Moving Among Strangers (4 page)

Stow and Cramer crossed paths in several ways. Both men were preoccupied, if not obsessed, by the events surrounding the
Batavia
, and they continued to correspond after Stow left Australia. Then in 1988, in his capacity as a builder and a carpenter, Cramer constructed a replica of the merry-go-round in the sea, in recognition of the popularity of Stow's novel, after the original roundabout had been removed in the 1950s. ‘Many local people and visitors are keen to see the places described in the book,' said Cramer. Max Cramer died in 2010, just months after Stow, and three weeks before the Stow memorial event. His death, as well as his achievements, were widely reported. As I travelled around Perth meeting people and chatting with taxi drivers, I would discover that Cramer, twice awarded the Geraldton Citizen of the Year Award as well as an Order of Australia medal, was much better known to West Australians than Randolph Stow. If Stow had won medals for sporting feats such as diving or tennis or yacht racing, rather than novels, he might have been a household name. Or even if he had become a farmer, like his grandfather, and grown grapes, then his work might have been remembered. There is a C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec to commemorate my great-grandfather; there is an entire Jack Mann range to memorialise the ‘legendary' Houghton winemaker (employed by C.W.), and there is even the idiotically named ‘Bandit' range supposedly to ‘immortalise the legend' of Moondyne Joe, complete with prison-garb arrows on the screwcap. (What on earth, I want to ask the Houghton marketing people, is wrong with the word ‘bushranger'?)

Ferguson, Mann, Moondyne Joe – these are all names that probably have some vague resonance for most West Australians. And yet, when I mentioned the name Stow people looked at me blankly. Where, I thought then, is the Randolph Stow Special Reserve?

8

Early the next morning I joined a journalist friend for a walk along the beach. She thought my infatuation with Stow was eccentric and essentially pointless and encouraged me instead to write about what we spent all our time talking about: parenting teenagers, middle-aged women and sex. As we chatted and power-walked, counting to six the number of ex-husbands between us, Susan pointed to a strange sculpture in the sea of a man on a horse that was immediately reminiscent of a Don Quixote figure. We sat down on the sand and I listened and learned, for the first time, about the sad story of C.Y. O'Connor.

Charles Yelverton O'Connor was one of those Australian heroes that Stow thought typical of ‘hot, tragic Australia'. In 1891, the then West Australian premier, John Forrest, offered O'Connor the position of chief engineer of the state. An Irishman by birth, among O'Connor's major works were the design and construction of the Fremantle port, the development of railway lines and later, a freshwater supply to the newly established goldfields in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. The scheme to pipe water more than three hundred miles from the western slope of the Darling Range to a reservoir at Coolgardie was the greatest undertaking of its kind ever to be proposed in Australia and one of the greatest engineering feats in the world at that time. Nevertheless, during its construction O'Connor was under constant attack from both the parliament and the newspapers, who accused him of mismanagement and madness.

In 1902 a preliminary pumping test failed: when the tap was turned on no water appeared. The next morning O'Connor went for his customary ride along the Fremantle beach, past the new harbour he had designed, and rode his horse into the sea. Then he took out his revolver and shot himself.

O'Connor had been the victim of a vicious public campaign that masked a popular prediction – almost a wish – for his imaginative and ambitious project to fail. It was too grand, too far-sighted, for the average, egalitarian Australian to have faith in. (Even as a boy, Stow had perceived that ‘nobody wanted anybody else to be good at anything'.) The pipeline, however, was not a failure. A year after O'Connor's death, in 1903, Forrest turned on the water at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie amid great rejoicing. The visionary Irish engineer, meanwhile, had been buried under a great Celtic cross, his remains adding to the collection of ‘gallant bones' that, according to Stow, ‘littered bare, melancholy Australia'.

Stow surely had O'Connor's fate in mind when he wrote
Tourmaline
, with its self-proclaimed water-diviner who arrives in a once-prosperous goldmining town that has deteriorated to dust and ruin following mindless, money-hungry plundering of the countryside. The townspeople place all their hopes in this mysterious stranger, but in the end Tourmaline remains as dry as when he arrived and the people continue as ‘tenants of shanties rented from the wind'.

In the note of the opening pages of
Tourmaline
Stow writes: ‘The action of this novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future.' Could he envisage, even at the age of twenty-five, our post-mining country when we will eventually find ourselves forever ‘tenants of the sunstruck miles', abandoned to our ‘derelict independence'?

Stow wrote
Tourmaline
in 1961, while travelling on the boat to England, and then finished it in Leeds, where he had taken up a temporary lectureship at Leeds University, a position offered by the great Yeats scholar, Norman (Derry) Jeffares, who had spent seventeen years at the University of Adelaide. Published in London in 1963,
Tourmaline
is described by critic Anthony Hassall as Stow's ‘first fully mature novel, a deeply-meditated and deliberate work expressing his personal religious vision'.

In a 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.

‘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, vibrations and breath of a young poet, now dead and buried under an oak tree in Essex. The silence that followed hovered with his
anima.

Truly, his voice was so melodic, so gentle and so exquisitely tender that one had to wonder how anybody so sensitive went about their day-to-day business. If Stow had been forgotten by the mainstream and only briefly remembered by the literary establishment, at least here, in the cathedral-like space of Winthrop Hall, his single soul had been deeply honoured.

9

Before leaving Perth I called the Western Australian State Library to arrange to see their copy of
Songs of the Vagabond Scholars: Lyrics by anonymous wanderers who sheltered in courts and monasteries at the time of the Black Death
, a collaboration between Randolph Stow and the artist Donald Friend. Stow had translated the poetry from Latin, and Friend had drawn the fourteen original lithographs.

In the rare-book reading room I was given white gloves to protect the precious pages. The book was heavy,
half a metre high and beautifully bound: number thirty
-one of only one hundred printed.

The story behind the book is that of the twelfth-century poets and troubadours who moved around Europe, presumably trying to evade the drift of the Black Death. Their lyrics were not unlike the ancient Nahuatl poetry of Mexico, with an emphasis on the urgency to pay attention and enjoy what is in front of you because death is always close behind. A stanza of Stow's literal translation reads:

My intention is

to die in the tavern

so that there may be wines

right beside my dying mouth.

Then choruses of angels

most joyously shall sing:

‘May God be well-inclined

towards this pisspot.'

The medieval practice of personalising death as the Grim Reaper – which also happens to be a Mexican tradition – seemed to appeal to Stow. His final novel,
The Suburbs of Hell
, is
ostensibly a murder mystery and partly prompted by the ‘Nedlands Monster', Eric Cooke, who from 1959 to 1963 murdered eight people in Western Australia, apparently without motive. But Stow's book is also a modern version of Chaucer's
A Pardoner's Tale
, and by the end we come to understand that the murderer is not an individual at all but Death himself.

Ever since my father's sudden death, I too had retained a persistent preoccupation with mortality. It took some time to find an Australian publisher who would take on the topic but in 1995 I finally negotiated a deal with Penguin for an anthology about death. Immediately, I wrote to Stow inviting him to contribute, hoping that his lengthy friendship with my mother might encourage him to consider the proposal
.
He responded graciously as always:

It was nice to hear from you and thank you for thinking of me in connection with your Penguin Book of Death. I am afraid I just don't see a way of handling such a big subject. In the days when I was an apprentice anthropologist I might have dared to, but with what I've learned since about literature, history and archaeology it just seems too huge to handle. For me, that is – I'd be interested to see what I can learn from your contributors. Sorry to be a disappointment. My regards to your mother. Best wishes, Mick Randolph Stow.

This put into polite phrases the sentiment expressed by Dave in
Tourmaline
: ‘If we talk about it,' he said, ‘we'll talk crap. This is one of the laws of the universe.' Perhaps this also explains Stow's increasing silence as he grew older. As a young writer he had ‘dared' to speak of these topics but now he believed they were ‘too huge to handle'. Yet, also in
Tourmaline
, Gloria says, ‘Let your light shine … No good hiding it under a bucket. Let it shine.'

*

After years of being separated on either side of our great continent, cousin Andrea had reached out and broken the deadlock in Carey family communication. She had called and arranged to pick me up from the library – we'd go to lunch in Cottesloe to meet more cousins, the children of my father's three sisters!

‘Gabs!' Andrea greeted me now. I got into a messy car that smelt faintly of Kelpie and felt relieved. The difference between me and other people – proper, well-behaved, hard-working, law-abiding people – is that they're tidy like my sister, while I'm shockingly disordered. I'm always happy to find that others also live in anarchic mess.

And as we drove she talked about how fond she'd been of ‘Uncle Alec', my father, who'd also been notoriously messy and disordered, despite his meticulous academic footnoting.

At the Cottesloe restaurant three more cousins were indeed waiting – Carey the stockbroker, Ashley the miner and John the fitness equipment wholesaler, along with Carla, Carey's Jaguar-driving beautician girlfriend – all people and professions my sister would have thoroughly disapproved of. Cathy had told me often, with particular disdain, about a cousin who allegedly worked as a
merchant banker
, which was the equivalent, in her eyes, to a white-collar criminal. And yet here were these people with open, smiling faces, none of whom looked like they'd just slinked out of the offices of Goldman Sachs or Bernard Madoff after fleecing pensioners of their life savings.

We greeted each other warmly, and sat over wine and food. Our last forty years needed filling in. We talked of children and marriages and places and Stow and the past, and we showed photos. There was a natural ease and familiarity around the table that perhaps only first cousins can feel, and I was embraced and accepted in a way I hadn't felt in my immediate family for years.

‘It seems so sad that we didn't know each other for all those years we were growing up,' my cousin Andrea said as we were going. We felt so comfortable together and looked so alike that we might have passed as sisters. ‘Uncle Alec always stayed with me when he came to Perth,' Andrea said. ‘And then one day he said he wanted to have a barbecue and invite everyone he'd ever known in Perth … there were people there we hadn't seen for twenty-five years. I thought it was a strange idea at the time. But now I think he'd made up his mind and it was his way of saying goodbye.'

At the airport her eyes were moist. But I didn't feel sad at all; I felt I had finally come home.