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anyone living in modern, twentieth-century Australia.
    As I walked along the foreshore towards the centre of Fremantle, Stow’s analysis of Australia and Australians, told through the fable of Tourmaline , seemed to be exemplified. The wealth derived from West Australian mining was obvious in the number of pleasure craft that crowded the marinas, many of them bigger than my house. This area was, I recalled, the playground of that Aussie anti-hero Alan Bond and the scene of great rejoicing over the America’s Cup win in 1983. In many ways, the recent history of Fremantle symbolised everything that frustrated Stow about Australia: an obsession with sport, wealth and materialism, combined with a general ignorance or lack of interest in our more remote history, which might unlock the secrets behind our obsessions.
    And so the twin myths that preoccupied Stow and his work continue with force and meaning today. Among the thousands of refugees that attempt the sea journey to Australia, seeking a utopia, many only find a prison. These people are the modern castaways and some, of course, are shipwrecked here. The latest prison, the flat, featureless, desolate island of Nauru, has a setting eerily similar to the Abrolhos Islands, the site of Batavia atrocities.
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    The word ‘shipwreck’ often appears in Stow’s poetry and prose. In one of his most quoted passages, he writes of human existence as a kind of shipwreck: ‘We are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly.’
    And in the poem ‘Complaint Against Himself’ the last stanza reads:
    But words are frail, and shipwreck; hands find flaws;
    And though we build strong bridges with our hate,
    Our love makes islands, mocks communication.
    Shipwrecks symbolise another of Stow’s constant themes: our failure to communicate. These vessels, once buoyant and lively, busy and on course, are messengers from one continent to another, attempts to reach out from one island to another. But then they are silenced underwater forever, their stories drowned, their messages sunk.
    Many of our forebears found themselves, after long, arduous journeys, stranded thousands of miles from the place they called home. When my own great-great-grandmother Isabella Ferguson arrived in Australind, a struggling colony-to-be south of Perth, she felt as though she had just climbed out from a shipwreck. Back in her native Scotland, the prospectus for Australind had shown a town square and neat streets, but on arrival she and her family found nothing but wilderness. Momentarily she despaired, crying as she sat on the packing case that contained her piano.
    My mother, continued Midnite, ‘came from a good Colonial family, which arrived in the Parmelia . They were of the true old Swan River pioneering breed, and spent their first winter in the Colony camped on a beach underneath their grand piano.
    But then my great-great-grandmother’s Calvinism came to the rescue. It was that old-fashioned faith that gave her the strength to survive the first two years camping in a tent with two children, a faith that I envy, the loss of which has left so many of us feeling adrift and unanchored.
    Stow appears to have spent his entire life seeking a way to rediscover faith, whether through Taoism, Anglicanism, poetry or meticulous research into the religious foundations behind a Dutch sect that resulted in a massacre off the coast of Geraldton. His search was for spiritual meaning (in a country that he accused of ‘spiritual malaise’) and it was precisely his religiosity that bothered some Australian critics and readers. Kramer complained of his ‘quasi-religious ideas’ while another critic referred to ‘religious propaganda’. Vincent Buckley was more understanding: ‘His is the religious stress,’ he wrote; as was Dorothy Green: ‘Australian critics were not receptive to the exploration of religious ideas in