If I could have met up with the author of The Glass Spear in the house where I saw him as living — in the sprawling house with the long return verandahs looking across park-like countryside towards a distant road somewhere in the western half of Victoria — I would have complained politely to him that his sort of book always came to an end too soon after the chief events, so to call them, had taken place: after the murders had been solved and the lovers had become engaged to be married. I might even have dared to tell Sidney Hobson Courtier, while we sat in a shaded corner of his verandah, that the chief fault of books such as The Glass Spear was that they came to an end when they might have gone on for as long, or longer, than I could have read them. I could not reasonably have asked of any author that he or she should write a book so long that I could never read to the end of it, but I might have dared to suggest to Sidney Hobson Courtier that he might have written as the ending of his book at least one more chapter like the early chapters so that my last experiences as a reader of The Glass Spear could have been sights-in-my-mind of room after room in a sprawling mansion surrounded by grassy countryside, or feelings such as I might have felt if I had been one of the persons who was to go on living in that mansion for long after the book had come to an end.
At least one murder was reported to have taken place in The Glass Spear. I forgot long ago who the victim or victims was or were and, likewise, who was the murderer. The murder-weapon, I seem to recall, was a spear such as an Australian Aborigine might have made. The tip of the spear was a piece of sharpened glass from a beer-bottle. When I first learned this while I was reading one or another serialised episode, I was disappointed. Until then, I had supposed that the words of the title of the book I was reading referred to a spear made all of glass and perhaps even lying on dark-coloured velvet in a glass display-case in the hall of the large house described in the early pages of The Glass Spear. Or I had supposed, against all odds, that I might read in due course that one or another room in the large house was a chapel or an oratory, or even a library, and that the windows of that room were of stained glass and that one of those windows, late on every cloudless afternoon glowed with a many-coloured design at the centre of which appeared a spear of a rare shade or tint.
I had only a passing interest in the murder or murders and hardly more interest in the chief male character or even the chief female character. These were two young unmarried persons and distant cousins, so I seem to recall. The man seemed dull and predictable; I had no wish to share in his life as I sometimes seemed to share in the life of a young male character. I gave to the image in my mind of the young woman a face that I would have called attractive, but I found her much less interesting than another female character who will be mentioned shortly.
My not having to take part in the life of the chief male character left me free to have a version of myself wander through the setting of The Glass Spear, which setting was a huge sheep or cattle property in the west of New South Wales. The name of the property was Kinie Ger. I spent hardly any time in the paddocks, partly because they were too arid for my liking and partly because I preferred not to meet up with any of the many Aborigines who lived on the property. Some of these worked as stockmen or labourers or kitchen-hands and lived in quarters not far from the homestead; others seemed to have no other homes than a row of humpies beside the creek. The white persons in the homestead referred to these humpies as the blacks’ camp and to the tall woman who seemed the leading person there as Mary, preceded by an epithet that I cannot recall.
The homestead known as Kinie Ger has stayed in my mind more clearly than any other building I have read about in fiction for the reason that the author of The Glass Spear took pains to include in his text details sufficient for the reader to be able to draw an accurate plan of the building. During my conjectured meeting with Sidney Hobson Courtier on his return verandah, the question I most wanted to ask him was whether or not he considered himself such a person as I considered myself: that rare sort of person who cannot be content in any district or any building unless he or she can refer to a map or a plan, even a map or a plan that the person has devised in haste in his or her mind. I was mostly content while I was a ghost-character of The Glass Spear because I mostly wandered through the homestead known as Kinie Ger seeing in my mind my whereabouts on the plan in my mind.
The homestead, as I see it now, nearly sixty years since I last read any reference to it, was shaped like an upper-case letter E. A person approaching the homestead saw the three arms of the letter pointing towards him or her. The central arm comprised the dining-room and the living-room. The outer arms each comprised mostly bedrooms. The long arm from which the three shorter arms projected comprised kitchen, pantries, storerooms, and the manager’s quarters. I seem to recall that Mary and some of her tribe spent much time in the yard behind this arm of the house.
The persons living in the homestead numbered perhaps ten, many of them being members of what would be called nowadays an extended family. I forgot long ago whatever I might have read about most of them. I remember today that one of them was named Ambrose Mahon. I remember also a great deal about Huldah.
As I approach yet again in my mind the three-pronged building that I first read about in the early 1950s, I keep my eyes fixed on the windows of the nearest room in the prong or wing at my left. Behind those windows, the blinds are always drawn. The nearest to me of the rooms in the wing on my left is the furthest room along the corridor for someone standing inside that wing and also the most remote room in the house from the main living areas. The door to that room is always locked, just as the blinds are always drawn in the windows. In the dim, locked room lives Huldah, one of the several siblings of the older generation of the family who live at Kinie Ger. Huldah has lived in her room since she was a child. Her siblings, presumably, know why she hides from the world and perhaps even visit her in secret late at night. The younger persons at Kinie Ger have never seen Huldah and can only guess at her story. They mostly guess that Huldah has some hideous disfigurement that she wants to keep hidden from the world or else that she has an illness of the mind that causes her to live her life in secret.