Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Read Free Book Online

to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.
    Not long before I read Brat Farrar , or it may have been not long afterwards, I read in The Australian Journal one after another instalment of the novel The Glass Spear , by Sidney Hobson Courtier. I knew about the author only that he was an Australian whose previous published works had been short stories set in New Guinea during the Second World War. (During the late 1950s, when I had decided on a career as a teacher in a State secondary school who would write poetry and perhaps short stories in secret at weekends or during the long summer holidays, I learned that Sidney Hobson Courtier was a senior teacher in a State primary school about five kilometres from the south-eastern suburb of Melbourne where I then lived. I was prepared to write always in secret and to use a pen-name because I knew that teachers employed by the State were forbidden to undertake paid employment outside their working hours. Sidney Hobson Courtier made no secret of his being a writer. He had got special permission from the Education Department to write in his free time after he had presented the Department with a medical certificate stating that he needed to write in order to preserve his health. During the early 1960s, when I was teaching in a primary school and writing poetry and short stories in secret in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, my head-teacher had been a colleague of the man he referred to as Sid Courtier. I never questioned my head-teacher about the author of The Glass Spear , partly because I was afraid of revealing that I was a secret writer and partly because I preferred not to learn that the author was other than I had surmised during my reading of his book.) While I read the early instalments of The Glass Spear , I surmised that the author was a person I might have confided in: a person who might have listened with interest while I explained that I read books of fiction in order to see landscapes in my mind and to meet up with young female personages in my mind. While I read the later instalments, I read also in order to learn how the plot, so to call it, would unfold and what would happen to the characters, so to call them. But my interest in these matters was only a passing interest: I was anxious to have done with them so that I could turn my attention again to what I considered the true subject-matter of the book.
    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