Tourmaline
JULIAN RANDOLPH ‘MICK’ STOW was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student.
While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection,
Act One
, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel,
To the Islands
, the following year.
To the Islands
also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.
He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed
Visitants
, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse,
Outrider
; the novel
Tourmaline
, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction,
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
and
Midnite
.
For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews
.
In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award.
Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.
GABRIELLE CAREY is the author of novels, biography, autobiography, essays and, most recently,
Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family
, which was the joint winner of the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. She teaches writing at the University of Technology Sydney.
ALSO BY RANDOLPH STOW
A Haunted Land
The Bystander
To the Islands
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy
Visitants
The Girl Green as Elderflower
The Suburbs of Hell
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Copyright © Randolph Stow 1963
Introduction copyright © Gabrielle Carey 2015
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First published by Macdonald, London, 1963
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2015
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer
Primary print ISBN: 9781925240306
Ebook ISBN: 9781922253118
Creator: Stow, Randolph, 1935–2010.
Title: Tourmaline / by Randolph Stow ; introduced by Gabrielle Carey. Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
Fraught with Danger and Promise
by Gabrielle Carey
Fraught with Danger and Promise
by Gabrielle Carey
WHEN THE actor, director and writer Rachel Ward arrived in Australia from England, a friend handed her two books. If you want to understand this country, he said, these are your essential texts. One of them was
The Timeless Land
, by Eleanor Dark. The other was
Tourmaline
, by Randolph Stow.
There is something quintessentially Australian about
Tourmaline.
The outback town could be any outback town, the pub any rural pub at the end of ‘the raw red streak of the road’. The landscape of dust and flies is instantly recognisable. But what is this book about a stranger who comes to a once-prosperous mining town now stricken by drought and promises to find water? Is it fable or allegory, a Western, or a philosophical examination of the differences between Christianity and Taoism?
Tourmaline
was published in England in 1963 and subsequently greeted with bewilderment in Australia. Dame Leonie Kramer dismissed it as ‘
The Waste Land
with a few more bar scenes’. Anthony J. Hassall calls it Stow’s least understood book. It is one of the most overtly modernist of his nine novels—at least of the early half dozen, published between 1956 and 1967—and the author’s favourite, perhaps because it combined his talents as poet and prose writer. Indeed, the first few lines could easily be reformatted into poetry:
I say we have a bitter heritage, but that is not to run it down. Tourmaline is the estate, and if I call it heritage I do not mean that we are free in it. More truly we are tenants; tenants of shanties rented from the wind, tenants of the sunstruck miles.
The pairing of poetry and prose is just one of many twin themes in
Tourmaline
, among them what Stow might have called the dual myths of Australia: paradise and prison, antipodean Eden and waterless wasteland, land of the spirit and of the Antichrist. The novel’s narrator—Tourmaline’s oldest resident, mysteriously named the Law—tells us that his town once had a crystalline lake and Babylonian hanging gardens. Now it is barren, dusty and sterile.
Like Australia, democratic and egalitarian, ‘Tourmaline is a great leveller.’ Of the men on the veranda of the pub, the Law tells us: ‘Their clothes, their bark faces, their attitudes were identical.’ Tourmaline is isolated from the rest of the world, the only contact a supply truck that arrives from ‘the back of the blue ranges’ each month. ‘All of us, all Tourmaline, gathered in the street. And the truck slowly coming, its hot green paint powdered with Tourmaline dust, a grotesque hand of yellow metal dangling beside the driver’s door. Waiting, all of us.’
Into this scene, with its echoes of Beckett’s
Godot
, arrives a stranger. Off the back of the truck, like cargo, Michael Random is unloaded, scarred with a stigmata of sorts and terribly burned from the desert sun. The townsfolk gather round to revive him. When asked who he is, he answers: ‘I’m—ah—diviner.’ Stow’s irony is so quiet it can sometimes go unnoticed. A water diviner who has almost died of thirst?
After the townsfolk save his life, he is expected to save theirs. Random is received as a messiah and the people place their faith in his supernatural ability to divine water. They trust in his promise to return Tourmaline to its mythical origins of lush greens and abundant water, a coloniser’s nostalgic fantasy—the dream of England’s verdant fields. Visions ‘arose of a Tourmaline greater and richer even than in its heyday, a town paved with gold…inhabited solely by millionaires’.
Like the Biblical desert fathers, the diviner has come out of the desolate emptiness. Like Leichhardt, and Burke and Wills, he displays a ‘gallant folly’: perhaps another quintessentially Australian characteristic. But he has lost his divining rod, lost that which gives him direction and power.
As the diviner slowly recovers, his skin begins to peel. Again with gentle humour, Stow writes: ‘On the third day he shaved,’ a domestic and profoundly un-supernatural activity, playfully resonating with ‘he rose again the third day.’ And as the diviner rises from his convalescent bed, the town falls under his spell. All except Tom Spring, the storekeeper. Whereas the rest of the community is looking for a cure—for their lack of water, purpose, belief—Spring warns against the seductions of the diviner, remembering similar ‘lunatics in the past’: ‘These black-and-white men… these poor holy hillbillies who can only think in terms of God and the devil.’
Random is the evangelist-preacher and Spring the quiet Taoist. When the Law asks Spring to outline his alternative faith, then says that the explanation is almost meaningless, Spring responds: ‘Words can’t cope…Your prophet knows how to cut the truth to fit the language. You don’t get much truth, of course, but it’s well-tailored.’
The residents of Tourmaline are looking for someone who can bring them together, enlighten them and, above all, save them. They believe that Random will make the desert bloom again. (Although his surname tells us that anyone might have played this role.) ‘So wild was the optimism that there seemed to be a hazy feeling that the drought might break with the diviner’s coming, and the millionaires go yachting on Lake Tourmaline.’
Even the Aboriginal people from the camp outside town, like Charlie Yandana, are swept up. They think that the diviner is the incarnation of Mongga, the water and fertility spirit. Tom Spring’s ‘half-caste’ foster daughter, Deborah, also looks to the diviner, hoping that he might save her from her relationship with the brutish publican Kestrel. She sits in the bar ‘wrapped in her clouds of exile’, perhaps a little like Stow himself.
*
After the publication of
Tourmaline
, Stow decided to settle permanently in England, only returning to Australia twice. There were many reasons for his self-exile, but the uncomprehending reception of
Tourmaline
may well have contributed to his frustration with Australia, a frustration expressed by the young Rick in Stow’s next and most popular novel,
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
.