The First Chapter

The cumbersome engine lurches, slowing, yet you love it – its stopping and starting, now rushing and racing. Workmen, orange vests, one leaning against the truck, others working. Who are they? Do they have children? Do they mistreat their wives when they return home from the Pub late at night? You know not and never shall. You’ll never know if anyone listened to Father McKenzies’ sermon, and you’ll never know if the graying man leaning against the truck ever hoped for more than digging holes and laying tracks – why waste another moment pondering such?
An old platform at Castlemaine across to the left, estranged from locomotives – once a hub of commercial activity perhaps. Once long ago, someone placed each of the red bricks into that structured pattern; some young man aided the contruction of those archways.
You cannot help yourself, on and on you go, making phrases – yet that is not what draws people to you, no – it would be a repellent, pretentious in every regard. Still, you long to be artless; to be passionate as an artist whilst maintaining the cool patience of a scientist – to draw forth, or else create, meaning. You long to intelligently contribute to the broader discourse, to grab it by the horns and wrestle it to the ground – you’re competitive, aggressive and must win, though you are sensititve and readily observe the delicacies of life. Your words must, and will, bend and clash with those gone before.
A small lake nestled in the folds of undulating emerald slopes that are speckled with the rought tufts of brown, yellow and gold.
Here, another colonial hamlet, we cautiously pull to a halt, the bluestone establishment of Malmsbury Railway Station is splattered with small circular splotches of moss, showcasing in gray, tiel, and aquamarine. Peeling paint signifies once more the previously glorious, now dead and decrepid, world of modernity. You’re momentarily sick with nostalgia, longing to glimpse a world you never knew. Images blur with reality -

A neatly dressd young woman, Richard’s mother, stands on the platform, her small son with his combed hair, beside her. They’re about to board the Melbourne bound train to pay a visit to Nellie’s sister who has recently married and settled in Fairfield Park.
Nellie misses Katherine terribly, there is but eighteen months between them, and in marrying her sister, Mr. Graham has taken off with her confidante and dearest companion. Of course, she is liable to take the blame foremost – Richard now four years old. ‘However,’ she silently begs her case behind well composed blue eyes, ‘Malmsbury was but a stones throw from our family home in Kyneton.’
Seated comfortably, with little Richard between herself and the carriage window, she gazes listlessly at the countryside flying by. The burgundy chimnies of Woodend capture her attention for a breif moment. The exuberance of Richard bubbling in his small body resting against hers – still attached by invisible threads to she, the Mother.

Does Richard envy his father? Is he detaching himself from her through his own personal discoveries of world and body?
No! That’s certainly wrong, she was before Lacan, you’re fairly sure, most likely before Freud – she has to be, and if not, she certainly was not educated in frontiers of psychoanalysis. Nope, you have lost the thread. Your desired artlessness has been the death of you this time; merely an affectation of creative intellect.
You falter, like the engine approaching the workmen. Everyone is jolted in their seats, left gawking about, blinking in the bright of the day – trying to make sense of where you have halted. You have disempowered your reader, who desperately desired to know whether Richard had discovered he was a boy yet, or not.

Gisborne – a young woman articulating in an animated fashion. Hands enlivened, her audience, semingly another woman, listens, head cocked to the side, just slightly. Was the orator shocked, angry, relieved?
A slice of outrageous Gisborne gossip.
Theresa Wallace has been sleeping with Paul Davidson. Alyssa, as you can imagine, is so pissed off – she’s plotting her revenge. Poor girl! Everyone knows, no one will shut up about it, poor, poor Alyssa; everytime someone new mentions it its like a slap in the face of course. I saw Theresa last night, working at IGA. God! We’re all gonna have to see her whenever we wanna buy anything. Gave her the cold shoulder of course – I mean, how could she! What a slut

‘It is time for the Old Woman to be put off, that time has come – ye must be clothed with the New Woman’, you think to yourself. And therefore, Kelly ought not malign Theresa, using the verbal ammunition of men. She must lay aside the social divide, befriend Therese, gain her trust, advise her positively, and influence her for the better.

Hun, we can’t just do whatever we feel like round here, its just not on. How do you think Alyssa feels, you guys were such good friends – you went to Kinder together for Godsakes. Paul just uses girls for a root, you know that, he’s not the right guy. Don’t let him win by just picking up and dropping girls whenever he wants; if he did so to her, he can, and will, do so to you. Don’t let him get away with it babe, we girls gotta stand up against guys like him, not roll into bed with them.

‘We must unite! We must stand against male dominance. We must move now to proclaim our case – we do not lack anything! We do not need you, and we definitely do not need that objecft you possess that you believe can complete us. We must wage war against phallogocentric oppression!’
But you know Kelly did not say anything of the sort.
You’re sorry you’re so innately oppressive, but what are you to do – turn to men while all the women turn their love to women in order to be rid of patriarchal oppression, ridding themselves of the dangerous weapon used for murder women?
You’re not really sorry, contrition is not to be found overflowing from your heart this time. You are a man, thoughtful and well educated, but a man nonetheless. And you desire woman – you even suggest tentatively that you are lacking without her.
It begins in Sunbury. You have returned – being dragged slowly through the fringe into the body of that tangled concrete mess. Oh stop! turn back – chuck her in reverse, you silently cry, longing to dwell amonst the emerald slopes and small glassy lakes once more. Wandering from here to there for a while, walking about the country all day long with nothing but a biscuitin your pocket, writing, singing, praying, meeting, encamping, discovering, bonding, settling, creating, sustaining, loving. A rustic countrified existence; you rotten idealist – do you honestly believe… this phrase need not even be completed, for it is your heart, and that irrational conglomeration of nerve tissue cannot be made sense of.
Thank God for that! you say, shivering and wiping tears from your non-commital blue eyes.

                                                                           *                          *                          *

I go here and there
I sing songs
Dream dreams
And let my mind run through space and time the whole day through.

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