the two souvenir shops (the first was before the great features I’ve mentioned above); that, too, gave me hesitations, but I was assured that one could go straight through – and one could. One did, and was able at once to imagine a male world of singing, jobs, little food, doctrine, prayer, feeding pilgrims (not for too long, or tucker would run out), and searching for the great abstraction without the presence – the distraction, they said – of women.

Even Marcel Proust speaks of women as if they are of profound importance to male humans because they lie outside, and around, and at the source of those whose life is the central experience of the human race. I’m loving my Proust this time … but I’m not unaware of his position.

This morning I read his presentation of the homosexual Baron Charlus to the reader, and it was superb!

I had a brief lunch – a pizza slice and a plastic container of chocolate – read the paper and looked from the ramparts, then went up again, before coming down through the rooms which my booklet tells me are famous.

The day being gloomy and the place sparse, I was able to define its purposes clearly enough, and felt disappointed that to the monks’ experience had been added the hotels and souvenir shops, and from their experience had been excised those places which had to do with the presumably non-ritualised functions of sleeping, shitting, and, occasionally, bathing. Surrounded by water, they must have needed water. Seeking blessedness, they must sometimes have found it in launching boats, swimming or fishing – if they were at all human, as they must have been.

My notes return at this point to things I’ve already said about gothic architecture, then take a turn, unexpected by me, as I sat in Rennes, writing:

Which brings me to express, only very briefly, the effect these places have on me. Exposure to them is steadily burning the European out of me. I can still hear certain passages of Berlioz, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven (and you name it) and know that I will die without giving up what I found as a young man, but I also know that as I grow older I’ll find less and less inspiration in Europe, and will find in the great spaces of my own country, haunted by the vestiges of a culture I hardly understand, more and more of the sustenance I need in the remainder of my life. Going to L’Ile Saint Michel was a great experience but it reminds me of a late afternoon and early evening, many years ago, when Roger Moore and I drank some whiskey on the beach a little way east of Lakes Entrance, and reminds me also of the great discoveries that embedded the Wainwright story in me, and made me write a certain book over thirty years later. It’s as if, here in Europe, wonderfully rich Europe, but so brutally and blatantly concerned with itself, I’m taking all the riches and they’re having an antidotal effect. I don’t want any more. Europe is the dominant part of the human race which, though I weep tears for my beloved Hector Berlioz … I was going to say ‘want to put behind me’ – but actually I want to sweep it out of the way. It’s no use to me. It provides me with no way forward.

It doesn’t even bring me to where I am tonight.

I put my notes down wondering why I’d said these things. I still had places to visit. I took an overnight train to Marseille, and visited the sights of Provence, annoyed at times by the frustrations of travel, but loving everything else. The Frenchman in me wasn’t giving up. I talked to my hotel-keeper who spent his Sundays looking for pictures and furniture for the rooms he offered his guests. I drank hot chocolate in cane chairs set in the sun, near an ancient Roman arena. I watched, and despised, the killing of six bulls. (Hemingway, you fool!) I cherished the snow as a train took me to Clermont Ferrand in the central alps. I lunched in working men’s pubs talking to anyone who would talk with me. I finished Vol. 1 of Proust and was sad that I didn’t have Vol. 2 so I could go straight on. Strange as Marcel was, he embodied so much of the French mind; they really were a culture apart, even though they bordered Germany, Italy, Spain, the lowlands and England across the water. How had these cultures grown so different when they were so close? My own country couldn’t differentiate its parts as Europe could. Yet the Europeans had been to war so often; they’d been, often enough, the devils they affected to despise. Had they, in defining half of humanity as devilish, given themselves the devil’s energy when they wanted it? I thought they had; the Christian condemnation was a way of allowing themselves to be what they told themselves they shouldn’t be. Every war, every business victory, was a claim, an achievement, made by the non-Christian sides of themselves. No wonder they located their spirituality, their faith, in places built specially. They’d built spires everywhere in order to locate themselves but they still allowed themselves to do whatever they liked and take benefits therefrom.

Odd people, the Europeans!

From Paris I flew to New York and found myself confronted by the even odder people who lived there. I’d been warned not to make eye contact if travelling on the subway, a maxim I obeyed until I no longer felt fear. New Yorkers had drive and if they could conceive of something it could be done. You had only to look at the buildings, if you could twist your neck around to see the tops. Their variety of styles showed that Americans could vary what they did even as their confidence renewed itself, year after year. They’d built the Chrysler Building as the recession crashed about them. I had the feeling they might do the same again, confidence answering the disaster that hadn’t dented it.

Or that was how it seemed. What would my country look like when I got home? Would I find things in it to sustain me, or would I feel bereft? I was only staying a couple of weeks in New York; my test wasn’t far away!

It was dawn when we landed in Sydney. I rushed to the domestic terminal and got a flight to Melbourne. A stranger sat next to me and we talked all the way. We landed, and I was home.

This word is a magnet attracting meanings. Home. My journey had reached its end. I’d been to many places, been affected by them all, and now the place of reckoning had been reached. That, for me, was what ‘home’ meant: it was where you balanced your thoughts and made your judgements. If life was a journey, if you were a traveller most of the time, home was where you considered what you’d do next.

You might decide to do nothing at all!

I was home, and I knew it. I’d been away before and each time I’d been happy to get back: my house knew its job was to welcome me with the cup of tea I could never get anywhere else. It did its job every time and did it again after my circling the world. I looked at a map of Australia, asking myself where I’d go first, now that I was back. I couldn’t differentiate; it was all mine. I owned none of it except the house I was sitting in, but the spiritual connection was complete. I belonged to this country. What was it they said about the aboriginal people? They belonged to the land rather than it belonging to them. Was that true? White people could rarely be trusted as interpreters of the aboriginal mind because the black people kept us out. It was the only safe thing to do, we were such a deceitful mob. Yet, whitefellas and blackfellas, we had to make a civil country between us; the time of aboriginal singularity could never have gone on forever. Isolated as they had been for millennia, the writing – of invasion – had always been on the wall, and it had turned into reality in 1788. The ever-impending had become the reality, my home stood in the middle of what had resulted, and I was in it.

My travel, so exciting, so stimulating, had been a trip away. A home, something to return to, was therefore a necessity. I visited friends, resumed my part-time work, did shopping and answered the phone when it rang. Everything slipped back to normal. Daily rituals were resumed. I printed my travel notes and gave copies to friends. I liked the thought of them being able to follow me around. They asked questions like, ‘How was it?’ and ‘Where’d you go?’ and I was able to tell them, plus what I’d been thinking at the time. That was what counted, for me – what I’d been thinking at the time. It’s a cliché to say, but a true cliché, that what we see most clearly when we travel is what it’s like back home. The benefit of travel is to see your own place more clearly.

So what had I seen while I was away?

This took years, and I’m still thinking about it. I want to say that Australia’s hot, dry, and flat, because those are my strongest memories of childhood, but of course there are parts of the country that are not, or not all the time, and yet these exceptions simply reinforce the impression I have of a land that has no need of humans. Imagine China without the Chinese? England or France without the English, the French? It can’t be done. The people and the country have formed each other and belong together. They’re as close as can be to indivisible. Strangely, this is also true of the settlers of Australia, who know they don’t entirely belong and cling all the harder to the place they want to make their own.

Australia is in an endless state of becoming, and this aligns with the fact that it’s such an eroded land. It’s worn out – except that it’s not. One of its paradoxes is that its rockiest, most barren places produce more than their share of wildflowers. Its greatest variety of eucalypts, including the ones that flower most richly, grow on the poorest soils. Huge slabs of Western Australia are no more than uplifted sea-bed, and look what they produce in spring! Even our madness is attached to the lure of gold in impossible places. The deserts pull people in and they revel in despair at the same time as they glory in the directionless spaces. Directionless? Sandhills lie parallel to each other, mile after mile, rippling at the will of winds that have blown forever. Nobody knows how far back the aboriginal civilisation goes, so nobody can imagine the beginnings of our country. It was once part of Gondwanaland, but that, and its eventual break-up, was before the arrival of human memory. The beginnings of everything are out of sight, of human recall, and this problem is neatly stitched up as insoluble by the way the aboriginal people have compressed what Europeans call history: they conflate the origins, the beginnings, with the present, in a concept which we latecomers summarise as ‘the dreaming’. I’m in no position to say what this means but it seems to refer to the present – yes, the present – as being no more than a part of what Christian-influenced whitefellas would call the creation. That is to say, the origins are also the now. Creation and re-creation are always going on, and surround us still, as they have always done.

I find it peculiarly liberating to think this way, when I can, and if I try. Space and time seem to be the co-ordinates of European thought, in modern times at least, and the Australian landscape, if seen in the aboriginal way, seems to be beyond that systematic control. This accords with the way in which our floods, fires and droughts, our ‘teeming rains’, as Dorothea McKellar called them, happen at times that confound our expectations. This was observed early on by white settlers and everything since 1788 has confirmed the excessive habits of our land. To the European mind, this represents the loss by mankind of our normal dominance, and the enforcement of a certain humility. This, I think, is good. Proud man benefits from a little enforced humility, and this, if contrasted with the pride of Europe, seems both rebellious and providing of a remarkable opportunity. Mankind knows what it will get if it’s allowed to be dominant; one has only to look around the world as we’ve known it. But if mankind is forced onto terms other than those it would have chosen for itself? The result is already becoming apparent. Circumspice! Look around you!

What is there to see?

In an earlier piece of writing, One Small Step, I referred to Goyder’s Line, a definition of where we should and shouldn’t try to settle. The South Australian surveyor proposed that European farming couldn’t be practised beyond a certain point. This is an early attempt to define a boundary that many commentators on this country have discussed, that is, the nature of coastal, European-style settlement as opposed to the requirements of the inland. Requirements? Perhaps I should have said ‘enforcements’. European methods can be made to work for a certain distance, as defined, mostly, by rainfall, and then something different takes over. The aboriginal way of living, the subservience to nature, as whitefellas would put it, has a suitability which even whites can see, or accept in some notional way, at least. The aboriginal way is adapted to the land in a mixture of cunning and humility. They built shelters when the area was dependable enough, they managed the land by fire (fresh grass to attract the kangaroos), and they used stones to make fish traps in circumstances where this was possible, but they were never in any doubt that they had to fit in with the ecology surrounding them. Europeans would say that their development had stopped at this point; they, I must presume, would say that the Europeans were too successful some of the time to ask themselves why they couldn’t keep on going in the way they did. Whitefellas thought you could dam rivers, or divert them, to suit themselves; blackfellas, expert in finding water wherever it might be, could move easily through ‘deserts’ that appalled the whites. Explorers took blackfellas with them to assist in their conquest, but rarely reversed the roles: they were there to discover, rather than to learn. That is to say, they were no less European when they failed than when they succeeded. I think this remains true even when we, the white settlers, manage to drive roads to, and create aerodromes in, territory that has been handed back to the blacks.

Like Uluru.

This last – the centre of Australia – is an example of the adaptation which Australia, the land mass, has enforced on its arrivals. Once called the dead heart, it is now as focussed by songlines as ever it was, but the lines now lead from all over the country, indeed the world, to a spiritual place; what is called tourism is really an endless pilgrimage to something held in awe, if insufficiently understood. Australia is a spiritual land, and this is an outcome of the millennia-long erosion that has worn our landscape down. The land is not much more and certainly no less than its flowers, its trees and birds, its aura of what things can rightfully be conducted on its surface and those that can’t. Its presence is a form of that morality which the white settlers couldn’t see in the aboriginal way of living and therefore thought wasn’t there. Used as they were to the spiritual and the virtuous, the moral, being embodied in a set of rules and customs, practices and conventions which were articulated and embodied in the churches which they’d built everywhere, the Australia they discovered seemed too unrestricted, out of control, to be thought of as possessing a ‘civilisation’ of its own.

Yet how strongly it speaks to us of restraint, teaches us to conserve, and all the rest. Worn as it may be, it’s articulate enough. Its speaking points are clear if you listen as you move. The centre. The tropical north. The waves besieging the bight, and Tasmania, our southern tip. Those vast transitions from one sort of landscape to another. The Blue Mountains, such a barrier until settlers discovered, in getting through them, that what had been a barrier had become a possibility. Wasn’t this the way to think?

Australians are learning to embrace their land, slowly as it may be happening. It’s mostly a matter of relaxing the grids, poles and structures of personality as we’ve learned to think of them. We’ve tied ourselves to the inwardness of our thinking, our psychology, as it’s known, when we might have loosed ourselves in our responses, as we all do to some degree. We’ve made systems out of our thought patterns, and now our social structures are less yielding than we’d like them to be. Our education trains us to follow the rules we’ve made for ourselves. We’re free to go where we like but when we get there, our minds are inflexible, so that we can’t respond to what we see.

And yet of course we can. If we go to Alice Springs, we know what a spring is; it’s water, and it comes up out of the ground. We can walk, if we like, along the MacDonnell Ranges, camping at spring after spring. There’s water there, and birds to guide us. The grevilleas flowering tell us not to give up hope! The black people, as I have observed before, were spread more evenly across the land than whites have ever been. They adapted, and they had thousands of years to work out how to do it. Whitefella judgements of blacks as lacking civilisation reveal little but the shortcomings of their own adaptation. The blacks had stories for every place, meaning that their imaginations had engaged with those places, and it’s the imagination, finally, even more than the science and the buildings, which is the mark of a lively civilisation.

How, then, did the European imagination overpower the blacks’? By guns, alcohol, disease, and willingness to use their power. The blacks retreated to their furthest, inmost, homelands, dishevelled and defeated, if they thought of the invaders they wanted to ignore. Their millennia-long isolation still had its appeal. They’d been safe, secure, back then. Slowly, now, they’re reappearing, unafraid of the comparisons they face. Will they be able to teach the newcomers to be respectful of the land? I think so. It’s happening, here and there, as white farmers realise that water isn’t in endless supply, and long droughts will happen again. Everything that’s done to the land will have its effects. What’s needed is to work with it, not to take from it. This sort of thinking is finding its way into our heads. We are aware, despite endless denials and efforts to dodge into side tracks of thought, that the land we’ve drawn a line around possesses a scarcely definable unity, to which the regions I referred to all make their contributions. Variable as it may be, the land requires us to be responsible in the way we treat it. We can’t ravage and expect it to repair itself.

So the land is forcing us to change. We say it’s our ‘environment’, but it’s our aesthetic too. It’s also the base of our morality, if we think about it hard enough. It’s our absolute, really, the thing against which we have to measure ourselves. I’ve already described myself sitting in a chair on the plains near Hay, as surrounded by infinity. This involves seeing oneself as tiny, insignificant, yet full of harm, and damage, unless restrained by humility. I’ve already described European civilisation as based on pride; we resemble them, we are them, transplanted, but the shift to a different continent has meant that the European rules have had to change, and that what must prevail, down here, is not pride but its opposite. We can take pride only in not taking pride. We can be pleased with ourselves when we’ve done without. Eroded as the land was before we arrived, washed out, long-suffering, it hardly needed us, did it? It was covered with trees, flowers, birds, and grasses to the stirrups of the settlers’ horses. Species now extinct lived well. It flourished, or it didn’t, over spans of time that didn’t fit the economic system we brought here. It’s forcing us to see that the ways of other places mightn’t be the right ways for this place of ours.

Note the possessive pronoun! It is ours, however much we may struggle against it. It’s tempting, when we travel in other parts of the world, to call for the skyscrapers, the galleries and the orchestras, the palaces and the punishment places we see over there, because we think that if only we could be as cruel as they are we could be equally commanding, domineering …

… but somehow it doesn’t work when we get back home. We’ve been here too long now, we whitefellas, to deny the land we belong to. We know its ways by now, and it knows ours. Travel is a wonderful release, an enlargement of the imagination, a broadening of the perception, but we can’t, or not forever, not endlessly, use it as an escape. Whether he knew it or not, Governor Phillip, back in 1788, with his sailors, soldiers, convicts, merchants and the rest of them, half starving for most of those early years, bereft of England and mountain-locked out of the new land they were claiming, was proposing and then consummating a wedding which has already produced, and will continue to bring, the most surprising results!