Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Page A

In a certain back-street, I used to walk for some distance beside a high wall of bluestone that was one of the boundaries of a large allotment. I sometimes heard the sound of trickling water from the far side of the wall. I supposed the sound might have come from an arrangement of fish-ponds with a tiny waterfall between them or, what was less probable but more to my liking, from a streamlet issuing out of a grotto wherein stood a statue of a female personage. I was never able to learn what caused the sound of trickling water, but I was one day able to assume that a fernery of some sort was on the other side of the wall. On that day I noticed, as I walked beside the wall, a pale-green button-shape protruding from the grey mortar between two blocks of bluestone. I found that the seeming-button was the uncurled frond of a fern. On the other side of the wall, so I understood, was a fernery so well-watered and so lush that one of the fern-plants there could find no other way of reproducing than by forcing a child-frond into a crevice within the strip of mortar between two blocks of bluestone in a massive wall, as though somewhere, on the far side of the wall, was a place where a new and more spacious fernery might come into being.
    On day after day, I observed that the button-shape was developing into a frond and that the pale green was changing to green. My first catching sight from a distance of the single shred of greenery protruding from the dark-blue wall became for me the chief event of each day. I soon understood that the sight of the fern-frond growing out of the wall would become in time the sort of image that would go on troubling me until I had discovered more of the network of images and feelings of which the frond-image was only the most noticeable part.
    For as long as I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing, I used to tell my students that my own way of writing fiction was only one of many ways. Even so, I made sure that my students were well aware of how I went about my writing. I told my students of Advanced Fiction Writing during a discussion about the origins of fiction in the year when the fern had appeared that I believed I would write at some future time a work of fiction the central image of which was an image of a fern-frond protruding through a bluestone wall. I told my students further that an image connected with the central image would be an image of a strand of hair lying diagonally across the forehead of a young female person who looked out across an ocean or who lay with closed eyes beneath a lake.
    Only a year or two after I had told my students what is reported above, I gave up writing fiction. The work of fiction that I talked about in front of my students will never be written. And yet, the simple network of images that would have given rise to that work remains in my mind and has become more complex in recent years.
    Nowadays, the south-west coast of Victoria is often described as a popular tourist destination. At a certain point on that coast, the local government authority, hoping perhaps to reassure the persons known as tourists that the place whereat they have arrived is of historical importance, has erected a sign on which appear two words. The second word is Bay . The first word is the surname of my paternal great-grandfather followed by the possessive apostrophe. The surname on the sign is, of course, the surname of the author of this sentence and of all the other sentences in this work of fiction. I have been told that many tourists, so to call them, visit the place where the sign has been erected and admire the high cliffs thereabouts and even descend the steep stairway to the small bay named on the sign. I myself have not visited that part of the coast for twenty-nine years and will not visit it again. When I last visited the place, long before anyone would have wanted to erect a sign on it, I did so for the purpose of showing to my wife and my three young children a district