Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane

She quoted several of my sentences to me one afternoon as soon as I had arrived home from school. She took out my pages from the pocket at the front of her apron and she questioned me in the way that many a person would question me at writers’ festivals and such gatherings thirty and more years later. My mother wanted to know how much of my fiction was autobiographical, so to speak, and how much was imaginary, so to speak. She was especially interested in the origins of the two chief characters, a young man and a young woman each of marriageable age whose rooms were at diagonally opposite ends of a huge homestead, which was shaped like an upper-case letter H. The young man’s given name was the same as my own, and my mother seemed to have divined that the young woman’s given name was that of a girl at my school, although she, my mother, could surely not have supposed that the name belonged to a girl in an upper grade who would have been three years older than myself. I spent much time in observing this girl, although she had never caught me at it and may well have been unaware of my existence.
    My mother handed back to me the pages of my fiction. I destroyed them soon afterwards, but without having given my mother the satisfaction of knowing that I had done so.
    When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I supposed that her hiding herself was not the result of some deformity but of the opposite. I supposed that Huldah might have been like the princess in many a so-called fairytale who was so beautiful and so talented that her father would give her in marriage only to some young man who could perform three impossible-seeming tasks. I also connected Huldah with a female character I had read about a few years earlier in a comic-strip named Rod Craig , in one or another Melbourne newspaper. I had little sympathy for the hero of the strip, Rod Craig himself, who was a muscular adventurer and yachtsman. But I was much interested in a certain female character in one of the episodes of the comic-strip.
    Rod Craig was occupied with some or another important task on some or another island in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean. While he went about his task, he came to hear about a mysterious pale goddess who was venerated by a tribe of dark-skinned persons in some remote valley or on some remote outer islet. Rod, of course, resolved to meet up with the goddess. Her dark-skinned worshippers, of course, denied him access to her. I have long since forgotten the struggles that took place between Rod Craig and the dark-skinned persons, but I can still recall the line-drawing that appeared sometimes in the comic-strip during the fictional time when Rod Craig was trying to gain access to the pale goddess. The drawing was of a large, ornate building of grass or leaves or coconut fibre or some such material. On the side of the building facing the viewer was a doorway. Nothing was visible in the darkness on the other side of the doorway, but I understood that the space beyond the doorway was an antechamber, the first of many such vestibules or foyers that led through a maze of inner chambers towards the abode of the goddess. Again, I forget the details of the plot, so to call it, but I recall the line-drawing of the scene in one of the outer chambers of the elaborate building when Rod and the goddess met at last. Her costume was studded with hundreds of pearls that her followers had gathered for her over the years, and the few pen-strokes suggesting her features allowed me to believe that she was beautiful. She was, of course, the sole survivor of a shipwreck and had been rescued as a child by the dark-skinned ones, who had never seen a pale-skinned person. She readily agreed to return with Rod to the civilised world, so to call it, and the very last panel illustrating her story showed her dressed in a blouse and slacks and waving from the deck of Rod’s yacht to her former worshippers, who had seemingly accepted her departure