The Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture
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Westerly Volume 64 Number 1, 2019 New Writing from 64.1 Western Australia Notice of Intention Publisher Fiction Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia Creative Non-Fiction Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available General Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly Poetry Catherine Noske website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This Essays work has been supported by a grant from Associate Editor the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Josephine Taylor Limited. Editorial Advisors All creative works, articles and reviews Cassandra Atherton (poetry) converted to electronic format will be correctly Rachel Robertson (prose) attributed and will appear as published. Elfie Shiosaki (Indigenous writing) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Editorial Consultants material cannot be further republished without Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) authorial permission. 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Westerly is published biannually with assistance from the State Government of WA by an investment in this project through the Culture and the Arts (WA) division of the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, and from the Australia Council for the Arts. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. The Randolph Stow Andrew Lynch is Emeritus What really comes across to me about Stow’s time at UWA is the Memorial Lecture Professor of English and Literary breadth of his interests and studies, and how deeply the formation of his Studies at The University of identity as an Australian writer was marked by both local immersion and Saturday 23 February, 2019 Western Australia. His recent world awareness. As Suzanne Falkiner tells us, by the end of Stow’s four Andrew Lynch and forthcoming publications, as co‑editor and contributor, years at UWA, he had a BA in English and French, had written three novels include A Cultural History of (one unfinished), published thirty-five poems and numerous skits and Emotions, 6 vols, (Bloomsbury, dramatic pieces, and had work broadcast on the ABC (from the age of 2019) and The Routledge History eighteen) (Falkiner 104, 82). He knew German and Latin, taught himself of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700 Italian, Spanish and Scots Gaelic, and read widely in anthropology—this (2019). He is also an editor of the was before UWA had an Anthropology Department—and in art. Stow’s journal Emotions: History, educational and intellectual environment was confident, outward- Culture, Society. looking and active. During his time as an editor of The Winthrop Review, an ancestor of Westerly, it published Australian writers, including WA locals Donald Stuart, Olive Pell, Mollie Skinner and Mary Durack, but It’s a great honour for me to be asked to give this memorial lecture for also work on French, British, American, Irish and Hungarian literature, Randolph Stow. Thanks to the Westerly Centre and the Festival for art and theatre, and it stood in opposition to censorship and the White inviting me. Stow’s writing has been a part of my life since my early Australia policy. It’s not what you might expect of mid-1950s Australia, twenties, when I was given the Penguin To the Islands (1962) as a birthday deep in the Menzies era, and often characterised as a time of second- present. I didn’t know then that when Stow wrote it he was the same age hand Britishness and cultural cringe. From the beginning Stow was as me reading it, or that it was his third published novel. After that, I read finely attuned to his local landscape. Yet he always saw and heard things The Merry-go-Round in the Sea (1965) and Tourmaline (1963). Then in my in a larger mindscape of language, place and time. He’s famous for his early years here at the University of Western Australia (UWA) I first read evocation of particular places, whether it’s the Kimberley, the Mid-West two more: Visitants (1979) and The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980). Quite coast, the dry inland, New Guinea or East Anglia, but in other ways his a few years later, after many re-readings, I think of Stow as a great artist, books are about interpenetrations of times, places and languages. He a poet amongst the English-language novelists of his time. learned languages and you might say he learned voices too. He heard This lecture exists to honour Randolph Stow as an Australian writer, voices, from the living and the dead, and let them speak in his books and especially as a West Australian. It takes place in the state where about the conditions of life in time and place. That’s one reason why I he was born and raised, in the city where he went to secondary school, think of him as a true historical novelist. My talk tonight is going to and at this university where he lived (at St George’s College) and was wander through this landscape and mindscape, looking at some of the a brilliant student and literary and theatrical figure. Stow had long left interconnected themes that preoccupied Stow throughout his novels— Australia when I first came to Perth, but there were plenty of people trauma, myth, love and home. around the English Department who knew him, and who feature in the The first of these themes is trauma. All Stow’s novels are about crises in recent biography by Suzanne Falkiner—including Peter Cowan, Bruce which individuals and communities face historical changes and revelations Bennett and Bill Dunstone. Also Dr Helen Watson-Williams, to whom he in consciousness that threaten their sense of being in the world. His novels once submitted an essay beginning ‘Dear Mrs Double-W, I hope our prose are all acts of recovery, creatively working over the past. Stow’s distinctive will not trouble you’. He must have been daunting to teach. One of his method of working was first to construct the details in his head, then to tutors remarked: write the narrative down on pen and paper at high speed, and usually at a He invaded authors (as someone said) like a monarch. Instead long distance in time and place, before revision. Tourmaline was written of being content with the necessarily thin selections of the in Leeds; The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea in New Mexico; his New Guinea syllabus, he would sink himself into everything he could find novel Visitants in Suffolk. His work can’t be divided into ‘Australian’ novels by each author we came to. (Falkiner 78) and ‘other’ novels, because his idea of consciousness and his artistic 142 | Westerly 64.1 143 | Andrew Lynch methods didn’t work like that. Consciousness is layered. Disparate images Stow once wrote, ‘The environment of a writer is as much inside him connect. Memories persist. Voices from one place are heard in another. as in what he observes’ (‘Raw Material’ 4). His books are famous for the Old events and words return out of time. sense they give of the physical environment, but I think they were also ways for him, a very private man, to discover and share through visible Trauma signs the invisible nature of his mind and soul. The ‘country’ of his novels I’ll go back to To the Islands, first published in 1958 when Stow was is his shared soul. Their existential bleakness and constant awareness twenty-two. It’s set in 1957 on an Anglican Aboriginal mission station of loss and death are not depressing; they are the default conditions in in the Kimberley. It has, in Stow’s words, ‘a King Lear-like theme’ (Stow which he celebrates acts of shared love, and creates moments of benign in Falkiner 180), of an old man’s madness and self-realisation in the connection. wilderness, and is shot through with reference to medieval lyric, Jacobean Take for example the scarifying passage in The Merry-Go-Round in the drama, hymns and liturgy, folk song and the poetry of Baudelaire, Sea, when Rob realises the loss of his childhood home, Hopkins and many others.