Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Page B

that stayed in my mind even though I had turned away from it. I showed them the red-roofed sandstone farmhouse built by my father’s father on the site of the earlier wooden house built by that man’s father, who was the first owner of the nearest farm to the coast and the man for whom the steep bay was named. I photographed my children standing on the edge of a cliff with the bay visible below them and beyond the bay the Southern Ocean. I told my children of how my parents had taken me often to the farm beside the coast while my father’s father was still alive during the 1940s. During those years, the steep bay was so seldom visited that the sand would be littered with driftwood during winter and spring. Only in the hottest weeks of summer did visitors arrive, and they were mostly local farming families bringing picnic-lunches. I told the children that my parents and my brother and I sometimes picnicked in the steep bay. I told the children of how I had hated and feared the sea since the time when my mother had taken me onto the beach at Port Campbell before my first birthday and when I, a quiet and docile baby, had screamed until she took me away from all sight and sound of the waves. I told the children of how I used to plead with my parents not to take me down the path from the cliff-top into the steep bay; of how I used to stand on the cliff-top and to turn my back on the sea and to look northwards across the first few of the hundred and more miles of the so-called Western District and to yearn to belong to one of the families who lived there and who looked out all day from their windows and verandahs onto views of seemingly endless grassy countryside with intervening lines of trees marking the courses of creeks that trickled towards some far-away river that flowed sluggishly towards some farther-away ocean. I told the children of how I was always compelled to go down with my brother and my parents into the steep bay but of how I often avoided having to paddle and to splash among the incoming waves and to pretend that I was enjoying myself or even learning to swim. I often avoided these hateful rituals by creeping, with my parents’ reluctant permission, in among the piles of boulders at either side of the bay. The boulders were pieces of cliff that had fallen during past centuries. The waves from the ocean had so eroded the boulders as to create a complicated system of tunnels and sluices and pools. If I crept far out among the boulders, I was able to hear the crash of each ocean-wave against the outermost boulders and afterwards the long succession of hissing- and gurgling- and sucking-noises that marked the flowing of the water from the wave inwards among the boulders. I could sit in safety by some or another rock-pool while the force of the ocean-swell shook the boulders all around me but barely troubled the water of the pool. The sides of the pool would have been overgrown with bunches of the plant that I called sea-lettuce and with fronds and ribbons of plants that I had no name for. Currents in the pool caused the plants to sway continually. The currents were surely caused by the waves that struck the outer boulders, and yet the swaying of the plants seemed unconnected with any inrush of water from the ocean. The water from each wave took so long to travel through the heaps of boulders to the furthest pools (the nearest to the beach) that a second wave would sometimes arrive before the water in those pools had begun to recede. The plants attached to the sides of the rock-pools moved unpredictably, although always gracefully. Many years after my last visit to the heaps of boulders beside the bay named after my father’s grandfather, at a time when I supposed that I might soon begin to write a piece of fiction in which one of the central images was of a fern protruding through a wall of bluestone and another central image was of a strand of hair lying across the forehead of a female person, I began to