Tourmaline

by Randolph Stow

  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

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  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

  INTRODUCTION

  Fraught with Danger and Promise

  by Gabrielle Carey

  Tourmaline

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  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.

  Stow was so perplexed by the Australian response to the Taoist elements in Tourmaline that in the mid-1960s he published a series of poems entitled ‘The Testament of Tourmaline: Variations on Themes of the Tao Teh Ching’. The original Lao Tzu text is:

  Tao wells up

  Like warm artesian waters.

  Multiple, unchanging,

  Like forms of water,

  It is cloud and pool,

  ocean and lake and river.

  Stow’s version reads:

  Deep. Go deep,

  as the long roots of myall

  mine the red country

  for water, for silence.

  Silence is water.

  All things are stirring,

  all things are flowering,

  rooted in silence.

  The search for real water in a desert can only be a mirage. Stow suggests that the country needs not the divining of gold or water, but rather, as Hassall has observed, ‘the divining of a true identity that will unite the land and its people’.

  Metaphysics and mysticism aside, Tourmaline is a richly poetic novel with a visceral Australian atmosphere: ‘the smell of sweat was overlaid with the clean and bitter tang of dust. Perhaps a sharper scent was there, too, from the leaves of myall baking in the sun.’ So lyrical is the prose that an opera of Tourmaline was drafted in the early 1970s, with a libretto by Richard Fotheringham and music by Robert Keane. The performer and composer Iain Grandage has set extracts of Tourmaline to music, and the theatre director Andrew Ross has staged adaptations. Rachel Ward is writing the screenplay for a film version.

  Tourmaline is more relevant now than ever. A note at the beginning instructs the reader that ‘The action of the novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future.’ Stow’s apocalyptic vision of a formerly wealthy mining city is prophetic. As I write this, there are reports that Broken Hill may run out of water. Its mayor is assuring residents of the treatability of bore water. Ours is a country immeasurably rich in resources, yet our most precious resource is also our most scarce.

  In one scene of the novel the townsfolk congregate at the war memorial at the call of the bugle. It seems like an ordinary Anzac Day ceremony, the kind that most Australians have attended. But the Law tells the assembled people that there is a curse on them all—for the unexplained ‘terrible things’ that happened there in the past.

  This is partly why the townspeople fall for the cult of the diviner. They hope for the town to be reborn; the Law looks forward to a change in the weather and plans an Edenic garden free of sin. Yet, in the world of Tourmaline, there ‘is no sin but cruelty. Only one. And that original sin, that began when a man first cried to another, in his matted hair: Take charge of my life, I am close to breaking.’ Stow suggests that cults prey on two common human frailties: the desire for someone else to ‘take charge’ of our lives, and self-loathing. (Tom Spring argues with the Law: ‘And how is it, anyway, that you’ve lived all these years and not seen that a man who hates himself is the only kind of wild beast we have to watch for?’) Michael Random offers to relieve the townspeople of the burden of responsibility, of living for themselves.

  Spring’s final words, and perhaps the key to the philosophy behind all of Stow’s fiction, are: ‘Honour the single soul.’ With this new edition of Tourmaline, we honour the singular soul of Randolph Stow.

  Tourmaline

  Ô gens de peu de poids

  dans la mémoire de ces

  lieux…

  St-John Perse: ANABASE

  NOTE

  The action of this novel is to be imagined

  as taking place in the future.

  A first draft of Chapter 1 was published

  in Meanjin, No. 85 (1961).

  For M.C.S.

  ONE

  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. Nevertheless I do not scorn Tourmaline. Even here there is something to be learned; even groping through the red wind, after the blinds of dust have clattered down, we discover the taste of perfunctory acts of brotherhood: warm, acidic, undemanding, fitting a derelict independence. Furthermore, I am not young.

  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. Spinifex grows here, but sere and yellow, and trees are rare, hardly to be called trees, some kind of myall with leaves starved to needles that fans out from the root and gives no shade.

  At times, in the early morning, you would call this a gentle country. The new light softens it, tones flow a little, away from the stark forms. It is at dawn that the sons of Tourmaline feel for their heritage. Grey of dead wood, grey-green of leaves, set off a soil bright and tender, the tint of blood in water. Those are the colours of Tourmaline. There is a fourth, to the far west, the deep blue of hills barely climbing the horizon. But that is the colour of distance, and no part of Tourmaline, belonging more to the sky.

  It is not the same country at five in the afternoon. That is the hardest time, when all the heat of the day rises, and every pebble glares, wounding the eyes, shortening the breath; the time when the practice of living is hardest to defend, and nothing seems easier than to cease, to become a stone, hot and still. At five in the afternoon there is one colour only, and that is brick-red, burning. After sunset, the blue dusk, and later t
he stars. The sky is the garden of Tourmaline.

  To describe the town, I must begin with the sun. The sun is close here. If you look at Tourmaline, shade your eyes. It is a town of corrugated iron, and in the heat the corrugations shimmer and twine, strangely immaterial. This is hard to watch, and the glare of the stony ground is cruel.

  The road ends here. There is a broken fence to show it, its posts leaning, its barbed wire trailing to the ground. Facing this, the Tourmaline war memorial, a modest obelisk, convenient for dogs and the weary. Some sons of Tourmaline, it seems, patronized the empire in the days of the Boer War, but not much is remembered. To the right is Tom Spring’s store, the white paint flaking from its iron and the purple paint from its ancient advertisement for Bushell’s tea. In the window, shaded by a rough veranda, tinned food, soap, cutlery and boots cradle the immemorial cat of T. & M. Spring.

  On the left is Kestrel’s Tourmaline Hotel, of stone and rough plaster, once whitewashed, but now reddened with dust. The roofing iron is also red, and advertises a brand of beer no longer brewed. A veranda shades the bare dirt on three sides. In this hot metallic shade Kestrel’s dog wakes and yawns, and sleeps again. The windows are closed, and painted inside. It is dim in there.

  Following the raw red streak of the road are the houses of Tourmaline: uniform, dilapidated, stained with the red dust. There are not many. At last, and apart, is a cube of stone, marked by a wooden sign as the police station. And behind it rises a fortress, a squat square tower open to the sky. This is my tower and prison; for I am the Law of Tourmaline.

  On two stony hills to the north of the town stand the toppling masts of the mine and the hulk of the abandoned church. The church is of tender brown and rose stone. Beside it, an oleander impossibly persists in flowering. Planks are falling from the wooden bell tower, but the bell is there still; and in dust-storms and on nights of high wind its irregular tolling sweeps away over Tourmaline to the south.