Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Read Free Book Online Page A

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