Randolph Stow’s Politics

Novelist and poet Randolph Stowe was an Australia artistic giant who found himself unwelcome in his own land. Why is it that so many creative Australians find their natural surroundings haunting them and their compatriots confounding them. Stow’s personal story has now been brought to life in popular author Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick – A Life of Randolph Stow. It unravels the reasons behind Randolph’s quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Suzanne Falkiner addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 20 July 2016.

RANDOLPH STOW’S POLITICS

SUZANNE FALKINER

I was flattered, if a little alarmed, to read in The Sydney Institute’s email notice for this talk that I was going to “unlock the meaning of Randolph Stow’s rich and introspective works”, even though these words do appear in the blurb for my biography. Some hundreds of critical articles have been published about Randolph Stow in academic journals, as well as several book-length studies, and each reading of his books still brings new interpretations.

During my research I became aware that Stow did not really like people speaking for him, although he was generally willing to answer questions when asked in good faith. So what I have in fact tried to do in Mick: A Life Of Randolph Stow is to place his books and poetry in the context of his life, and thus let the reader develop his or her own understanding. His works were poetic, and complex, but they are also coded and autobiographical, and so I will be happy to try to answer any questions about his books at the end. But the other important thing I learned about Randolph —“Mick”— Stow is that he had a very dry sense of humour.

I am sure, with an audience as well-read and well-informed as this, I don’t have to remind you about Stow’s stellar literary career. How in 1959, at the age of 23, he made his mark as the second-ever winner of the Miles Franklin award for his third novel, To The Islands, the year after Patrick White won the first with Voss. How, over the next three decades, he went on to write Tourmaline, a ground-breaking work, along with his much-loved semi-autobiographical novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, and his children’s story Midnite, and then Visitants, The Girl Green as Elderflower and the Suburbs of Hell. All these books helped to give Australians a new way of looking at their world.

Despite all this, unlike Patrick White who made his beliefs pretty clear in his public life, after some four years of research, I found I still didn’t know much about Stow’s political beliefs. I don’t know how he voted in any Australian election or, after he became a British citizen in early 1972, whether he voted in any elections in the United Kingdom. So tonight I thought it might be fun to have look at what hints Randolph Stow’s life might give us about his politics.

First of all, his family background on both sides would suggest a certain conservative leaning. His father’s family, the Stows, were devoted to the Law and the Lord, with a number of his antecedents becoming judges, lawyers and politicians. Mick’s great great grandfather, Thomas Quinton Stow, started the first Congregational Church in South Australia in 1837.

Mick’s great grandfather, Randolph Isham Stow, was one of the first three Queen’s Counsels in Adelaide, and later a Supreme Court judge, and also entered politics, serving as state Attorney-General in three ministries. When he died of atrophy of the liver at the age of 49, in September 1878, he was given a state funeral, with a cortege a mile long, and on the following Sunday eulogies honoring his uprightness were delivered in St Peters Cathedral and in eight other churches.

Perhaps finding the Stow legacy weighing a little heavily in Adelaide, the next two generations of Stow’s antecedents, his grandfather Francis and his father Cedric, who also trained as lawyers, retreated to Western Australia, one to Perth and the next to Geraldton.

Mick’s mother Mary Stow, nee Sewell, was also of a conservative bent. The daughter of Geraldton’s mayor, she was working as a secretary in Cedric’s law firm when they were married. Her own father George Ernest Sewell was a descendant of one of the earliest pastoral pioneers in the district, who had taken up land there in the 1850s. In old age, describing her childhood membership of a “Chum’s Union”, a band of little girls devoted to Victorian moral virtues, she remarked that this was the “only union she had ever belonged to”.

Some of Mary’s maternal relatives, however, were a little more unpredictable: Mick’s grandmother Alice and his adored great aunt Sutherland McDonald, who lived nearby in Geraldton, were descended from Scottish Gaelic-speaking stock, and introduced him to the romantic poems and ballads of their antecedents. Proudly nationalistic, perhaps it was Suthie who caused the young Mick Stow to show signs of breaking away while quite young. In The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, Stow describes an early trip to Perth, in about 1946, in which his ten-year-old alter ego Rob visits London Court, an arcade built to resemble a cobbled London street:

Perth was ancient, an ancient civilisation. Soot-darkened buildings proved it, and the existence of a Museum. … And it was a very special city, cut off from other cities by sea and desert, so that there was not another city for two thousand miles. Among all Australian cities it had proved itself the most special, by a romantic act called the Secession, which the other cities had stuffily ignored.

Cinderella State, he thought, feeling indignant. That was the reason for the Secession. Because they had ignored his poor Cinderella State, all one million square miles of it.

Maybe after this war there’d be another war. Western Australia against the world, Black Swan flying.

“We shouldn’t have gone to Parliament House,” his mother had remarked, “it seems to have made you political.”

“I’m a rebel,” he had replied. “I’ve got rebel blood.”

Walking down the terrace he dreamed of Eureka, the torn banner of the Republic of Victoria.

But not a republic, not in Western Australia. That would hurt the feelings of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose.

“When will Western Australia be free?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” said his mother. “Perhaps when Bonnie Prince Charlie comes over.”

“Aww.” He grew disgusted at her flippancy.

In later years, Mick would come to criticise Mary Stow’s political conservatism, her anti-Catholicism and her class-consciousness – what a friend of his called “that small-town snootiness that you associate with the wives of doctors and lawyers”. The two often squabbled, or contradicted each other, or scored points off each other, this same friend recalled, although he also remembered her kindness.

Mick’s father Cedric was again something of a wild card: always quiet, in later years he sank into depression and became almost totally silent, even with his family. As a solicitor, he acted for the town’s Italian fruit growers and lobster fisherman; once, during the Depression, he was paid his fee in bananas. By the time Mick was in primary school he had become aware of his father’s sense of social justice – a school friend of Mick’s told me that the teachers at Geraldton primary school sat his sister Helen next to one of the Aboriginal, or Yamitji, pupils – then commonly called in the town “black niggers” – because the school knew that his family would not come hurrying down to the school to complain. Later, Mick learned from writer Nene Gare, whose husband Frank worked for the local Native Welfare Association, that his father had spoken up against the town council when they wanted to clear the Yamitji homes off the common land at Mount Misery, on the town’s outskirts, and his father had prevailed.

By the time Stow was sent to Guildford Grammar School in Perth, at fourteen, his anti-authoritarian stance was such that he had no qualms about challenging the headmaster, Mr Thwaites, about the school’s emphasis on sports (which he loathed) at the expense of art, dance and music. One of his ways of protesting was to write for the school magazine, The Swan – which once led to the entire print run being recalled and the relevant pages torn out. During sports, I’m told, he was usually found hiding out in the change room, reading and smoking cigarettes. He was fond of Ogden Nash, the Bronte sisters, and perhaps a touch of Gilbert and Sullivan, as in this playful verse, in which he rails against the then much-studied “Average Man”:

To every little incident they noted his reactions,

And worked out his mentality in decimals and fractions.

His broadcast talk in London was relayed to the Dominions,

And every worthwhile paper had a space for his opinions.

At the University of Western Australia, after his school days in the Guildford cadets, which he equally disliked, Mick had not taken kindly to the idea of six months mandatory National Service, or “Nashoes”, introduced in the early days of the Korean war. When he and some other eighteen-year-olds attended their medical examination at North Perth in November 1953, another student told me, Mick reported to the interviewers that he suffered from shortness of breath, sleep-walking, eye trouble, hearing problems, frequent stomach and bowel trouble, travel sickness, and needed glasses for reading, and he argued for so long that they all went back to College without him. Nevertheless, he was accepted.

The following year Stow, as a University student, published several strongly political poems—“Song for a Chinese Route March”, “On the Road to Purgatory”, and “Change”— in the St George’s College Magazine. Markedly anti-war in theme, the first was influenced by revelations of starvation among Chinese soldiers before the Korean War armistice, and the second by Stow’s continued aversion to the idea of compulsory National Service. A bitter unpublished fragment called “The Conscript”, taking off Rupert Brooke and kept by one of his friends, read:

If I should kill, think only this of me,

I murdered God to save our vanity.

By 1956, while still an undergraduate, Mick had completed two precocious novels, both loosely based on scandalous incidents among his pioneering forebears, which were published in England, but which he later repudiated. His poetry was now also appearing in national and international magazines, such as the Bulletin and Punch. In Meanjin that year Clem Christesen published “Montebellos”, his most overtly political poem to date, which linked the dead from past shipwrecks with Britain’s 1956 nuclear tests in the nearby Montebello Islands.

Jack Honniball, an old school friend, also satirised Stow in the College magazine, describing a breakfast table discussion in which their resident “young novelist” gave his opinion of the Suez Crisis: “I hope the English get thrown out of Egypt, Cyprus, Scotland and everywhere else.”

When Mick left University he spent some months working on an Anglican mission at Forrest River in the Kimberley, which gave him material for his novel To the Islands. He had already published several poems expressing his sense of the injustices done to Aborigines, notably “Aboriginal Dream-Song” in the Bulletin under Douglas Stewart in 1956: in this, the arrival of European ships begins a process of turning the tribal people into ghosts. Two more, “Black Jack’s Doppelganger”, and “Jabulmara Dancing”, a tribute to a friend who had taught him to dance at Forrest River, he sent to Vincent Buckley at Prospect magazine.

Stow spent most of the next two years tutoring at the University of Adelaide, and studying anthropology at the University of Sydney, after which, with the help of Paul Hasluck, in 1959 he went up to Papua New Guinea as a cadet patrol officer. After being repatriated to Australia after a mental and physical breakdown, he went to England to recuperate. For the next few years he see-sawed between Australia and England, and then accepted a Harkness traveling fellowship to the United States.

Here he wrote of how oppressed he felt by the country’s marked racial divide while driving through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. One night in Texas in November 1964, he wrote to a friend, he had met “the most unpleasant segregationist that I’ve yet come across”.

He had a café outside Del Rio, and he was entertaining his customers by telling them how he bought a shotgun the day the Bill of Rights became law, because “Uncle Sam has taught me how to kill, and I don’t mind doin’ it.” He also said Kennedy wasn’t a Catholic because he was a goddam communist and the goddam Communists don’t believe in God. …. I must have looked like a goddam liberal, because when I left, this murdering son-of-a-bitch followed me out to the car and we had a long staring match.

Tensions were high in the US at that time as Americans debated the Civil Rights Act. In a hotel lounge in the Texan town of Marfa, Mick watched the election where Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, defeated the Republican Barry Goldwater, carrying 44 of 50 states. After this, Mick settled in the rather more laid-back atmosphere of Aztec, New Mexico, where he wrote The Merry-go-Round in the Sea. By the next summer he was studying Indonesian at the Yale, where the call-up for the Vietnam War was a pervasive topic, as each month some of his American student friends were obliged to report to their draft boards. American foreign policy had begun to grate on him, he wrote home: he felt that, where the young were concerned, America was practically a totalitarian society:

Everyone in Washington is so goddam virtuous and altruistic. One would never think that the same people had trained their own version of the Viet Cong in Guatemala and tried to land it in Cuba. Or fomented a rebellion by a sort of Islamic Ku Klux Klan in Indonesia.

After America, Stow moved to England again, where he settled down in a farm cottage in Suffolk. In 1972, for a Melbourne Age article called “The divided affections of a restless novelist”, Stow explained to a journalist that he was an “accidental expatriate”, and that chance had directed his progress to date, rather than any conscious rejection of Australia. He was very attached to his homeland, but some aspects of it made him raging mad – “the awful smug indifference and mediocrity of so many of the people in politics, the stupidity of some of our foreign policies.” Nevertheless, he still thought he still he might end up living in Australia.

In June 1973, at the urging of his mother, who wanted him to come home, Stow applied for a grant from the Australian Council for the Arts. Mick had closely followed the previous December’s Australian elections, which had brought Gough Whitlam’s new Labor Government to power: Australians in London had been wearing “It’s Time” buttons, he reported to Mary Stow. William McMahon, he thought, sounded “very dim”, and the English journalists obviously favoured Whitlam. That January, he’d been invited for the first time to Australia House in London for the Australia Day celebrations, and had attended out of curiosity. He was even more cheered by Nixon’s announcement that month of the end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

In May he had been summoned to meet Gough Whitlam himself, at a cocktail party at the High Commissioner’s house. The Whitlams hadn’t appeared for very long, he wrote to his mother, but long enough for everyone to see that they were very big, although they appeared quite stunted beside their sons. His friend Russell Braddon had been particularly taken with Margaret Whitlam: “Russ thinks she is lovely, which is something from a neanderthal Tory like him.”

In that first year, writers swamped the Literature Board with over eleven hundred applications. The new Board members were Manning Clark, Geoff Dutton, Dick Hall, A. D. Hope, Nancy Keesing, David Malouf, Betty Riddell, Richard Walsh and Judah Waten, with Geoffrey Blainey as Chairman and Michael Costigan as Executive Director.

Mick had applied for one of the senior awards, a three-year fellowship. Soon after, the Adelaide Festival Committee invited him to come to Adelaide for the premiere of “Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot”, a musical theatre piece he had written with the English composer Peter Maxwell Davies.

“I’m sorry you’re so down on the Whitlams,” Mick wrote to Mary Stow in July, telling her of his planned arrival the following March – “and you’re quite wrong to say they’re making Australia a laughing stock; but it’s not your fault if you have to depend for information on the half-witted Australian press. The fact is that they’re enormously popular here….Nick Whitlam, one of the gigantic sons, told me they were quite mystified by their own fatal fascination. No doubt he’s making mistakes and will make more, but he’s done a marvellous job on Australia’s image.”

Later that month Stow heard from Geoffrey Blainey that the Literature Board had unanimously recommended him for a three-year grant of $9000 per annum, without conditions, not even that he spent it in Australia. The first instalment of $500 was due in early August. Stow responded that now he hoped to return to Australia for a year to write a book about the wreck of the Batavia in the Abrolhos islands in 1629, and then would return to England to work on an historical book about the Indian Ocean that necessitated his being within reach of museums and libraries of Europe. The August payment would certainly help him through “a leanish period” before his next royalties were due, he wrote.

Mick was obviously chuffed. “I wonder what you’ll think of Whitlam now?” he wrote to his mother the same day. A day later he sent his friend Jean Jeffares a cheerfully rude “chanson anti-nucléaire”, a satirical pastiche in French of “La Marseillaise” entitled “La Mururoaise”, “Dedicated to the Rt. Hon. Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister of Australia”. He intended to send it to both Whitlam and Norman Kirk, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, “in the hope that he will sing it at the Ambassador of France,” he wrote to Jeanne.

Mick arrived in Western Australia by ship in late February 1974. Unknown to most, he was recovering from a severe addiction to the drug Mandrax, medically prescribed for his insomnia, associated with his depression. Partly as a result, after his early successes, he was in the grip of a writing block that had lasted for some years. He was optimistic that the Australian trip might help him recover from it.

After the Adelaide Festival, Stow travelled to Melbourne, Perth and Geraldton. Much of the rest of his time he spent in retreat in his third cousin John Jefferson Bray’s house in Adelaide, while Bray was overseas. However, he had remained unable to work, and, after some months, decided to return to England. In Sydney before his departure, friends and acquaintances noted his reckless behaviour and heavy drinking. From “S.S. Britanis, in Sydney Harbour” on 19 September – the day he sailed – he addressed a letter to Gough Whitlam, mailing a copy also to Michael Costigan.

Dear Prime Minister,

I am most grateful to you and the Arts Council of Australia for making it possible for me to revisit this country. However, the removal of Professor Geoffrey Blainey from the Literature Board, and the circumstances of his removal, make me feel that it is impossible for me, in good conscience, to accept further bounty from the Council. I should like it therefore to be understood that my Fellowship terminates on this date.

With thanks, and patriotic good wishes,

Yours sincerely

Randolph Stow

In Sydney, it seemed, Stow had found a minor contretemps occurring. Geoffrey Blainey had left the Literature Board at the end of his inaugural chairmanship, and the transition had been ineptly handled and had damaged relationships among the members. Whatever version of the events Mick had heard had obviously upset him.

Stow’s reasons for relinquishing his grant were, of course, rather more complex. The generosity of the new arts funding had caused gossip and envy among less successful writers, along with press complaints about profligacy with taxpayers’ money. Most important, by now he had realised that his writer’s block remained firmly in place, and he would not be able to complete his projected book any time soon. Despite his need for the money, he saw little honourable alternative than to relinquish the grant – joining playwright David Williamson, some time later, as one of only two Australian writers ever to do so.

Stow never lost his fondness for the Whitlams, however. In 1975, at his friend Bill Grono’s request, he added his name to a list of leading academics, artists and writers on a half-page advertisement in the West Australian protesting the dismissal of Gough Whitlam on the 11 November —“That business created a great stir here, and made me very angry. I could hardly believe my ears,” he wrote to Mary Stow.

In early 1981, after successfully completing two more novels, Visitants and The Girl Green as Elderflower, Stow moved from East Bergholt to Harwich. His receipt of the Patrick White Award of $10,000 in 1979, along with his mother’s canny investments, and had finally allowed him to buy a tiny terrace house there, the first property he had ever owned. He was now aged 45. Despite his reputation as one of the most important Australian writers of his generation, his living of necessity continued to be extremely frugal over the next two decades.

In his older age, when he was a little more comfortably off, Stow supported generously a number of causes, including the World Wildlife Foundation, various local conservation and cultural societies, and in early 1991 he allowed his name to be used to support Aboriginal Landrights in the Kimberley.

In the late 1990s, after his mother had given him a gift of her shares in the Herald & Weekly Times, which were subsequently taken over by Rupert Murdoch, Stow was able to afford some major renovations to his Harwich home. His sale of Murdoch’s bonus issue of Newscorp Preferred shares, which had cost him nothing, had brought him a windfall of £64,000. For the first time in his life, he had all the money he needed, he wrote to Mary Stow in 1998. Best of all, his mother’s original holding, of the Newscorp Ordinary shares, remained intact. “I really don’t understand capitalism, but at the moment I think it’s beaut. So thank you very much for that,” he wrote to her, at the age of 62.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what can be deduced from this small survey, so once again I’ll leave you to draw whatever conclusions you like. I would have to say, however, that I think Stow was largely uninterested in politics on a day-to-day level, but feeling that he was something of an outsider himself, he always actively stood up for outsiders and the marginalised.