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Mapping Space in Randolph Stow's to the Islands1

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Mapping Space in Randolph Stow's to the Islands1 ‘You Don’t Know that Country’: 1 Mapping Space in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands CATHERINE NOSKE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA At some point in 1959, stationed in the Trobriand Islands as a Cadet Patrol Officer, Randolph Stow drew a mud-map in the back of his diary, coloured with red and green pastel. Titled ‘Forrest River Mission from Memory,’ it shows the layout of the Mission near Wyndham in the Kimberley, where he had been based for most of 1957—the space which served as the setting for his Miles Franklin-winning novel To the Islands (1958). The image is out of place within the journal, which is entitled ‘Notes and Texts,’ one of three which records aspects of Biga- Kiriwina language from the Trobriands. In ‘Notes and Texts,’ Stow collects word lists and jottings as well as manuscript versions of two short stories (which Ellen Smith discussed so beautifully in the ASAL ECR 2019 keynote and in her 2019 NLA Fellowship Presentation on a related topic). The same journal also includes a map of Kiriwina Island with similar language detail, drawn within the front cover. The Forrest River map is both counterpart and an odd after- note, hidden away behind the back cover, shifting the journal into another space and time. Stow seemingly felt some ambivalence towards his role in working for the colonial government in the Trobriands in 1959. In her biography of Stow, Suzanne Falkiner notes his unease with ‘the insensitivity forced upon them by bureaucratic tasks’ (288) and his fatigue with the tax- collecting patrols (295). This was the same year Stow’s father died, rumours of his homosexuality were potentially spread by locals, and he attempted suicide (Falkiner 294–99). Undated, it is uncertain at what point in the year Stow drew his Forrest River map, but the connection it suggests between the two spaces is significant. Its appearance in the journal invokes the possibility that the tension of his situation in the Trobriands, his distance from home and his uneasiness with the colonial politics at play, might all have been familiar sensations, connected to memories of a similar isolation at Forrest River as a space wherein, his letters home suggest, questions of colonialism tangibly arose for him, discussed below. The map offers in this a complex rendering of settler-colonial subjectivity in the process of place-making. The map is complete with rivers and tributaries, place-names in two languages, a scale and a compass rose: Stow is no artist, but the map is far more sophisticated than it appears at first glance. It is suggestive of an aspiration to precision in the representation of the space, something unusual for the average mud-map, and not found universally in Stow’s journals. This precision enacts both pride (an idea supported by the title, ‘from Memory’) and a sense of nostalgia or longing in remembering Forrest River across time and from a distance. It may have potentially been something of a memory exercise, mimicking the Kiriwina map at the front and reasserting against that a connection to a life outside his current situation. The fact that it is by Western standards ‘upside down,’ with north to the bottom of the page, complicates this somewhat, suggesting a more complex and personal remembering than the simple parroting of a known map. But whatever the impulse which led to the drawing, I would suggest that the map enacts a desire for the place in tracing an intimate knowledge of it, through both language and spatial forms. This paper explores Stow’s map alongside his novel To the Islands, as a means of reflecting on Stow’s relation to Forrest River as a place. In doing so, it seeks to examine the function of his creative practice in both considering and articulating the complexities of his positionality on country. JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 21.2 Fig. 1: Randolph Stow, ‘Forrest River Mission from Memory.’ Back cover of ‘Notes and Texts’ journal (NLA, MS Acc 10.128, Box 5, File 37). The Forrest River map suggests the importance of place for Stow—the deep interrogation of spaces he encountered both in his general engagement with the world, and in his creative practice. Ross Gibson makes clear in his early scholarship the distinction between place and space, distinguishing between land and the subjective ‘act’ of landscape. As soon as a space is ‘represented and dramatized within images, sounds, and stories, it is no longer land. Rather, it is landscape; it has been translated and utilized’ (1992, 75). Gibson makes this distinction for the purpose of considering the significance of myth and romanticisation in Australian cultural representations of country. In more recent work, he has connected this to the function of memory: ‘If you baulk at calling the country itself memory, I would remind you that this landscape is subject to persistent integrative forces that never stop … And human work— human memory-work …—ensures that a combined human and organic memory continues to serve as an integrative force that is always replenishing’ (2015, 7). For Gibson, this memory- work can operate individually or collectively, but ultimately functions as definitive of place. ‘The country grows out of the remembered past.’ (2015, 7) As a frame to approaching Stow’s construction of place—both his novelistic representation and his mapping from memory— Gibson’s understanding of place emphasises subjective positionality and experience as determining the place produced.2 It also leaves room to recognise the intensely personal act of memory-making inherent to Stow’s map alongside the social and cultural implications of the place-making it represents when considered in relation to his novel. Stow is forthright about his use of his experiences of Forrest River in To the Islands. The Preface to the 1981 edition makes clear the deliberate rendering of the Forrest River Mission in fiction, and the imperative behind it to support the work of remote missions: ‘In the original NOSKE: 'You Don't Know that Country' 2 Editor: Roger Osborne JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 21.2 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’ (Stow 1958, 4). Stow’s letters, collected within his archive, also confirm that he entered the space with the intent already in place to write his novel, drawing from his experiences there. Early anecdotes from among his letters appear in the work: for instance, his first letter to his mother, dated 2nd April 1957, describes the ‘big black wala’ in the cane grass ‘outside the dining room and everyone joined in to try and get it—screams and shrieks of laughter from all the kitchen girls’ (NLA MS Acc 10.195, Box 1, File 4), an episode recognisable in Dixon’s encounter with a ‘black wala’ in the long grass, chased by the mission girls (Stow 1958, 13). Stow had decided on the concept for the novel during his last year at the University of Western Australia (Stow 1985, 5; Falkiner 180). As Kate Leah Rendell describes, ‘The fieldwork Stow conducted with Aboriginal residents at Forrest River Mission was a means by which to gather material for a novel imaginatively conceived in his final year at university […] Stow sought out a ‘wild and grand’ location to give local flavour to his King Lear-like narrative’ (3). The idea of ‘local flavour’ and a predetermined narrative speaks to both the conceptual intent and the inherent imperialism of the project. It is vital in this to acknowledge that both Stow’s novel and letter-writing are marked by racial prejudice and imperialist assumptions in representing the Aboriginal people of the Missions.3 Recognising this prejudice provides us with some sense of positionality on country, articulating what must have been an inherent frame to Stow’s engagement with the place. But Stow did at least question some of these assumptions, and attempt to represent and advocate for Aboriginal people through his writing. It is this feature of his writing that often sees him praised by white critics as ‘before his time’ (Neumann 3).4 He also acknowledges in a paper given in 1984 (published 1985) that his experience of the place altered his approach to his work: ‘I had in my head a general plan of a novel, To the Islands, conceived during a seminar on King Lear in my last student year. But every detail of the finished book came out of personal experience’ (Stow 1985, 5). This shifting influence of place over practice is suggestive simultaneously of Stow’s shifting subjective relation to the place, and growing consciousness of the complexities of colonialism within it. A little further within the same paper, Stow acknowledges ‘When the time came for me to leave … I felt a deep sense of loss. It seemed that I had been privileged to feel for a while, vicariously, rooted in my native land as no white man can be, in fact’ (Stow 1985, 5). This is a concept Stow works through in his novel, from various perspectives. For example, Dixon discusses the politics of colonialism and citizenship with Matthew and Gregory (Stow 1958, 68–69), and a little later, homesickness for country (Stow 1958, 128). Stow’s writing of To the Islands can be read thus an instance of creative practice contributing to Stow’s shaping and forming of his complex subjective relation to place. His process of writing—clear conceptual intent followed by immersion, experimentation and development to produce the creative artefact—is somewhat similar to contemporary scholarly creative practice.
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