To the Islands
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Exhausted and losing faith, Anglican minister Stephen Heriot abandons his mission in Australia’s northwest. Wracked with guilt for his past transgressions, Heriot flees to the vast emptiness of the outback, searching for the islands of the Aboriginal dead. In the soul country of the desert he begins to reflect: was his life’s work worthwhile? Are history’s crimes also our own? Can any connection to be found in the unrelenting isolation of the land?
A Lear-like tale of madness and destruction, To the Islands was heralded for its poetic mastery upon its publication, when Stow was only twenty-two. It went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ALS Gold Medal. Stow substantially revised the novel for its republication in 1982.
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’.
‘To the Islands is a masterpiece.’ ANZ LitLovers
Customer Reviews
Are we there yet?
Author
Australian (1935-2010) born and raised. Lived in the UK from the late 1960 until his death. Wrote two novels and a collection of poetry while an undergraduate at Uni of WA then spent time working at an Aboriginal mission in the Kimberly region, which formed the basis for his 3rd novel, To The Islands, which won the Miles Franklin award in 1958 and vaulted the 23-year-old Stow into august company. The inaugural Miles Franklin was awarded the year before to Patrick White for Voss. It was fitting that Stow received the Patrick White award, among many others, later in his career. To The Islands was groundbreaking in its era for the way the author integrated aboriginal culture and language into the text. The author issued a revised edition in 1981 to "tone down" his veneration for Anglican missionaries.
Summary
Stephen Heriot, an ageing Anglican missionary in the Kimberly region of WA is much troubled by a massacre of aboriginals by whites in the area. Believing it is time he died, he goes "walkabout" with an aboriginal friend and companion, seeking to do just that, and doing a lot of reflecting along the way.
Writing
Mr Stow wrote elegant prose for such a young man. The descriptions of the outback are lyrical, but his command of dialogue left something to be desired. I've read reviews comparing him to Graham Greene and Cormac McCarthy. In his later work perhaps, not here IMHO. There are some reasonably well rounded aboriginal characters, which would have been revolutionary at the time. Through Heriot, Mr Stow seeks to push his own non-racist credentials, which would likely be shot down in flames by today's activists given that racial discrimination (implied racism) was, and still is, pervasive in post-colonial Australia.
Bottom line
An Australian classic according to the literati; a hard slog for me. Not Patrick White hard, mind you, but hard enough. The message, while undoubtedly novel at the time, is familiar one nowadays.