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    Early the next morning I joined a journalist friend for a walk along the beach. She thought my infatuation with Stow was eccentric and essentially pointless and encouraged me instead to write about what we spent all our time talking about: parenting teenagers, middle-aged women and sex. As we chatted and power-walked, counting to six the number of ex-husbands between us, Susan pointed to a strange sculpture in the sea of a man on a horse that was immediately reminiscent of a Don Quixote figure. We sat down on the sand and I listened and learned, for the first time, about the sad story of C.Y. O’Connor.
    Charles Yelverton O’Connor was one of those Australian heroes that Stow thought typical of ‘hot, tragic Australia’. In 1891, the then West Australian premier, John Forrest, offered O’Connor the position of chief engineer of the state. An Irishman by birth, among O’Connor’s major works were the design and construction of the Fremantle port, the development of railway lines and later, a freshwater supply to the newly established goldfields in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. The scheme to pipe water more than three hundred miles from the western slope of the Darling Range to a reservoir at Coolgardie was the greatest undertaking of its kind ever to be proposed in Australia and one of the greatest engineering feats in the world at that time. Nevertheless, during its construction O’Connor was under constant attack from both the parliament and the newspapers, who accused him of mismanagement and madness.
    In 1902 a preliminary pumping test failed: when the tap was turned on no water appeared. The next morning O’Connor went for his customary ride along the Fremantle beach, past the new harbour he had designed, and rode his horse into the sea. Then he took out his revolver and shot himself.
    O’Connor had been the victim of a vicious public campaign that masked a popular prediction – almost a wish – for his imaginative and ambitious project to fail. It was too grand, too far-sighted, for the average, egalitarian Australian to have faith in. (Even as a boy, Stow had perceived that ‘nobody wanted anybody else to be good at anything’.) The pipeline, however, was not a failure. A year after O’Connor’s death, in 1903, Forrest turned on the water at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie amid great rejoicing. The visionary Irish engineer, meanwhile, had been buried under a great Celtic cross, his remains adding to the collection of ‘gallant bones’ that, according to Stow, ‘littered bare, melancholy Australia’.
    Stow surely had O’Connor’s fate in mind when he wrote Tourmaline , with its self-proclaimed water-diviner who arrives in a once-prosperous goldmining town that has deteriorated to dust and ruin following mindless, money-hungry plundering of the countryside. The townspeople place all their hopes in this mysterious stranger, but in the end Tourmaline remains as dry as when he arrived and the people continue as ‘tenants of shanties rented from the wind’.
    In the note of the opening pages of Tourmaline Stow writes: ‘The action of this novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future.’ Could he envisage, even at the age of twenty-five, our post-mining country when we will eventually find ourselves forever ‘tenants of the sunstruck miles’, abandoned to our ‘derelict independence’?
    Stow wrote Tourmaline in 1961, while travelling on the boat to England, and then finished it in Leeds, where he had taken up a temporary lectureship at Leeds University, a position offered by the great Yeats scholar, Norman (Derry) Jeffares, who had spent seventeen years at the University of Adelaide. Published in London in 1963, Tourmaline is described by critic Anthony Hassall as Stow’s ‘first fully mature novel, a deeply-meditated and deliberate work expressing his personal religious vision’.
    In a