The Best Australian Stories (63 page)

Eventually, Crawley's editor and close friend, David Phillips, banned him from making any further references to Harmer in the journal. By that time, of course, a scandal had erupted over
Ariel's Daughter
. The original review, at close to 10,000 words, was rejected by Phillips, the two men almost coming to blows when Crawley realised Phillips had cut 96 per cent of the review. (Phillips later destroyed all copies of the longer review, fearing it would irrevocably damage his friend's reputation.) Even in the shortened form, the review is excruciating, reading like a 400-word chat-up line. And yet it must have had the desired effect, as soon after it was published Emma Harmer fled to Africa with Crawley. Her husband, pursuing them to the airport, was arrested for brandishing a knife at the boarding gates.

It is the great irony of Peter Crawley's life that he courted controversy yet married banality. But there can be no doubt that he was deeply in love with Emma Harmer. Only a man besotted would have carefully recorded for posterity her asinine travel observations in
An African
Honeymoon
.

Controversially, Crawley's last, unfinished piece, the wry essay ‘Where Is That Great Australian Novel?,' has been included in the collection. I believe that here, at least, the editors made the correct decision. The twelve pages that survive are amongst the best Crawley ever wrote. Sadly, we will never know the answer to the question he set himself. As he was putting the finishing touches to the essay, a deranged Frank Harmer broke into the critic's house. He found Crawley in his study, bludgeoned him into unconsciousness with a glass paperweight, then stuffed the last eight pages of the essay down Crawley's throat, choking him to death.

Peter Crawley once said, pessimistically, ‘The good writing about writing will go first, and then the good writing itself.' This collection of good writing about writing has not sold well, and the publishers have scrapped plans for a second volume. I suspect this will be the last we will see of Crawley on the bookshelves, except perhaps in the form of posterity he most detested, that of three or four lines in a book of quotations.

And the good writing itself? Crawley's widow Emma recently changed her name to Emma Crawley-Harmer. Her autobiography,
The
Poetess of Sadness
(with its lengthy subtitle,
One Woman's Extraordinary
Journey Through Marriage, Infidelity, Madness and Murder
) reputedly sold for a six-figure sum, and was released by Picador last week. While the reviews were overwhelmingly negative, the book has debuted at number two on the bestsellers list, outsold only by
The Dog and the
Lamp-post
, now in its seventh printing.

Repossession

Michael Meehan

Tom O'Reilly took two shotgun cartridge cases and rolled his note and secured it inside, forcing the lip of one case into the other till it was watertight. Then he pitched it to the darkness. A year or two later and well after his death and only by an extraordinary chance a dog out chasing kangaroos toppled into the abandoned well-shaft and stayed there barking, unable to climb the crumbling walls and save itself until they lowered the youngest of his sons into the well-shaft on a rope.

The red flash of the cartridge caught his eye, half buried in the dried mud and the sand.

A year later, the sons were called to rescue a child stuck up a hollow pine. The boy, down from the city, had gone up to steal a Major Mitchell's egg. He climbed too high and out along a branch, and was unable to get back. When they went up to fetch him, they found high up in the crevice a cigarette pack wrapped in plastic with a further note inside.

After that time they went on to discover other notes, Tom's nine children now starting to scour the wilderness for further messages, with now and then a cartridge case appearing, or a bottle or a matchbox or cigarette pack hidden within a hollow log or in a cockatoo's nest lodged high up in a blasted Murray pine and even, once, deep in a rabbit burrow. All knew by then that through those last months of his life, Tom O'Reilly, with tumour spreading through his brain and all around him the lands that were mingled with his sweat and labour shrinking apace, roamed out across those tracts of recent dispossession to plant his mysteries and his presence, to seed his lost lands with fragments of some message, the whole of which was never to be found.

Tom discovered just months before the tumour took its hold that the leasehold on all the land that he and his forbears had cleared, settled and straightened for a hundred years was to be resumed, the stock hunted out, the fences uprooted, the sheds demolished and the dams choked off, with Tom and his heirs left clinging to each other on a withered three-hundred-acre freehold fragment at the core. The word resumed did not mean in this instance a return to any state of being that ever was before, when the first inhabitants tracked across that wilderness. It did not mean a vacating of the land for other wandering pilgrims to return, or restoration to some pristine state where the land might learn to speak in its own voice. It was rather for the imprint of a bureaucratic story, of this way and not that way and nine to five and make sure the gate is closed. The new Decalogue was spelt out in signs and bins and chains and padlocks, the pathways and tracks closely charted and signposted with the strictest prohibitions, and camping here and not there and, of course, no open fires. The stringy box and buloke and stark stands of pine were now lost to regulation, the early nomad wanderings of Tom O'Reilly and his brothers and sisters below the vast white gums that lined the ancient lakebeds now boxed back to the padlocked gate, the official map, the jackboot grid of Management Vehicles Only.

Thus Tom O'Reilly with spreading tumour and with shrinking lands crossed the boundaries of that last and fragile island freehold and tracked out at night into the coarse tracts of scrub and seas of box and buloke and mallee and Murray pine, taking within him his lode of secret messages, now hiding his voice in hollow trees and wash-holes and soaks and under fallen logs and in rabbit burrows and in parrots' nests, seeding the landscape with his messages but always in secret and in hidden places, with just enough to be discovered for all to know there must be many others across that landscape. With his own life and holding now buckled to restriction Tom still raged against that dying and that shrinking, forging at last these new and lasting forms of possession, new ways of living with a landscape that would run far beyond
I own
towards
I know, I love, I understand
, bred from an intuition fed perhaps by the secret marks of those previous travellers who had moved across that landscape, their presence never quite eroded, their fragile but rich possession still marked for those with eyes skilled to see it in the middens, soaks and canoe trees, and in other hidden places.

What did the notes say? That if you walked two hundred metres directly to the east you would come across a mallee fowl's nest. That if you crossed the sand ridge three hundred metres to the left, you would find the last of a trapper's hut. That if you made for the tall pine that capped the huge drift to the east you would in less than one hundred metres find a hidden soak. No more than fragments. Not maps, but only parts of maps. Fragments not touching other fragments. As though Tom O'Reilly knew that it was in full order and design that his own destruction lay, that it was in incompleteness and broken tracks and hidden vignettes only that there was life and hope of continuing possession. The tumour in his brain telling him at last the deepest truths of our nomadic condition, against which no kind of fencing, no kind of signposting might give reassurance, he knew, though perhaps in deep unconsciousness, that this smallest shift from frame to frame, the living that one did within the short space that ran from abandoned well to mallee fowl nest, from hollow tree to trapper's hut, from hidden soak to canoe tree, was the best form of mapping that there could be. That the best way to tell the story was not to wrap up the story but to replace it with a lasting conversation. That the best way to possess was not in deed or map or charter but in the adding of one's voice to all the voices that had passed, to be part of the disorder and not the regulation, part of the fount and not the boundary, part of the mystery but not the explanation

How many further maps, how many further secrets? If you asked his widow, years afterwards, what Tom O'Reilly thought he was doing, the answer was quite clear and simple, that he liked to find old bottles in the bush and even once high in a hollow tree; that once or twice in all that time he had found things with old writing in them, and thought it would be good for those after him to find these things as well. The richness of his artistry perhaps being as well spelt-out in her few words as ever surly Tom would have attempted, he never telling anyone or trying to explain those silent night-time journeys, linking his messages with the flints of rock and the marks in the trees, the nests and new growths of mallee; innumerable, boundless and not subject to resumption. His family, as though knowing, even before that first note was discovered, decided at his death to build the box themselves and bury him on the last of the freehold. His casket was rough-hewn from that same strain of Murray pine in which he left his messages, the coarse adzed planks sawn and nailed and screwed together, the boards scarce meeting at the seams so that he might quickly meet the earth and be possessed in turn, his body running out to join his words. The nine children, each risking a splinter, carried him to his grave, set on a high ridge beyond the house and towards the sand drifts, to overlook the margins of the freehold fragment, the boundary fence, and beyond, out over the wild and ever renewed and now illimitable tracts of Tom O'Reilly's mysterious repossession.

The Boy's Name Was David

Gerald Murnane

The man's name was whatever it was. He was more than sixty years of age and he spent much of his time alone. He was never idle, but he was no longer in paid employment, and on the most recent census form he had described himself as a retired person.

He had never thought of himself as having any profession or following any career. From about his twentieth to about his sixtieth year he had written some poetry and much prose fiction, and some of the fiction had been afterwards published. During those same years, he had earned a living by several means. In his forty-first year, he had found a position as a part-time tutor in fiction-writing in an insignificant so-called college of advanced eduction in an inner suburb of Melbourne. His first students were all adults, some older than himself. So far as he could tell, they were not impressed by his credentials or his teaching methods, and he responded by being wary with them and giving away little of himself.

He had been given to understand that he was only a stop-gap; that he would keep his tutor's position only until the college was able to appoint permanently as a lecturer one or another writer of note: someone whose reputation would lend prestige to the writing course. In the event he, whatever his name was, stayed on for sixteen years. By then, the place where he was employed had become a university and most of his students were not long out of school. How these things came about is no part of this piece of fiction.

This piece of fiction begins a few years after its chief character had ceased to be a teacher of fiction-writing, and at a time when he sometimes lived through several days without remembering that he had formerly been such a teacher.

The man of this fiction had no interest in mathematics, but throughout his life he had loved arithmetic. He was fond of calculating such numbers as the approximate total of the breaths that he had drawn since the moment of his birth or of the bottles of beer that he had drunk since the well-remembered day when he had drunk the first of them. He had once arrived at a close estimate of the total length of time during which he had experienced the extremes of sexual pleasure. He daydreamed of quantifying things that had never before been measured. Whenever he was in a railway carriage or a theatre, he wished he could have been free to discover which person from among those present had the keenest sense of smell; which one had been most often frightened of another person; which one had the strongest belief in an afterlife …

Most of the man's arithmetical enterprises resulted in estimates only, but in some matters he was able to arrive at exact totals, for he was a diligent keeper of records. Calendars, bank statements, receipts and such things he stored in his filing cabinets at the end of every year. And in keeping with his love of recording and measuring, he kept precise and detailed accounts of his work as a teacher of fiction-writing.

He was obliged to keep certain records, of course, so that he could award grades to his students at the end of each semester, but he went far beyond this. Not only for his own satisfaction, but also to avoid disputes with students over their grades, he devised and perfected during his first years as a teacher what he supposed must have been a unique means of arriving at a mark (on a scale from 1 to 100) for each piece of fiction that he assessed. His method was to record in the margins of every page of every piece of fiction every instance of his having had to pause in his reading. Whenever he was stopped by a spelling mistake or a fault of grammar; whenever he was confused by a badly shaped sentence; whenever he lost the thread of the narrative; whenever he became bored by what he was reading; at every such time, he put in the margin what he called a negative mark and, if time allowed, he wrote a note to explain why he had stopped and had made the mark. At the foot of each page he put a running tally of the number of lines of fiction that he had so far read and of the number of negative marks that he had made in the margin. At the foot of the last page he set out in full his calculation of the percentage of the fiction that had been free of fault. This percentage figure became the numerical mark for the piece of fiction.