Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey Read Free Book Online

1963 review, The Spectator admired Stow’s ‘extraordinary talent’ and stated that ‘ Tourmaline is an exciting addition to his three earlier novels about Western Australia. It has the same gift of combining fable and marvellously realistic description. It shares their poetry, their force, their original characterisation.’
    Australian critics did not agree. In fact, it was precisely this gift – of fable and poetry combined with realism – that was rejected.
    Amid other severe comments, the leading critic of the time, Leonie Kramer, described it as ‘ The Waste Land in prose with a few more scenes in bars’. But, twenty-seven years later, in 1990, academic Russell McDougall defines Tourmaline as a turning point in Australian fiction, a watershed, when our vision finally turned away from bush realism and towards something more experimental. The change was not initially welcomed though, and Stow, says McDougall, became the whipping boy. It wasn’t just the style that people objected to; it was the content. Or, as scholar Peter Kuch says, ‘ Tourmaline was too austere, too truthful; too confrontational of conventional attitudes; too much in opposition to a whole set of beliefs and attitudes by which Australians had come to domesticate the outback. The novel was too far ahead of its time.’
    *
    That afternoon Roger Averill, Stow’s authorised biographer, met me in the café below the University of Western Australia library. Roger had the privilege of interviewing Stow at length over a number of days in Harwich, England. He had sat at Stow’s kitchen table and shared pots of tea. And, like a groupie, I wanted to be near anyone who had been that close to Randolph Stow.
    â€˜He felt things more keenly,’ Roger told me. ‘He was like someone who was missing a skin.’
    We discussed our love of Stow’s novels, especially Midnite. Roger told me what I’d already heard from several people, that Stow was very polite and gracious – he believed in the old-fashioned notion of gentilesse – but that his ability to host graciously had definite limits. After being questioned around the table for a couple of hours, he would suddenly stand up and ask, ‘Is that enough?’ And Roger would know that it was time to go.
    Later, I heard this impulse to escape interrogation during an interview with the ABC. ‘Is that enough, do you think?’ Stow suddenly asked the radio documentary maker, mid-interview. ‘I rather fancy a drink.’
    *
    Then it was time. The event to commemorate the life and work of Randolph Stow was held on campus in the Winthrop Hall – a grand, gracious building that Stow must have entered many times, if only to sit exams. Given his long absence from Perth, it was impressive to see the huge space fill with people on a rare chilly evening. The poet Dennis Haskell hosted, while various people recounted episodes of Stow’s life. His colleagues from St George’s College talked of Stow’s obsession with theatre, his opposition to national service and his insomnia. Sally Herzfeld, a nurse with whom Stow worked while on the Forrest River Mission in the northern Kimberley region – and also one of the dedicatees of To the Islands – told stories of their walks together through that wild region, about his love of water and his favourite locations – waterfalls and creeks. She also said how impressed the local people were when Stow learnt the Umbalgari language in three months.
    The highlight of the evening was a crackly old recording of Stow reading a short poem. He had made it for his publisher, Jock Curle, and the poem was clearly a gift of love and gratitude. Stow had barely a hint of an Australian accent but neither did he have a forged British accent; it was a voice like no other, both in speech and on paper, and for a moment the beautiful space within Winthrop Hall was filled with the tone,