To the Islands (2 page)

Heriot is highly educated. On his journey he quotes or alludes to a raft of classics: the Bible, Dante’s
Inferno
,
Everyman
, Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
,
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
; and Greek, Latin, German, French and Spanish poetry. Perhaps erudition blinds Heriot to any genuine understanding of himself and his place in the world. Only by shedding that learning, that way of seeing and thinking, can he approach true knowledge. Like David Malouf’s Ovid in
An Imaginary Life
, Heriot eventually reaches a state of mind beyond language and intellectual understanding: a state of heightened intuitive perception and openness to experience. He discovers the landscape of his soul, a horizon of possibility.

As Stow’s prepositional title indicates, this novel is more concerned with the journey than the destination. There can be no doubt, however, that the Stow scholar Anthony J. Hassall was correct when he noted, in
Australian Book Review
in 2009, that the closing scene of Heriot ‘alone on a cliff above the Arafura Sea, confronting the strangeness of his soul and looking out towards the Aboriginal islands of the dead, is one of the unforgettable images of Australian literature’. Do the islands exist? Does it matter? Has Heriot found peace? Stow withholds certainty, offering open-endedness over resolution.

Earlier, Heriot and the murderer Rusty debate the possibility of an unforgiving God. When Rusty suggests that God ‘pays us back for what we done’, Heriot insists: ‘We pay ourselves back...Because you know our crimes are like a stone, a stone again, thrown into a pool, and the ripples go on washing out until, a long time after we’re gone, the whole world’s rocked with them.’ As his final act of will, Heriot hurls a boulder into the sea below. While one man may not be able to atone for the sins of a nation, he could set in motion ripples of thought that may reverberate after his death. The novel’s true conclusion may yet lie somewhere far in the future.

I remember first reading
To the Islands
as an undergraduate in the 1980s. I was amazed at how Stow managed to evoke such beauty and majesty in landscape and people while narrating a tale of such pain and anguish. Like so many readers, I am haunted by the final vision of Heriot and perplexed by his last utterance. Over the years I have taught this novel to hundreds of students and, therefore, had cause to reread it multiple times. Thirty years after my initial encounter with
To the Islands
, I remain captive to its power.

Revisiting the manuscript of this novel in 1981 an older Stow remarked: ‘Nowadays I should hardly dare to tackle such a
King Lear
–like theme; but I do not regret having raised the large questions asked here, and so wisely left unanswered.’ He pondered that perhaps the novel retained some interest ‘because this story of an old man is really about a certain stage in the life of a sort of young man’. Today, the reverberations of Heriot’s hurled stone continue long after the covers of this extraordinary novel are closed.

To the Islands

My cell ’tis, lady, where instead of masks,

Music, tilts, tourneys and such courtlike shows,

The hollow murmur of the checkless winds

Shall groan again; whilst the unquiet sea

Shakes the whole rock with foamy battery.

There usherless the air comes in and out:

The rheumy vault will force your eyes to weep,

Whilst you behold true desolation.

A rocky barrenness shall pierce your eyes,

Where all at once one reaches where he stands,

With brows the roof, both walls with both his hands.

Marston:
The Malcontent

Still islands, islands, islands. After leaving Cape

Bougainville we passed at least 500, of every shape,

size, and appearance...Infinitely varied as these

islands are—wild and picturesque, grand sometimes

almost to sublimity—there is about them all an air

of dreariness and gloom. No sign of life appears on

their surface; scarcely even a sea bird hovers on their

shores. They seem abandoned by Nature to complete

and everlasting desolation.

Jefferson Stow:
Voyage of the Forlorn Hope
, 1865

To
SALLY GARE AND BILL JAMISON
with admiration

To The Islands
was first published in 1958, and completed not long after I had passed my twenty-second birthday. Understandably, it contains many faults, due partly to immaturity, but more to the fact that my technical competence was not equal to my ambition, which in retrospect makes me realise how horizons narrow in middle age. In reissuing it in this very slightly abridged version, I am conscious that it still asks for the tolerance which most reviewers were kind enough to show when it was new, on the grounds that its author (who no longer seems to be myself) was too young to know his own limitations. Nowadays I should hardly dare to tackle such a
King Lear
-like theme; but I do not regret having raised the large questions asked here, and so wisely left unanswered. If the novel retains any interest, other than as an historical-sociological document, it may be because this story of an old man is really about a certain stage in the life of a sort of young man who has always been with us, and always will be.

In the original edition I was consciously making propaganda on behalf of Christian mission-stations for Aborigines, in particular for one Mission on which I had worked for a short time, and which seemed in danger of closing down. Australian writers before me had generally given missions and missionaries a bad press, and in earlier days some had deserved their low opinion. By 1957, however, the year in which the novel is set, it seemed to me that at least one of them was performing a valuable service to the Aboriginal community which it housed and employed, and which, indeed, it could be said to have created. Though the Government contributed largely to the lodging and education of children, medical services and the rations given to ‘indigents’ (nomads), it could not easily have distributed its charity without the facilities provided by the Church of England and its servants, employed at merely token salaries. It was clear that if the Church felt forced to withdraw its backing from that isolated village, one of only two settlements in a region about the size of Tasmania, the effect on the inhabitants would be disastrous.

For that reason there was in the novel a good deal of talk by the white characters about their difficulties and hopes, and even a very tepid love-interest, introduced not for its own sake but to suggest that at least two Europeans would remain committed to the Mission. Most of those passages have gone now, as the cause was lost long ago. The book did get itself mentioned in the Federal Parliament (‘A brilliant story’, said
Hansard
), but that was in connection with the alleged need for Professors of Australian Literature. Chairs were duly invented for them; and the Mission, in the late 1960s, was abandoned.

Even though I saw for myself the financial problems which confronted the Church of England there, this withdrawal strikes me as astonishingly irresponsible. The Aborigines were removed, willy-nilly, from the ‘country’ to which they were so deeply attached (as who would not be, for it is stunningly and majestically beautiful), and sent to live near the town of Wyndham. The result was exactly what could have been predicted: drink, prostitution, violence and gaol.

In the early 1970s a combination of white men and Aborigines managed to secure a quite substantial Government grant and went back to the Mission lands. One of those involved was my friend Daniel Evans, who is quoted extensively in Chapter 2, and who was (there seems no harm in revealing) the original of Justin. In 1974 I heard some very painful accounts of this deracinated, replanted community. Alcohol, which was never known there in the Church of England’s time, was periodically taking hold of the entire population; there was violence, especially the beating-up of women by men, and the intimidation of strangers; and a visiting film-maker reported having had a conversation, at 10 a.m., with three girls of eleven or twelve who were rolling drunk, and told him about their careers as prostitutes.

I have heard no further reports, and sincerely hope that these were teething-troubles, and that the people have returned to something like their former life-style. Alcohol is certainly a great problem, and one which did not arise in the 1950s, when Aborigines had few if any civil rights and were forbidden to drink. But it need not be a problem forever. In New Mexico and Alaska I have visited Indian and Eskimo communities which were ‘dry’ by their own choice, and the extreme isolation of the former Mission would make such voluntary prohibition very effective.

The hostility shown by some of those people to white visitors, as reported to me in 1974, may prove a worse problem. In 1957 disagreements and even flaming rows between black and white were not unknown, but it was generally perceived that both races were necessary for the continuation of a community which all wished well. Even the Umbali massacre of 1926, described in Daniel’s words in Chapter 2, had had one positive effect on race-relations: the courage and intransigence of ‘Djadja’ (Father) Gribble, the then Superintendent, had left, it seemed to me, a sharper memory than the atrocities of the murdering policemen. Some of the children rescued then are probably still alive. One wonders what their feelings are now, after having been abandoned by their Church and exiled to a township not noted for enlightened attitudes on racial matters. I fear that the often affectionate relations between black and white which I was lucky enough to see in that place may not be seen there again, at least for a generation or two.

I began my Note to the original edition with the curt statement: ‘This is not, by intention, a realistic novel’, which has been misinterpreted as a sort of manifesto. In fact, it merely expressed my irritation with the tyranny, in Australia, of social realism. In the 1950s novelists, one gathered, were supposed to concern themselves with Statistically Average Man, and he did not interest me. But in other respects I aimed, as I always have, at the most precise description I could achieve of things I had experienced with my own senses. Except in the choice of subject-matter, I have always been a fanatical realist.

The return to literature of Patrick White, after a long silence, soon made it superfluous to attack social realism in Australia. But this also led to a misapprehension about
To The Islands
, which many academics (who have rather innocent ideas about the speed with which writers and printers work) took to have been written under the influence of
Voss
. In fact, it was in the publishers’ hands before
Voss
was available in Australia, and had been begun much earlier. Literary influences there certainly were, and the text confesses them—‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’,
Everyman
,
King Lear
—but they had been assimilated over some years.

Though I covered on foot a great deal of the dramatic country forming the Mission’s territory, my work as ration-storeman prevented me from making any very long journey. But I did, in writing of Heriot’s travels, consult the accounts of several explorers of the North Kimberley, particularly C. Price Conigrave’s book
Walkabout
(Dent, 1938), and realised that I had, in effect, seen all the landscapes Heriot would have encountered. At the time I was rather haunted by a passage written by a sea-explorer of that region, a brother of my great-grandfather’s; and as it was much in my mind, I have added it to this edition as an epigraph.

Daniel Evans told me much about the language and mythology of his people, and on both subjects I received further enlightenment from the work, published and unpublished, of the linguist Dr A. Capell. His manuscript notes on the language were of great assistance in my dealings, as ration-storeman, with the nomadic Aborigines. I later became, for a short time, a student of his at the University of Sydney.

The lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins on
page 25
are reprinted from his
Poems
by kind permission of the Oxford University Press.

A child dragged a stick along the corrugated-iron wall of a hut, and Heriot woke. His eyes, not yet broken to the light, rested on the mud-brick beside his bed, drifted slowly upwards to the grass-thatched roof. From a rafter an organ-grinder lizard peered sidelong over its pulsing throat.

Oppressed by its thatch, the hot square room had a mustiness of the tropics. On the shelves of the rough bookcase Heriot’s learning was mouldering away, in Oxford Books of this and that, and old-fashioned dictionaries, all showing more or less the visitations of insects and mildew.

Collecting himself from sleep, returning to his life, he said to the lizard: ‘The sixty-seventh year of my age.
Rien n’égale en longueur les boiteuses journees
—’

Outside, the crows had begun their restless crying over the settlement, tearing at his nerves. The women were coming up to the kitchen. He could hear their laughing, their rich beautiful voices. Already the heat was pressing down on him, the sheet under him clung to the skin of his back, and it not yet six o’clock and a long day.

‘When shall I be cool?’ demanded Heriot of the lizard. ‘Soon the weather must change, the Wet is over, an old man can begin to live again.’ He tore aside further his sagging mosquito net, and the lizard took fright, dropped down, scurried to the doorway and froze there, waving a frantic paw.