From the moment when I first read about Huldah, she was for me the chief character of The Glass Spear. I often disregarded the facts of the novel, so to call them, and thought of her as a young woman of marriageable age rather than the middle-aged person she surely was. Given that the version of myself who stepped easily into the scenery of books of fiction was a young man of marriageable age, it was inevitable that I would spend much of my time as a hanger-on at Kinie Ger in trying to attract the attention of the unseen Huldah. I did what little I could think of doing. I walked past her windows several times each day, always with a book in my hands as a sign that the world in which Kinie Ger stood among vistas of arid grasslands with trees in the distance — that world was not for me the only possible world. When I had tired of so walking, I would sit with an opened book in front of me in the living-room, in the central wing of the house. I was far from Huldah’s room, but one of her trusted siblings might have reported to the hidden young woman that the newcomer who had found his way across pages of text into the dim rooms of a remote homestead was a reader; that even in a place I had only read about, I still read about other places.
If it had been possible, the trusted sibling might have reported also that I was a writer. The sibling could not have told Huldah that he or she had seen me writing for hour after hour during some or another hot afternoon at the table of the living-room. As a child, I supposed that my sort of writing could be done only in secret. However, I am able to report that my having read about Huldah and her locked room in a fictional homestead drove me to begin to write the first piece of prose fiction that I can remember having written. As I recall, I wrote during 1950 or 1951 the first few hundred words of a story set on a large rural property in inland Tasmania. Most of what I wrote described the homestead on the property and some of the persons who lived there. I wrote in secret and I hid the finished pages each morning before I left for school. I hid the pages under a loose corner of the frayed linoleum in my bedroom, but after I had written the first few hundred words my mother found them. She quoted several of my sentences to me one afternoon as soon as I had arrived home from school. She took out my pages from the pocket at the front of her apron and she questioned me in the way that many a person would question me at writers’ festivals and such gatherings thirty and more years later. My mother wanted to know how much of my fiction was autobiographical, so to speak, and how much was imaginary, so to speak. She was especially interested in the origins of the two chief characters, a young man and a young woman each of marriageable age whose rooms were at diagonally opposite ends of a huge homestead, which was shaped like an upper-case letter H. The young man’s given name was the same as my own, and my mother seemed to have divined that the young woman’s given name was that of a girl at my school, although she, my mother, could surely not have supposed that the name belonged to a girl in an upper grade who would have been three years older than myself. I spent much time in observing this girl, although she had never caught me at it and may well have been unaware of my existence.
My mother handed back to me the pages of my fiction. I destroyed them soon afterwards, but without having given my mother the satisfaction of knowing that I had done so.
When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I supposed that her hiding herself was not the result of some deformity but of the opposite. I supposed that Huldah might have been like the princess in many a so-called fairytale who was so beautiful and so talented that her father would give her in marriage only to some young man who could perform three impossible-seeming tasks. I also connected Huldah with a female character I had read about a few years earlier in a comic-strip named Rod Craig, in one or another Melbourne newspaper. I had little sympathy for the hero of the strip, Rod Craig himself, who was a muscular adventurer and yachtsman. But I was much interested in a certain female character in one of the episodes of the comic-strip.
Rod Craig was occupied with some or another important task on some or another island in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean. While he went about his task, he came to hear about a mysterious pale goddess who was venerated by a tribe of dark-skinned persons in some remote valley or on some remote outer islet. Rod, of course, resolved to meet up with the goddess. Her dark-skinned worshippers, of course, denied him access to her. I have long since forgotten the struggles that took place between Rod Craig and the dark-skinned persons, but I can still recall the line-drawing that appeared sometimes in the comic-strip during the fictional time when Rod Craig was trying to gain access to the pale goddess. The drawing was of a large, ornate building of grass or leaves or coconut fibre or some such material. On the side of the building facing the viewer was a doorway. Nothing was visible in the darkness on the other side of the doorway, but I understood that the space beyond the doorway was an antechamber, the first of many such vestibules or foyers that led through a maze of inner chambers towards the abode of the goddess. Again, I forget the details of the plot, so to call it, but I recall the line-drawing of the scene in one of the outer chambers of the elaborate building when Rod and the goddess met at last. Her costume was studded with hundreds of pearls that her followers had gathered for her over the years, and the few pen-strokes suggesting her features allowed me to believe that she was beautiful. She was, of course, the sole survivor of a shipwreck and had been rescued as a child by the dark-skinned ones, who had never seen a pale-skinned person. She readily agreed to return with Rod to the civilised world, so to call it, and the very last panel illustrating her story showed her dressed in a blouse and slacks and waving from the deck of Rod’s yacht to her former worshippers, who had seemingly accepted her departure from them. (The ghost of a story in which I was the ghost of a character had a different ending. Rod Craig was set upon and killed by the dark-skinned persons after he had committed the sacrilege of stepping across the outermost threshold of the goddess’s apartments. I was allowed to stay on among the goddess-worshippers after I had given them to understand that I wanted no more than to be able to learn at some future time the ground-plan of the goddess’s building and, perhaps, to erect a modest but not uncomplicated dwelling of my own within walking-distance of her abode.)
When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I had no way of knowing how much she might have learned about myself-the-ghostly-minor-character who loitered sometimes around the grounds or along the corridors of Kinie Ger. And even when I was able to suppose that she had learned something at least about me, how was I to know whether she felt towards me contempt or indifference or even such a warm interest that I ought to expect before too long some sort of message from her locked room?
When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, which is to say when I thought as a child that Huldah might be forty or older, she was of no less interest to me than the young, marriageable Huldah.
In 1955, only a few years after I had first read about Huldah, I read in one of my secondary-school textbooks the poem “The Scholar Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. When I state that I have never since forgotten the poem, I mean, of course, not that I can recall whole lines or stanzas, much less the entire poem, but that I can see in my mind clearly today much of what I saw in my mind when I used to read the poem as a schoolboy and that I can feel today much of what I felt then. The scholar who had to give up his studies at Oxford on account of his poverty and who lived thereafter with gipsies on lonely back-roads or in remote woodlands — or, I should rather write, the imprecise images in my mind of a nameless, faceless figure skulking in the background of a few other images in my mind of a few landscapes of England, a country I have never seen, affect me still today somewhat as the original account of the lad from Oxford seemingly affected Matthew Arnold so that he came to write the poem. Even during the years when I was driven to give every free hour to the latest of my writing projects, I would sometimes be overtaken by a strong intimation that the true work of my life still awaited me: that I had still not discovered the precious enterprise that would occupy me wholly for the remainder of my life in some or another quiet room behind drawn blinds. During my teenage years, however, and during the many later years before any of my writing was published, the equivalent for me of the scholar’s research among the gipsies was always the latest of the poems or the pieces of fiction that I was trying to write. Even as a child in the years when I read such fiction as The Glass Spear, I mostly saw myself-the-adult as a reader or a writer in a house of two storeys overlooking rural landscapes, although I recall a period when I had a rather different vision of my future.