Moving Among Strangers (12 page)

22

Mexicans are right, death comes in threes. In 2009 it was my mother, in 2010 Randolph Stow and 2011 my sister.

My brother rang just after midnight.

‘Cathy stopped breathing half an hour ago,' he said.

I was alone. No one else in the house was awake. There was no one to say, reassuringly, ‘Go and kiss your sister goodbye. She has turned into an angel.'

*

The following afternoon we sat together by the fishpond in my backyard. Russell told me Cathy had left instructions that she wanted to be cremated.

‘And she said she wanted her ashes to be scattered on the Cotswolds,' he added.

‘The
Cotswolds
?' I said. ‘In England?'

‘Yes.'

That was when I felt the involuntary tears welling, and I cried, properly, for the first time. Could she really have been so lonely that she wanted her remains left in a place where she had never lived and knew nobody? Where no one could go to leave flowers and mourn on her anniversary? My mother and father were buried side by side in the Woronora cemetery in the Sutherland Shire where they had bought their first home and brought up their children. Stow was buried in the woods where he spent the last thirty years of his life walking. It made no sense at all, surely, that my sister wanted to be returned to some kind of faux postcard pastorale where she had no family and no connections. Why then had she remained her entire life in a place she felt she didn't belong?

Would my left-leaning, Greens Party activist sister really have felt more at home in the Cotswolds than the inner-west of Sydney? Or was this all about a lost-Eden innocence we long to return to, that in fact never existed?

There I go again, I thought, judging her, when in reality I am no different. I've spent my entire life in longing – to go back to Ireland, as though that were
my
lost homeland. Ever since my first trip there in 1984 I had taken every opportunity to return. I had even ‘accidentally' left my passport in Derry once, no doubt subconsciously hoping this would prevent my boarding a plane to return to Australia. But I never had the courage, like Stow, to make the move permanently.

I pressed my brother for some explanation.

‘I think she thought she wanted her ashes left somewhere that could never be destroyed, some place that was permanent.'

So my sister's yearning was the same as Stow's: the search for permanence, according to Geoffrey Dutton, was Stow's major theme, emerging ‘in various guises, again and again'. The only way of achieving permanence, says Dutton, was by ‘going on a journey away from transitory, inadequate life' and ‘towards the peace of permanence of death.'

‘The Royal National Park is permanent,' I argued. ‘Why not there?'

The National Park was where our family had picnicked on innumerable Sundays, where all of us had walked and walked, literally hundreds of miles for hundreds of hours over decades, through Flat Rock Creek and by Deer Park Pool, to Little Marley and Burning Palms. Why not scatter her ashes there? Over well-worn bush tracks rather than cobblestones? Why not leave her remains on
our
landscape?

But there was no point in arguing. Last orders must be obeyed. Clearly, my sister had always felt herself an Anglo in exile. She had been born in London, lived there until she was five years old, and retained her British passport. Like Stow, Cathy must have always felt more English than Australian.

23

If my mother had not died I wouldn't have written to Stow. And if I hadn't written to Stow and received letters in return, I might not have felt so compelled to attend his memorial. And if I hadn't attended that memorial I would not have rediscovered my relatives and found a clan I truly belonged to. And if I hadn't rediscovered my family, I would have had no reason to visit White Peak and no one to accompany me to Geraldton. And if I hadn't visited White Peak I would never have gone on to uncover the part of my father's life that he always kept secret. And his life, and my mother's, would have remained mysterious and obscure. So although Randolph Stow was now finally and truly silent, the stories, thanks to him, continued to be told.

*

This then, is what I have learnt about the dead: they do not lose their power just because they are buried beneath an oak tree, or interred in a Sutherland Shire cemetery or their ashes scattered on the cobblestones of an English village. And we don't lose our desire to talk with them just because they no longer have a voice. Stow's presence among my family and the power of his storytelling became more meaningful to me when he died.

I like to think that my mother's letters to Stow while he was a schoolboy and an undergraduate, letters that he described as ‘a window on the world', showed that there was at least one person who realised that Stow was indeed a special case. And I am also quietly impressed to know that, as a young poet, Stow posted poetry to Joan, confident, I feel, that she would understand.

I'm sending you two of my poems . . . My Aunt May was greatly shocked by the ‘Shepherdess's Tale' and when my mother suggested that she might not have understood it, she said: ‘Of course I understood it, only too well.' She didn't really, of course; the sex in it is an allegory of nature asserting itself over man.

Among the many pleasures of English country life that Stow enjoyed was the practice of country winemaking. He clearly loved the process of decay and ferment followed by bubbly effervescence, and was particularly intrigued by a phenomenon that has the rather ugly scientific name of ‘malo-lactic ferment'.

Stow explained it as follows: ‘It is something that happens to wine when the plant that produced it flowers the next year. The wine effervesces, as if in sympathy.'

A strange, almost magic concordance between the vine and the crafted, altered juice of the fruit of that vine, ‘malo-lactic ferment' is a mysterious moment that my grandfathers and great-grandfathers, as winemakers, must have known about. My mother, if she spent time in the Houghton cellars, might have heard the celebratory bubbling in the casks.

Stow was so taken by this curious organic show of empathy between flower and fermenting wine that he wrote a poem called ‘Wine',
which opens:

When, among new leaves and tender tendrils,

The first green grape-flowers appeared

Wine rejoiced, and the drunken casks danced in the cellars.

A reader could be forgiven for thinking that this is a poem in celebration of landscape and country life, yet ‘Wine' ends in a typically inscrutable Stow way:

I rejoice in the spring. I strike the intolerable window.

Another year, and the bubbles rise bitterly in my veins.

Stow too was ageing, each year bringing him closer to the permanence of death. Perhaps this awareness was what made the bubbles bitter.

*

A year or so after my sister's death something unexpected happened. I found myself turning into a devoted gardener. Both my sister and my mother had been gifted gardeners and it was one of those talents I'd always felt I had missed out on. But now they were both gone I found my garden was developing in a most unusual way, almost as if I had begun channelling something of their horticultural flair. Perhaps, because I'd been thinking to them, they'd been thinking back.

The fig tree, although still the size of a shrub, produced two beautiful purple fruit. The orchids that I had inherited from my mother burst into bloom. The grass tree I had bought at an exorbitant price because it reminded me of the beautiful design on Stow's second novel sprouted a magnificent stalk and then flowered, excreting a moist honey each morning that gave off a subtle, intoxicating scent. I became, almost overnight, one of those people who spend their Saturday afternoons at Flower Power and their evenings studying the
Yates Garden Guide
. I even found a terracotta Green Man to adorn the rose trellis.

Then one afternoon, in the garden section of the local nursery, I came across a tiny elderflower plant in a section titled ‘Renaissance herbs'. I took it home and planted it in the backyard between the banksia and the flowering gum. It is now almost three metres tall, with thick, lush green leaves that in spring are covered in tiny white flowers.

I have followed the Country Cottage recipe for elderflower wine carefully and the first batch has been sealed and sits in the bottom of the pantry. I await the moment of effervescence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank the following for their assistance:

Roger Averill, Aliki Barnstone, Delys Bird, Jacqueline Blanchard, Tony Burrows, Andrea Davy, Madonna Duffy, Paul Genoni, Vivien Green, Bill Grono, Dennis Haskell, John Kinsella, Peter Kuch, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, Helen McArthur, Carey McDowell, Brigid Mullane, Stephen Romei, Rachel Rosenthal, Susan Smith, Penny Sutherland, Geordie Williamson, Justin Wolfers and Fay Zwicky.

Thanks also for the support provided by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, the Westerly Centre of University of Western Australia and the staff of the Geraldton Regional Library.

And to Anthony Buckley, who has lived with the ghost of another man for three years – thank you for your patience.

This project was assisted by an Eric Dark Flagship Fellowship for Non-Fiction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Select Works by Randolph Stow

Stow, R 1952, ‘He Snooped to Conquer',
The Swan: Guildford Grammar School Magazine
© The Estate of Randolph Stow
.

—
1956,
A Haunted Land
, Macdonald, London.

—
1957,
Act One: Poems
,
Macdonald, London.

—
1957,
The Bystander
, Macdonald, London.

—
1958,
To the Islands
, Macdonald, London.

—
1962,
Outrider: Poems 1956–1962
, Macdonald, London.

—
1963,
Tourmaline
, Macdonald, London.

—
1964, ‘Babbitt Eats Babbitt',
Nation
, September 19, pp. 11–12.

—
1964,
Australian Poetry 1964
, ed. R Stow, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.

—
1965,
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
, Macdonald, London.

—
1969,
A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems
, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.

—
1969,
Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy
, Penguin, Melbourne.

—
1971, ‘The Southland of Antichrist: The
Batavia
Disaster of 1629',
Common Wealth
, ed. A Rutherford, Conference of Commonwealth Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark.

—
1973, ‘To fix the identity of a raw
democracy', seminar, Australian Writers' Centre / Australian Society of Authors, Melbourne, 6 October.

—
1974, ‘I really have nothing to say',
Twelve Poets, 1950–1970
, ed. A Craig, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane.

—
1974, ‘The Opinions of Torrentius', seminar, Geraldton Historical Society, Geraldton, August 28.

—
1978,‘Raw Material'
Westerly 21: An Anniversary Selection
, vol. 21, pp. 47–49.

—
1979,
Visitants
, Secker & Warburg, London.

—
1980,
The Girl Green as Elderflower
, Secker & Warburg, London.

—
1984,
The Suburbs of Hell
, Secker & Warburg, London.

—
1988, ‘Remembering Mr Atkinson', Planet 71,
The Welsh Internationalist
, Oct–Nov, pp. 84–91
© The Estate of Randolph Stow
.

—
1990,
Randolph Stow: Visitants, Episodes from Other Novels, Poems, Stories, Interviews, and Essays
, ed. AJ Hassall, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia.

—
2012,
The Land's Meaning
, ed. J Kinsella, Fremantle Press, Fremantle.
©
Sheil Land Associates Ltd.

Stow, R & Friend D 1982,
Songs of the Vagabond Scholars
, Beagle Books, Sydney.
© The Estate of Randolph Stow
.

Works on Randolph Stow

Buckley V 1961, ‘In the Shadow of Patrick White',
Meanjin
, vol.
20, pp. 144–154.

Dutton G 1965, ‘The Search for Permanence: The Novels of Randolph Stow',
Journal of Commonwealth Literature
, vol.
1, no. 1, pp. 135–148.

Hewett D 1988, ‘Silence, exile and cunning, the poetry of Randolph Stow',
Westerly
, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 59–66.

Higginbotham PD 1979, ‘Honour the single soul – Randolph Stow and his novels',
Southerly
, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 378–392.

Hope AD 1974, ‘Randolph Stow and the
Tourmaline
Affair',
The Australian Experience
, ed. WS Ramson, Australian National University Press, Canberra.

King B 1987, ‘Randolph Stow's Novels of Exile',
Antipodes
, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 75–78.

Kinross-Smith G 1985, ‘Randolph Stow: A Double Nostalgia',
This Australia
, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 17–23.

Kuch P & Kavanagh P, et. al. 1986, ‘The self-critical craftsman – Randolph Stow talks to Peter Kuch and Paul Kavanagh,'
Southerly
, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 437–443.

Kramer L 1964, ‘The Novels of Randolph Stow',
Southerly
, no. 2, pp. 78–91.

MacGregor T 1997, ‘Walking Well Worn Paths', radio program,
Radio Eye
, ABC Radio National, Sydney, 14 July.

McDougall R 1990, ‘Randolph Stow's
Tourmaline
',
Aspects of Australian Fiction
,
ed. A Brissenden, University of Western Australia Press, Perth.

Steinke N 1996, ‘Your Desert, Not Mine: Australian Literature since 1950', Program 6: ‘Tourmaline', ABC Radio National Open Learning Series, Co-production of University of New England, University of Sydney and Radio National, Australia.

Romei S 2010, ‘Randolph Stow: Australia loses one of its greatest writers', 31 May, cited at http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au.

Williamson G 2012,
The Burning library
, Text, Melbourne.

Zwicky F 1986,
The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival 197
4
–1984
, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands.