Moving Among Strangers (3 page)

5

A dear old friend.
My mother had said that one of the reasons Stow left Australia was because he was homosexual and being homosexual in Western Australia in the 1950s, especially if you came from ‘a good family', was simply not tolerated. Other accounts suggest that he was bi-sexual.

As a university student Stow had girlfriends,
including the broadcaster Penny Sutherland, with whom
he stayed in contact for many years. There is also a story that, as a young resident at Sydney University's St Paul's College, Stow had tried to take an overdose of pills after being left heartbroken over a girl. Someone went into the room and found him, and so he was rescued.

How much sense does all this make? Stow was young. Perhaps he still hadn't ‘come out'. Yet, the love must have been passionate to have left him truly heartbroken.

Was this the beginning of what he described as his deeply melancholic character? Melancholy might arise from lost or unrequited love. Or perhaps, as he suggested in an interview, it was genetic and he had simply inherited ‘the vile Stow melancholy' he had witnessed in his father and his father's father.

Whispered commentary about Stow's suicide attempt at Sydney University might be dismissed if it weren't for
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
. In that novel, Rick's girlfriend takes an overdose of sleeping pills after Rick breaks off their engagement. She survives her heartbreak, as well as the overdose. But this sudden act of violence seems out of character with the rest of the novel, and quite unnecessary to the plot and structure. Since every other significant event in that novel is based on fact, it is possible that Stow was writing out something that had happened in real life.

*

Suicide and suicide attempts also feature in Stow's other books: Cawdor, in
Visitants
, who successfully suicides; Clare, in
The Girl Green as Elderflower
, who survives an attempt; and Michael Random in
Tourmaline
, who also bears suicide scars. Both Clare and Cawdor look like aspects of Stow himself. As a writer he has been described as ‘the Australian Camus' so it's not unexpected that Stow should consider seriously Camus' famous ‘first philosophical question'.

Stow was a deeply private person and suicide is perhaps the most deeply private decision a person can make, so his alleged suicidal moment was probably not an event he wanted to see publicly discussed. However, when asked about whether he believed that ‘knowing something of the life and personality of an artist can help to understand his work', Stow's response was, ‘I think one does need to know a great deal – well, a certain amount, anyway, about an author's life … and not only what he chooses to have known.' He goes on to talk about Conrad, on whom he had lectured: ‘For instance, it wasn't known until quite recently that he [Conrad] had tried to commit suicide as a young man. I must say that it is obviously something that one needs to know.'

*

Sadly, I wrote back to Stow immediately with feverish curiosity. I spent the entire day in bed composing my response, five pages of questions, so excited was I by his memories, his insights, his thoughtfulness. I foolishly believed that this was the opening to a real and perhaps literary friendship, mentioning my interest in Joyce, in the vain hope that he might respond and reveal his long-held interest in all things Joycean. I realise now it must have been like receiving an interrogation. And given that we barely knew each other, I perhaps shouldn't have been so familiar as to suggest that I visit him in Harwich. (I had presumptuous visions of us sitting over a beer together.) His card in return arrived swiftly and was more than clear:

Dear Gabrielle

It's friendly of you to suggest meeting up with me here, but I hope you won't take it amiss if I say that I'm old and ailing nowadays, rather an unsavoury old bachelor, and people understand that I don't like to be seen like this and prefer to be left alone. This sounds awfully unsociable, but I really have told you all that I know about the Fergusons and the Careys.

With every good wish …

I didn't believe him. I was sure he knew more – but he was clearly putting up a boundary that I was not to overstep. I was disappointed but I was also, at the time, extremely ill.

6

‘So successful was Randolph Stow in erasing himself from the nation's public memory that the
Sydney Morning Herald
took almost three weeks to print an obituary after his death in May 2010.'

— Geordie Williamson,
The
Burning Library
, 2012

The day after the merry-go-round was stilled Randolph Stow died. I felt deeply, inexplicably saddened. This wasn't just the loss of a great writer. We had lost a person of exceptional vision and sensitivity whose shaping was rooted in that other lost era, an era that for all its failings had, as Stow put it, ‘a certain fineness', which occasionally produced exquisitely fine-tuned human beings.

When Stow had said he was ‘ailing' it looked like he meant in the sense of ageing – but he'd had bowel cancer that had spread to the liver. It wasn't until two weeks before his death that anyone knew how serious his illness was.

‘I went next door to tell him that we were going to get a man in to put down rat poison,' Hugh, Stow's neighbour of seven years would tell me later. ‘I wanted to warn him. It was only then that we realised how really unwell he was.'

Hugh and Deborah had earlier tried being friendly with their odd neighbour Randolph.

‘But whenever we saw him he would look away, look down and avert his gaze.' He was always polite but ‘refused to connect'. Hugh had come to interpret Stow's inability to give of himself as a little ‘miserly'.

‘He seemed repressed,' said Hugh.

This made me recall D.H. Lawrence, referring in
Kangaroo
to the Australian male's habit of ‘holding most of himself aside' and creating a ‘withheld self'.

For the last fortnight of his life, however, Randolph the recluse was forced to let go of his withheld self and connect with his neighbours, and especially with Deborah, a trained nurse.

‘It was the only time the man accepted help,' she said later. ‘The only thing I knew of Randolph was from the rubbish he left out on bin night – I always noticed that his little black bag had almost nothing in it.' Stow, it appeared, lived an ascetic life, buying very little and consuming the minimum. Deborah never noticed piles of empty bottles (contrary to a rumour that Stow drank excessively).

They'd been almost strangers. And now suddenly there was a daily, enforced intimacy.

*

Hugh arranged for Stow's bed to be brought down the winding stairs of his cramped terrace house. Deborah took him his nightly meals, which he sometimes ate and sometimes left untouched. After two weeks his breathing became increasingly difficult and he was transported to the local hospital.

When the call came from the hospital saying that Stow was extremely ill and might not last the night, Deborah and Hugh had already drunk a bottle of wine between them. By that time Stow's sister, Helen, had arrived from Australia and was sitting with them, perfectly sober, but didn't feel confident enough to drive a strange car in a strange country in the dark. They lost almost an hour trying to decide what to do. In the end, Hugh drove but it was too late. Stow was dead. He, too, had died quite alone.

7

In August 2010 I booked a ticket to Perth to attend the Randolph Stow memorial event, a celebration of his life and work at the University of
Western Australia.

The day I arrived there the streets were deserted. ‘Grand final,' the taxi man explained. Which grand final exactly: rugby, soccer, cricket? It would seem ignorant and unAustralian to ask.

Looking out the cab windows at Perth going by, Stow's 1961 characterisation of Australia entered my mind: ‘Our democratic temperament, our love of sport, our depressing tolerance, and even worship, of the second-rate.'

Even as a high school student here, Stow had found himself in conflict with authority over the emphasis on sporting achievements above all else. When his mother wrote to the Guildford Grammar headmaster pleading that her son be excused from football so he could focus on other studies, the head wrote back unequivocally, saying he would not single out the young Julian – as he was known then – for special attention, because he could ‘see no reason why he should regard himself as a special case'.
In 1952, in his final year, Stow himself wrote to the headmaster, explaining his frustrations with the school, and to say he had tried to make a positive contribution but that there was little he could do:

I could never make a tennis, swimming, or athletes team, and there are no clubs which are interested in ballet, art or music … it was a horribly frustrating feeling to learn all about my hobbies from books and nothing by discussion … Why not do something for the non-sporting varieties? They must have other interests to prevent their being social outcasts and as a result they will be more loyal and well disposed to the school.

The four-page letter shows how young Stow felt himself a social outcast. If a teenage boy with an interest in ballet still feels slightly odd in contemporary Australia, we can only imagine how strange it must have been more than half a century ago in an old-fashioned grammar school in Guildford.

The taxi left me on the windy doorstep of a Fremantle B&B. For more than forty years our side of the Carey family in Sydney had not had any contact with the Carey family in Perth, not just because we were on opposite sides of the continent, but because we were on opposite sides of politics. The story my sister had told me many years ago, and the one I had always believed, was that we didn't speak to our relatives in Western Australia (let alone stay with them!) because they were all right-wing, materialistic uranium miners. The possible exception could be one cousin, Andrea. Apparently she taught English to migrants, rode a bicycle and was an animal rights activist.

Having settled in early, I perused the brochures, and decided on a visit to the Shipwrecks Gallery. I had always loved shipwrecks but possibly not as much as Stow, who had grown up along this coastline littered with lost ships – Dutch, Spanish, French and English. His particular interest, which became almost an obsession towards the end of his life, was the famous
Batavia
. Although a number of books have been written about the
Batavia
wreck and the mutiny and massacres that ensued, there are plenty of Australians, especially on the east side, who are unaware that the first white settlers in Australia were in fact two Dutch murderers set ashore in 1629, following the
Batavia
trials. One was a twenty-four-year-old soldier and the other, described by Stow as ‘the truly sinister and bloodthirsty teenager', was Jan Pelgrom de Bye.

For Stow, the
Batavia
tragedy symbolised something very significant about Australia and Australian identity – it became one of a pair of mirrored images appearing throughout Australian history and mythology. On the one hand, there is Australia seen as a prison; on the other, Australia as Eden. These two motifs derive from two historical events, says Stow. First, there is the narrative of Quirós'
Austrialis del Espiritu Santo
, which was an attempt by a devout Portuguese–Spanish navigator to establish a New Jerusalem in the South Sea, a land ‘of the Holy Ghost
'
,
at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Then there is the evil episode of the
Batavia
, led by the under-merchant (later the self-styled Captain-General) Jeronimus Cornelisz, and wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands – almost a perfect parody of Quirós' utopian ideal. The
Batavia
is the dark side of sunny Australia and one irony that Stow highlights is that the pious Quirós, with all his holy intentions, never set foot in the South Land, while two of the perpetrators of the
Batavia
massacre were our nation's first European immigrants.

The Australia envisioned by Quirós, writes Stow, ‘promised to be a rather prison-like, priest-ridden Eden', whereas ‘the domain of Captain-General Jeronimus … was perhaps another sort of Eden where nothing was forbidden, not even the pleasures of homicide. The empty continent offered both possibilities; and, as the fate of the Aborigines shows, both possibilities were later taken up.'

*

Tourmaline is a mineral belonging to a gemstone group that comes in many colours. The nature of the mineral tourmaline, according to critic Russell McDougall, says a lot about the vision of Stow's novel as well as its form. Tourmaline is created by a process known as twinning, which produces a dull face as well as a shiny face. When cutting a tourmaline, the lapidary needs to be extremely cautious of tourmaline's well-developed ‘dichroism', or two-colouredness, to ensure that only the shiny side is exposed.

In
Tourmaline
,
Stow was attempting to ‘twin' or combine poetry with prose. It was this approach that critics later decried, in particular Professor Leonie Kramer, who accused the young Stow of being caught up in a dangerous experiment in which ‘poetry has steadily aspired towards the condition of prose' and vice versa.

Stow's town of Tourmaline is also twinned as a prison that was formerly an Eden. As lucidly described by the narrator, Law, once upon a time Tourmaline boasted hanging gardens and a crystalline lake, but now it is barren and sterile. What little water remains is so red and dirty that it looks as though it is mixed with blood. Tourmaline has transformed from the land of the spirit to the land of the Antichrist.

Perhaps Stow saw the
Batavia
tragedy as precipitating what he believed to be an Australian propensity for Messianic cults.
Tourmaline
tells the story of the arrival of a newcomer, into a drought-ridden former goldmining town in the dusty Australian outback, who promises to find water by powers of divination. The residents of the town immediately fall under his spell but their faith is misplaced. And it isn't just a vulnerability to false messiahs that worried Stow: the real problem is a country that offers gold – materialism and wealth – but not the most important thing for sustaining life – water. Physical, but not spiritual sustenance.

The very last manuscript written by Stow and submitted to a publisher was a long non-fiction essay. In it Stow tries to make sense of the
Batavia
by proposing that the massacre was motivated by a sect or secret society back in Holland called the ‘Torrentians'. He argues that there was a religious, if satanic, reasoning behind the seemingly incomprehensible events that occurred on the Abrolhos all those years ago. The essay included a translation of a 1628 poem about the trial of Jan Torrentius, the Charles Manson-type character who was the leader of the sect to which Jeronimus belonged. (In order to do the research Stow had added old Dutch to his impressive list of languages.) The work was submitted to the University of Western Australia Publishing but after lengthy consideration was rejected.

*

All writers, no matter how successful, find rejections difficult. One can only imagine how Stow must have felt, after all those years living abroad, to have his work rejected by his own countrymen. The
Batavia
had been one of the darkest episodes in Australian history and Stow felt he had discovered something close to an explanation for this bizarre event, and yet his colleagues in Western Australia weren't interested. Or at least, could not understand how the story could be relevant to anyone living in modern, twentieth-century Australia.

As I walked along the foreshore towards the centre of Fremantle, Stow's analysis of Australia and Australians, told through the fable of
Tourmaline
, seemed to be exemplified. The wealth derived from West Australian mining was obvious in the number of pleasure craft that crowded the marinas, many of them bigger than my house. This area was, I recalled, the playground of that Aussie anti-hero Alan Bond and the scene of great rejoicing over the America's Cup win in 1983. In many ways, the recent history of Fremantle symbolised everything that frustrated Stow about Australia: an obsession with sport, wealth and materialism, combined with a general ignorance or lack of interest in our more remote history, which might unlock the secrets behind our obsessions.

And so the twin myths that preoccupied Stow and his work continue with force and meaning today. Among the thousands of refugees that attempt the sea journey to Australia, seeking a utopia, many only find a prison. These people are the modern castaways and some, of course, are shipwrecked here. The latest prison, the flat, featureless, desolate island of Nauru, has a setting eerily similar to the Abrolhos Islands, the site of
Batavia
atrocities.

*

The word ‘shipwreck' often appears in Stow's poetry and prose. In one of his most quoted passages, he writes of human existence as a kind of shipwreck: ‘We are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly.'

And in the poem ‘Complaint Against Himself' the last stanza reads:

But words are frail, and shipwreck; hands find flaws;

And though we build strong bridges with our hate,

Our love makes islands, mocks communication.

Shipwrecks symbolise another of Stow's constant themes: our failure to communicate. These vessels, once buoyant and lively, busy and on course, are messengers from one continent to another, attempts to reach out from one island to another. But then they are silenced underwater forever, their stories drowned, their messages sunk.

Many of our forebears found themselves, after long, arduous journeys, stranded thousands of miles from the place they called home. When my own great-great-grandmother Isabella Ferguson arrived in Australind, a struggling colony-to-be south of Perth, she felt as though she had just climbed out from a shipwreck. Back in her native Scotland, the prospectus for Australind had shown a town square and neat streets, but on arrival she and her family found nothing but wilderness. Momentarily she despaired, crying as she sat on the packing case that contained her piano.

My mother, continued Midnite, ‘came from a good Colonial family, which arrived in the
Parmelia
. They were of the true old Swan River pioneering breed, and spent their first winter in the Colony camped on a beach underneath their grand piano.

But then my great-great-grandmother's Calvinism came to the rescue. It was that old-fashioned faith that gave her the strength to survive the first two years camping in a tent with two children, a faith that I envy, the loss of which has left so many of us feeling adrift and unanchored.

Stow appears to have spent his entire life seeking a way to rediscover faith, whether through Taoism, Anglicanism, poetry or meticulous research into the religious foundations behind a Dutch sect that resulted in a massacre off the coast of Geraldton. His search was for spiritual meaning (in a country that he accused of ‘spiritual malaise') and it was precisely his religiosity that bothered some Australian critics and readers. Kramer complained of his ‘quasi-religious ideas' while another critic referred to ‘religious propaganda'. Vincent Buckley was more understanding: ‘His is the religious stress,' he wrote; as was Dorothy Green: ‘Australian critics were not receptive to the exploration of religious ideas in fiction.'

When Stow left Australia he wasn't just rejecting the materialism of his homeland, he was also rejecting a worldview that explained everything through science and technology; he longed for a world, like that of the Aboriginal Umbalgari people of Western Australia, or the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea or the mystics of medieval Europe, that was populated with myths and magic and ancestral spirits. For Stow, Western Australia was not only arid geographically; for a white man, it was also spiritually arid. Stow needed to believe in an enchanted world underpinned by stories, which is what led him back to rural England, English folklore and medieval myths in search of an imaginative reality, as well as a rootedness, that could not be found in Australia. Most of all, perhaps, he was looking for something he felt was impossible in his native land: a way to forge a soul. Or what he called honouring the single soul.

The idea of ‘honouring the single soul' is one of the keys to understanding Randolph Stow and his work, writes critic Paul Higginbotham, ‘a moral philosophy that motivated much of Stow's fiction'. It begins with an honouring of one's own soul, and eventually leads to the love of others, but it cannot be a possessive love. To honour the single soul is to give it freedom.

*

The Western Australian Museum Shipwreck Galleries is a spectacular convict-built museum that houses some of the earliest evidence of European visitors to this continent. The original timbers from the
Batavia
form the centrepiece, in the special Batavia Gallery, which also includes the skeleton of one of the murdered crew. The remains of the
Batavia
, off the coast of Geraldton, were discovered on 4 June 1963 – exactly 334 years after the day it sank – by three local men, led by Max Cramer, born just a year before Stow. The discovery caused an international sensation and Cramer, once an unknown recreational scuba-diver, developed into a semi-professional maritime archaeologist.