If the boy hiding among the clumps of rushes had had time to prepare, he would have brought a book with him to his hiding-place; but he had had to flee from his house with only the jar of water, and so he passed the time by listening to the sounds of birds. He would have preferred to watch the birds as well, but he dared not move from his hiding-place; if any of his sisters had been sent to fetch him back, she might have seen him through some or another gap between the clumps of rushes.
Although the farm was without trees or scrub, it did not lack for birds, and the boy often observed them. While he was hiding in the swampy area, the boy heard from time to time the sounds of two sorts of bird that he thought of as his favourites. Twelve years later, when he had bought his first bird-book, he learned the scientific names of the two birds: anthus novaeseelandiae and alauda arvensis, but as a boy he knew the birds only as groundlark and skylark, although he did know that the groundlark was a native of Australia whereas the skylark had been introduced from England. The boy found it strange that these birds spent much time on the wing but made their nests on the ground. Even if tall trees had been growing on the farm, the groundlark and the skylark would still have made their nests on the ground, hidden among tussocks.
The boy in hiding looked out for the nests of groundlarks and skylarks whenever he was walking across a paddock on his father’s farm. He had found only one nest. It was a disused nest, but the boy had admired its snugness beneath the overhanging grass. He had left the nest in place, meaning to go back and to inspect it on later occasions, but he had never afterwards been able to find the nest. Later in the afternoon while the boy was in hiding, he began to pass the time by looking around the swampy area as though he had been one of his favourite birds in search of a site for a nest. Whenever he found such a site, he tried to make with his fist a snug hollow and then tried to imagine the nest and the eggs and the naked young.
The day when the boy went into hiding among the rushes was a Sunday. At the midday meal, which the family called dinner, the boy had sat quietly, as usual, among his parents and his older brothers and sisters. During the meal, the boy had heard much talk about a party of visitors that was going to arrive in the early afternoon. The head of the party was a brother of the boy’s mother and was well known to the boy, who was, of course, the man’s nephew. The uncle, as I intend to call him, had remained unmarried until almost his fortieth year and had worked at many different jobs in several states of Australia but had lately married. The uncle had married a widow, who was the mother of nine children. He had then taken up, as the saying went, a soldier-settlement block in a forested district inland from his brother-in-law’s coastal farm. During the meal mentioned above, the boy at the table had learned that his uncle was then on his way to visit the coastal farm and was bringing with him his wife and the four of her children who had still not left home. The boy had learned finally that all four children were daughters.
Early in the afternoon, one of the boy’s sisters had called out that she could see the visitors arriving at the front gate. The boy had then stood with his sisters on the front verandah and had watched the visitors approaching in their horse-and-buggy across the home paddock. The boy had made out the four persons with pale-coloured dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats who had recently become his step-cousins but had still not made out their faces when one of this sisters thrust an elbow against his ribs and told him that the youngest of the four was exactly the same age as himself. The boy had then gone into the kitchen and had filled a clean jam-jar with water and had set out for the swampy area at the far end of the farm. He had remained in hiding in that area during the rest of that afternoon and had not returned home until sunset, long after the visitors had gone.
The reader is surely waiting still to learn how the seemingly imagined events reported in the foregoing thirty-four paragraphs might be considered part of some seemingly imagined version of the narrator’s having been conceived.
I have read and forgotten, during the past forty and more years, countless statements by writers about the writing or the reading of fiction. A few statements I still remember, even if I cannot recall who first made the statements. Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.
The man who released the pheasants on the island became, a few years later, my father. A few years later again, when I was a small boy, he took my mother and me and my younger brother one Sunday afternoon from our rented weatherboard cottage in a south-eastern suburb of the largest city in northern Victoria to a building of two storeys in a north-western suburb of that city. We walked from our home to the centre of the city and then we travelled by electric tramway to the north-western suburb. We left the tram at the terminus and then we approached and entered the building of two storeys. Except for a few churches, this was the largest building that I could recall having entered.