Two excerpts: The Land I Came Through Last by Robert Gray
Two excerpts from The Land I Came Through Last, a 2008 memoir by the late poet and writer Robert Gray, who died on 18 November 2025. The title comes from the opening line in a poem by Christopher Brennan: ‘The land I came thro’ last was dumb with night / a limbo of defeated glory, a ghost.’
The Land I Came Through Last
pp. 376-378
Patrick [White] liked conversations with working-class people: he would stop the cleaning women who came into his street, on the pavement, and the young mothers or the grandmothers, in the park, to talk about their children, or about making a stew, or getting the washing done in wet weather. He was continually delighted by the attitudes and remarks of these people. His own domestic help at this time was a Spanish woman, and he took such an interest in the details, developments and dramas of her life he might have been following a soap opera.
This respect for the ordinary person was not always reciprocated. He told me that when their car, which only Manoly drove, had recently been out of order, the two of them went into the city on the bus and came home laden with shopping, among a peak hour crowd. They were separated, Manoly forced to the back of the bus. Patrick had called out, through the crowd, ‘Is this the stop, Manoly?’ His voice in such anxious moments was a stentorian bleat. One can see him, wearing his knitted beanie, or his beret, his trench coat buttoned over his troublesome chest, carrying his knobbly string bags, and working his jaws. Again, ‘Is THIS the one, Manoly?’ He would have been imperious, quavering, irritable – and yet not failing to camp it up. ‘No, Patrick,’ Manoly called, ‘not yet, Patrick,’ with his beautiful Greek enunciation. Then: ‘This is it, Patrick. This is the one. Get ready. The next one.’ Patrick, standing over everyone’s head, in his military bearing, with ‘crater eyes’ and pommy voice, had excitedly shouted, ‘COME ON then, Manoly. Come ON. Hurry up, then.’ The commuters had loved it, writhing on their seats in their glee and embarrassment. This would have to be a couple of poofters. They took up Patrick’s imperatives as a chant. ‘Come on, Manoly. Come on, Manoly,’ as if at a football game. They passed Manoly to the front, from hand to hand, with all of his shopping. ‘There you are, Manoly. You’ll be all right, mate.’ Much backpatting. One big workman, beside Patrick, had slowly turned to him and said, ‘Now, you sure this is the stop you want, mate? I reckon what you might actually be lookin’ for is the Gap’ (a place famous for its suicides). As Patrick and Manoly clutched at each other, anxiously waiting their turn to get down, this man said, ‘’Ave you ever had the thought: Life, with all this gettin’ off the bus, with yer lovely shoppin’, is such a struggle. Does it haf t’ go on…? Organ music, mates. I hear organ music.’
Patrick told me all about it, doing the voices – delighted. Manoly slowly shook his head, at the memory.
I noticed, after not seeing him for a while, that Patrick had become frail: he was highshouldered with asthma, was wearing his ‘teapot warmer’ inside the house, kept the radiators on, and was constantly chewing. When he was rude to Manoly and stomped off to the bathroom on a stick, Manoly whispered, with a tear, ‘He used to be such a wonderful man, so handsome, and look at him now – ugly, and angry all the time.’ Manoly was the same age as Patrick, but was slimmer and his hair was still naturally black. He had a light touch.
Some people, it seems, can age with a calm compassion towards themselves, an almost amused tolerance. They look on the injuries of age with pride, as honourably earned. That was not Patrick. He was awkward, all the way. His emphysema made him seem to be tearing roughly at his late small handfuls of life.
The Land I Came Through Last
pp. 366-367
Often during this time, I began to sit by the harbour, among trees, through whole afternoons, without opening a book at all. To justify merely looking, I would draw. I had always been dissatisfied with myself when I felt ‘too much in the head’, as could readily happen, and my interest in drawing and painting became more and more something I practised, as an antidote to that. I liked the idea that painting was, as an artist had told me, ‘a dumb, intuitive process’. While in high school, I read T. S. Eliot’s remark about Milton, that ‘too much booklearning had withered his sensuous nature’, and when later I was surrounded by books at work and at home – reading ‘as if for life’, like David Copperfield – I would experience at times an exaggerated fear of such a fate happening to me. The secret about reading, I used to say, at such times, was to know when to refrain. I would be told I had never mastered it; but that was probably because poetry, which I read slowly and only a little at a time, but almost every day, carried along on the rhythm, was not counted as difficult reading by me.
I made daytrips into the bush around Sydney, by train, to draw the landscape, going with Tom, my young artist friend. We climbed on the densely forested hillsides above the Hawkesbury River, north of the city; or to the south, looked out at the ocean from among sandstone boulders that lay on a wide, continuing rock platform. We saw the sea again, having climbed higher up, through the branching screens of eucalyptus trees.
Deer had been imported into the national park there and lived wild, and I once found the entire skeleton of a deer, lying awkwardly below a cliff, on a shore of smooth stones. Going close to examine it, in the drifting sea smoke, I was moved to see that inside the rib cage there was hung, just then, a small black butterfly, fluttering where the pulse of life had been, as black and urgent as blood.
