Randolph Stow

A work of mesmerising power, against a background of black-white fear and violence, To The Islands journeys towards the strange country of one man's soul. Set in the desolate outback landscape of Australia's north-west, the novel tracks the last days of a worn-out Anglican missionary. Fleeing his mission after an agonising confrontation, he immerses himself in the wilderness, searching for the islands of death and mystery.

To the Islands

There is no stretch of land on earth more ancient than this. And so it is blunt and red and barren, littered with the fragments of broken mountains, flat, waterless. Tourmaline, in outback Western Australia, is dying: its mines lie abandoned and drought has taken hold. When the enigmatic diviner Michael Random emerges from the desert, desperate townspeople see him as a messiah. Random begins to spread the word of God—and to promise them water, that most precious resource. Both a complex spiritual parable and an enduring apocalyptic vision, Tourmaline is Randolph Stow’s most controversial novel. 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’. Praise for Tourmaline ‘Intense and extraordinary.’ Spectator ‘Brilliantly evocative...disturbing.’ Meanjin ‘A member of the Australian literary triumvirate that included Patrick White and Christina Stead, Stow was an original, and this is an unsung 1963 classic with which to reckon.’ Favourite Fiction and Non-Fiction of 2016, Irish Times

Text Classics

Tourmaline

Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

Ralph Steadman

Children's Book Council Award-Highly Commended 1968.

The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy

Midnite

Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare's present.

The Girl Green as Elderflower

The Merry-go-round in the Sea

Gabrielle Carey

Drusilla Modjeska

Visitants

The Suburbs of Hell

George III (King of Great Britain)

Peter Maxwell Davies

Music-theatre Work for Male Voice and Ensemble

Eight Songs for a Mad King

The gril green as elderflower

Evocative novel set in wartime Australia and its aftermath, seen through the childhood eyes of 6-year-old Rob Coram.

A Novel

In 1941, Rob Coram is six. The war feels far removed from his world of aunties and cousins and the beautiful, dry landscape of Geraldton in Western Australia. But when his favourite, older cousin, Rick, leaves to join the army, the war takes a step closer. When Rick returns from the war several years later, he has changed and Rob feels betrayed. The old merry-go-round that represents Rob's dream of utopia (the security of his family and of the land that is his home) begins to disintegrate before his eyes.

Randolph Stow

Books

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