Inland by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

In front of me on my table is a clipping from a daily newspaper issued in the year when I was eleven years old. The clipping comprises a reproduction of a photograph together with a caption of three lines underneath. At the centre of the photograph the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne County, the Most Reverend Doctor Daniel Mannix, holds open a small book and pretends to study the pages. Standing a little to one side of the Archbishop are two schoolgirls of thirteen or fourteen years. Each girl wears the pleated skirt and blouse and tie and blazer and gloves and bowl-shaped hat of the school uniform of Catholic colleges for girls in Melbourne County thirty-five years ago. The book in the outstretched hand of the Archbishop is rather far from the eyes of the two schoolgirls, but the girls are polite and obedient; the photographer has told them to look at the pages of the book in the Archbishop’s hand, and so they do. For the sake of appearances the two schoolgirls strain their white necks a little and compose their faces as though they are actually reading the pages held slightly beyond them.

On some nights in this room with books around the walls, I clear a space among these pages and I look at the newspaper photograph from thirty-five years ago. I look at the faces of the schoolgirls: at the clear skin of the faces and the alert and thoughtful eyes. On some nights in this room, after I have put aside my pages and after I have drunk my evening’s beer, I promise myself I will take steps next day to insert in the same newspaper (which is still published in Melbourne County) a copy of the photograph (I assume the original is still in the archives of the newspaper) together with the names of the two girls and a request to each girl, as she was then, to write to me here in this room telling me simply where she lives and what name she uses nowadays, so that I can write to her at length and perhaps even send her some of these pages.

But the next morning in this room I put the clipping in a drawer and I do not take it out again until some night, months later, when I look at the photograph through a reading-glass trying to identify the monogram on each of the blazer pockets and so to learn which of the many colleges for Catholic girls in Melbourne County each of the two girls attended and which two streams she lived between in the years when I lived between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri.

In the photograph of thirty-five years ago the two girls are standing on one side while the Archbishop stands in the centre. The girls have been included in the photograph because they have been awarded prizes. They have won prizes in one of a group of competitions for children of all ages in Catholic schools of Melbourne County.

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