The game mentioned earlier would have begun on some or another occasion when I saw myself as travelling from the shadowy foreground into the brightly lit distance, past the bridge and the river and then across the grassy countryside. On that occasion, I would have decided that I was viewing my admired illustration from the wrong direction, as it were. For a few moments, I would have seen the calendar-illustration as other than a patch of painted scenery hanging in a shabby room in the place that I called the world. During those moments, the source of the light behind the dark trees might have been a sun hardly different from the sun that shone often on my own world — not a painted image of a sun but an actual sun. For a few moments, I would have understood that the clump of trees and the verandah were the dark background and that what I had taken for the distant background was brightly lit foreground. The persons around the verandah were of little account. Anyone peering in on them from the darkness behind them mattered even less. The true subject-matter was yet to be seen. The game, if ever I had succeeded at it, would have consisted of my seeming to travel to the end of the grassy countryside while the light around me intensified and while I strained to make out the first details of the land that began where the painted places ended.
I can hardly believe nowadays that I wrote for thirty years and more before I arrived at the decision reported in the fourth paragraph of this piece of fiction: before I gave up a certain sort of writing. I can only suppose that I wrote during those thirty and more years so that I could explicate whatever mysteries seemed to require explication in the territory bordered on three sides by the vaguest of my memories and my desires and on its fourth side by a strangely lit horizon in a remembered reproduction of some or another famous painting. I can only suppose that I wrote fiction for thirty and more years in order to rid myself of certain obligations that I felt as a result of my having read fiction. Something else I can hardly believe nowadays: during those thirty and more years, I sometimes recalled my childhood ploy of seeing, or seeming to see, places further off than certain painted places, and yet what I recalled seemed quite unconnected with what I was doing as a writer of fiction. Not until the afternoon mentioned in the fourth paragraph of this piece of fiction did I understand how many were the blank pages; how ample was the space on the far side of every piece of fiction that I had written or had read.
I can make one last attempt to answer the question why did I write what I wrote for thirty and more years? Perhaps I wrote in order to provide myself with the equivalent in the invisible world of Tasmania and New Zealand in the visible world.
I am not unwilling to travel on land. On a memorable occasion nearly fifty years ago, I travelled by land almost to the southern border of Queensland. A year afterwards, I travelled by land to the eastern shore of the Great Australian Bight. Even nowadays, I travel sometimes to the far west of Victoria; to a small town mentioned earlier in this piece of fiction. I do not however, travel through air or across water. I have several reasons for not travelling thus, but I mention here the only reason that belongs in this piece of fiction. My view of the world has in the foreground a roughly L-shaped tract of land reaching from Bendigo through Melbourne to Warrnambool. I look often across this foreground in my mind, and always in a westerly or a north-westerly direction. In the middle ground is mostly level grassy countryside not without trees or even stands of forest. In the background is the wider world, as I call it, which most often appears to me as a series of far-reaching plains. If ever I had wished to visit the wider world, I would have had to plan my route so that I could travel first through the foreground and then through the middle ground mentioned above.
I look often across my mind in a westerly or a north-westerly direction, but I am not unable to see in my mind what might lie behind me. I am not unable to see in a subdued light, as though they lie beyond not sea but coloured glass, the islands of Tasmania and New Zealand.
Once only, I dared to step off the solid land that comprises my nearer view of the world. I travelled across water from Melbourne to Tasmania in order to accept an invitation to a gathering of writers. On the night before I left Melbourne, I was unable to sleep. On the day of my departure from solid land, I began to drink beer. When I arrived on the boat or ship or vessel or whatever it was called, I was drunk, and I remained so during most of my time in Tasmania. I recall hardly anything of the landscape that I passed through while I was conveyed by motor-car from Devonport to Launceston and then, twenty-four hours later, back to Devonport. All this happened more than twenty years ago, but I still regret that I did not see the midlands of Tasmania.
For several years before my visit to Tasmania, I had corresponded with a young man who lived with his wife in a rented cottage in a small town in a district that he called the Midlands. (He never failed to use an upper-case “M” in his letters.) The man had been, some years before, a student in my fiction-writing classes and was still writing fiction in his rented cottage, which, so he claimed in his letters to me, was at the very heart of the Midlands. I had seen a few photographs of lakes and seashores and mountains in Tasmania before I had begun writing letters to my former student, but I had never seen in any photograph any landscape such as he described in one of his letters to me. When I read in that letter that he had travelled on a day of sunshine and cold breezes to a place out of sight of his rented cottage and had looked all around him at the silent, level land and had lost all sense that he lived on a large island surrounded by the Southern Ocean, I had supposed that my friend was reporting not an actual experience but something imagined. (As a teacher of fiction-writing, I had always been ready to believe that some of my students had been possessed of imagination, although I was never comfortable when the word came up in discussions.)
As for New Zealand, I had never supposed that I could travel thither, but if ever I had been able to get aboard a tramp-steamer that could take me and my cargo of beer from Melbourne to Dunedin or to Christchurch, I would have wanted only to look at the Canterbury Plains before I found a ship that would take me back across the Tasman Sea. A student of mine during the late 1980s, a young woman, had written in a piece of fiction a few paragraphs about the landscape around her birthplace, which was a town named Geraldine. If I were to report in this piece of fiction my feelings towards the young woman, some readers might suppose that I had fallen in love with the young woman. In fact, during the years when I was a teacher of fiction-writing I felt towards many a female student of mine what I felt towards the young woman from Geraldine. I would begin to feel thus while I was reading one or another piece of fiction written by the woman in question. In the presence of the woman, I would feel hardly otherwise than I felt towards any other student of mine. At all times, I did my best to ensure that my admired female students would not divine my feelings towards them. At all times too, I did my best not to treat any admired student more favourably than I treated my other students. And yet, whenever I was reading certain passages of fiction written by the admired student I became anxious on her account. I wanted no sadness or anxiety to be visited on her. I wanted the course of her life to be untroubled. I wanted her to succeed as a writer of fiction, to fall in love only with persons worthy of her, and always to feel connected with some or another remembered or longed-for landscape. When I learned one day that the young woman from Geraldine had a husband who had been born in Melbourne, I hoped that he was worthy of her, by which I meant that I hoped he would one day visit the Canterbury Plains as a pilgrim in earlier times might have visited a remote shrine; would one day look all around him at the silent, level land and would lose all sense that he was standing on a large island bounded on the one side by the Tasman Sea and on the other by the Pacific Ocean.