Read Moving Among Strangers for Free Online Page A

fiction.’
    When Stow left Australia he wasn’t just rejecting the materialism of his homeland, he was also rejecting a worldview that explained everything through science and technology; he longed for a world, like that of the Aboriginal Umbalgari people of Western Australia, or the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea or the mystics of medieval Europe, that was populated with myths and magic and ancestral spirits. For Stow, Western Australia was not only arid geographically; for a white man, it was also spiritually arid. Stow needed to believe in an enchanted world underpinned by stories, which is what led him back to rural England, English folklore and medieval myths in search of an imaginative reality, as well as a rootedness, that could not be found in Australia. Most of all, perhaps, he was looking for something he felt was impossible in his native land: a way to forge a soul. Or what he called honouring the single soul.
    The idea of ‘honouring the single soul’ is one of the keys to understanding Randolph Stow and his work, writes critic Paul Higginbotham, ‘a moral philosophy that motivated much of Stow’s fiction’. It begins with an honouring of one’s own soul, and eventually leads to the love of others, but it cannot be a possessive love. To honour the single soul is to give it freedom.
    *
    The Western Australian Museum Shipwreck Galleries is a spectacular convict-built museum that houses some of the earliest evidence of European visitors to this continent. The original timbers from the Batavia form the centrepiece, in the special Batavia Gallery, which also includes the skeleton of one of the murdered crew. The remains of the Batavia , off the coast of Geraldton, were discovered on 4 June 1963 – exactly 334 years after the day it sank – by three local men, led by Max Cramer, born just a year before Stow. The discovery caused an international sensation and Cramer, once an unknown recreational scuba-diver, developed into a semi-professional maritime archaeologist.
    Stow and Cramer crossed paths in several ways. Both men were preoccupied, if not obsessed, by the events surrounding the Batavia , and they continued to correspond after Stow left Australia. Then in 1988, in his capacity as a builder and a carpenter, Cramer constructed a replica of the merry-go-round in the sea, in recognition of the popularity of Stow’s novel, after the original roundabout had been removed in the 1950s. ‘Many local people and visitors are keen to see the places described in the book,’ said Cramer. Max Cramer died in 2010, just months after Stow, and three weeks before the Stow memorial event. His death, as well as his achievements, were widely reported. As I travelled around Perth meeting people and chatting with taxi drivers, I would discover that Cramer, twice awarded the Geraldton Citizen of the Year Award as well as an Order of Australia medal, was much better known to West Australians than Randolph Stow. If Stow had won medals for sporting feats such as diving or tennis or yacht racing, rather than novels, he might have been a household name. Or even if he had become a farmer, like his grandfather, and grown grapes, then his work might have been remembered. There is a C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec to commemorate my great-grandfather; there is an entire Jack Mann range to memorialise the ‘legendary’ Houghton winemaker (employed by C.W.), and there is even the idiotically named ‘Bandit’ range supposedly to ‘immortalise the legend’ of Moondyne Joe, complete with prison-garb arrows on the screwcap. (What on earth, I want to ask the Houghton marketing people, is wrong with the word ‘bushranger’?)
    Ferguson, Mann, Moondyne Joe – these are all names that probably have some vague resonance for most West Australians. And yet, when I mentioned the name Stow people looked at me blankly. Where, I thought then, is the Randolph Stow Special