Or, the image in my mind connected with my uncle is an image of the white-fronted chat, epthianura albifrons. My uncle had led me to a nest of a pair of chats in the summer of my last year at school. The nest was in a clump of rushes no higher than my hips. For most of my childhood, I had thought of the nests of birds as being among the many things that I was not at liberty to inspect, most of them being in treetops or dense foliage or on cliff-tops. I got a keen satisfaction from my looking down at the four speckled eggs in the tiny cup of woven grass in the clump of rushes. The chats’ nest was at the edge of a swampy area, five kilometres from the swampy area mentioned earlier in connection with my uncle but still within sound of the Southern Ocean.
My uncle explained to me on that day of clear sky, when the sun was hot but when a cool breeze blew from the nearby sea, that the chat was a bird of the inland; he had seen white-fronted chats on saltbush plains in the far north of South Australia. The few chats in his own paddocks lived on the uttermost boundary of the species’ habitable territory, although the birds nesting in the rushes did not know this, of course. Those birds would live and die as though their own small territory was surrounded on every side by boundless grasslands. The female hatching her eggs in the rushes, if she could have had knowledge of such things, would have looked from her nest at any hour of the day towards the sandstone cliffs where none of her kind could have survived; she would have heard on most days and nights the sounds of the waves of the Southern Ocean, which was more vast than any continent of land and which sustained many kinds of bird but would have been death to her own kind. And yet, nothing that the bird or her mate saw or heard would have altered in the least their way of life. Nearly every day, their feathers were ruffled by winds from the ocean, but the birds went on living as though no ocean had ever existed.
My uncle told me that a common name for the white-fronted chat was nun, which name had been prompted by the bird’s white face and throat and by the contrasting black of the head and shoulders and breast. And yet, the bird that most resembled a nun was the male; the female was mostly grey-brown.
When my uncle was past forty years of age, and when the last of the young women that he had courted during the previous ten years had become married to some or another farmer or grazier, he sold the farm where he had lived alone for ten years with a distant view of cliffs along the coast. He gave as his reason for selling the farm that he was obliged to care for his widowed mother and for his three surviving unmarried sisters. These four female persons lived in a spacious sandstone house in the coastal city mentioned often in this piece of fiction. My uncle found work with a firm of stock and station agents and moved with his few belongings into a one-roomed, cream-painted weatherboard bungalow set among fruit-trees in the large backyard of the house where his mother and his sisters lived. My uncle would never draw the curtains across the large window that opened from his bungalow onto the garden. On most evenings, while he lay on his single bed and read the Weekly Times or the Bulletin or the Catholic Advocate, the window was crowded with moths and other insects and with the spiders that preyed on them. During the warm months of the year, when my uncle left the window always ajar, the insects passed freely through it, and two or three large huntsman spiders prowled the ceiling at all hours.
My uncle had kept the racebook from every one of the many race-meetings that he had attended. He read often from his collection, which he liked to call his Books of Wisdom or, sometimes, his Books of Lamentations, but he was an untidy man and had never arranged his collection in order. Some of the books were in shoeboxes in his wardrobe; others were in cardboard cartons under his bed. One day, a few months after he had moved to the bungalow, his youngest sister decided to tidy her brother’s bungalow while he was at work and took away and burned most of the cartons and their contents.
The woman mentioned in the previous sentence will be mentioned again several times in this piece of fiction under the title of my youngest aunt. She was four years older than my youngest uncle and was the youngest of his sisters. She was in her twenty-third year when I was conceived. Four months before my conception, she had become a postulant of an order of nuns that had been founded in Ireland.
During the year before my conception, my parents were presumably courting and, in due course, marrying, honeymooning, and setting up house together, although I have never learned precisely where or when they carried out these enterprises. During the same year, a so-called mission took place in the remote Catholic parish beside the Southern Ocean where my youngest aunt and her siblings attended church every Sunday. A so-called mission took place every third or fourth year in many a parish of the Catholic Church from long before my birth until at least my twentieth year, when I ceased to be interested in such matters. A so-called mission was usually conducted for two weeks by two priests from one or another of three or four religious orders of priests whose special work was the conducting of missions. The two priests would have prepared for the mission for several weeks beforehand, praying and looking into their hearts for guidance and writing notes for the many sermons that they would preach during the two weeks of the mission, the purpose of which was to revive the faith and the religious ardour of the parishioners, who were presumed to have become lukewarm and complacent during the previous few years. During the two weeks of a mission, a sermon and a prayer-service took place every evening in the parish-church. Each day, the two mission-priests visited homes throughout the parish and urged people to attend the prayer-services and so to rekindle their faith.
My youngest aunt would never have been lukewarm or complacent in the matter of her religion. What seemingly happened to her during the year before I was conceived was that her usual religious ardour developed apace. At some time after the mission had been conducted in her parish, she decided, so it seems, that she had a so-called religious vocation. She then applied to become a postulant of an order of teaching nuns. She could have had no hope of training as a teacher, given that she had left school at fourteen and had worked thereafter at housekeeping at her father’s dairy farm. However, the order that my youngest aunt applied to join included not only teaching nuns but so-called lay-nuns. The lay-nuns underwent the same spiritual training, so called, that the teaching nuns underwent and took the same vows that the teaching nuns took, but whereas the teaching nuns worked by day in schools as teachers, the lay-nuns were mostly confined to their respective convents, where they cooked and washed up and laundered and generally kept house for their teaching sisters.
If I were to get up now from the desk where I sit writing these words, and if I were to walk out of this house and up the driveway to the street in front of the house, and if I were to look to the south, I would see in the middle distance, on the highest hill in this district, the largest building in this district of unremarkable suburbs. The building now serves as a so-called centre for so-called aged persons, but when my wife and I first arrived in this district forty years ago, and for some years afterwards, the building was a convent occupied by numerous teaching nuns and postulants and, probably, by a few lay-nuns. The building is of three storeys, and persons looking out from certain windows on the uppermost storey would see, beyond the furthest suburbs, the mostly level grassy countryside north-west of Melbourne with the forested slopes of Mount Macedon in the distance. If my youngest aunt had looked out from one or another third-storey window during the year and more while she lived in the building as a postulant, she would have seen far more than I had hoped to see if only I could have looked out from an upper window of the convent of two storeys mentioned previously in this work of fiction.