Is it surprising that a people who could use against stubborn wood and pliant grass and bloody flesh nothing more serviceable than stone — is it surprising that such a people should have become so familiar with the idea of metal? Each one of us, in his dreams, had felled tall trees with blades that lodged deep in the pale pulp beneath the bark. Any of us could have enacted the sweeping of honed metal through a stand of seeded grass or described the precise parting of fat or muscle beneath a tapered knife. We knew the strength and sheen of steel and the trueness of its edge from having so often called it into possible existence.
In “Land Deal” (1978), the novelist Gerald Murnane imagines the colonization of Australia as the dreamed encounter of two “race[s] of men”, the narrators and the “men from overseas”, those who propose — preposterously, in the narrators’ view — to exchange implements of steel and glass, wool blankets, and quantities of flour for use of the narrators’ land. That they, or someone, must be dreaming is confirmed for the narrators by the fact that they recognize their counterparts’ trade goods from past dreams — and by the dreamlike abstractness of the men from overseas themselves.
The dreamer … had invented a race of men among whom possible objects passed as actual. And these men had been moved to offer us the ownership of their prizes in return for something that was itself not real.
… The pallor of the men we had met that day, the lack of purpose in much of their behaviour, the vagueness of their explanations — these may well have been the flaws of men dreamed of in haste. And, perhaps paradoxically, the nearly perfect properties of the stuffs offered to us seemed the work of a dreamer, someone who lavished on the central items of his dream all those desirable qualities that are never found in actual objects.
… In any case, we had been fairly sure that the foreigners failed to see our land. From their awkwardness and unease as they stood on the soil, we judged that they did not recognise the support it provided or the respect it demanded. When they moved even a short distance across it, stepping aside from places that invited passage and treading on places that were plainly not to be intruded on, we knew that they would lose themselves before they found the real land.
The question remains of who is dreaming. At first the narrators assume it is they themselves. Later they are forced to consider the possibility that it is the men from overseas:
At that moment, as we deliberated under familiar stars … the dreaming men were in an actual land far away, arranging our very deliberations so that their dreamed-of selves could enjoy for a little while the illusion that they had acquired something actual.
They decide to bide their time, confident that a day will come when the dream ends — when the men from overseas “learned how much of their history was a dream”, when the narrators themselves renounce their attachment to the steel axes and other goods whose dreamed perfection distracted them from the strangers’ true purpose.
Murnane was writing in the context of the passage of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, the 1976 law that established the first Indigenous land claims procedure in Australia. His source was the diary of one John Batman, who in 1835 led an expedition to Port Phillip, on the coast of what is now Victoria, and negotiated a lease for 600,000 acres of land, now occupied by Melbourne, with representatives of the local inhabitants, collectively known as the Kulin. Within months Batman’s treaty was repudiated by the governor of New South Wales. It is significant that Batman negotiated a lease, rather than simply squatting the land, as was common practice. Perhaps, had he had sufficient sheep on hand, he would have availed himself of their virtue as instruments of squatting. In any case we should not take Batman’s goodwill at face value: earlier he had been a vigorous participant in the war of extermination prosecuted by free settlers and the New South Wales Regiment against the inhabitants of Tasmania.
What interests me is not the role that interactions such as that between Batman and representatives of the inhabitants of the central Victoria coast have played in history, nor is it Murnane’s characterization of colonization as a dream — and, implicitly, as a continuation, in a new key, of the Dreaming, the cosmogonic recurrence by which Australians reconcile the contingency of event with the abiding quality of the land. What interests me, rather, is something more basic: the narrators’ captivation with the sensuous properties of made things.
In Tamarisk Row (1974), Murnane dwells at length on the sensuous properties of glass marbles of the sort children used to collect, trade, and shoot, and the role these marbles play in the imaginative life of a nine-year-old boy. Perhaps this is something we have all experienced: a feeling of being captivated by, or colonized by, some made thing — not of being dependent on it for our daily needs, but of being held captive by its tactile properties, its charisma, its intrinsic appeal. This is something I wish to explore in the notes that follow.