A strange country?

 

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

Romeo and Juliet, Act two, Scene two

Randolph Stow was prominent in Australian literature and letters in the late 1950s and sixties and seventies. He is well known for his evocation of Australian landscapes, notions of home and homecoming, cross-cultural paradox and the complex challenges of living life on the margin. His most well-known novels are perhaps Tourmaline, The Merry-Go-Round-in the Sea, and my personal favourite, To the Islands.

In the 2019 Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture (link here) published in the excellent occidental literary journal Westerly (vol 64.1), Andrew Lynch considers four inter-connected themes that permeate Stow’s writings: trauma, myth, love and home. I don’t propose to summarise nor critically assess Lynch’s astute and incisive observations but rather wish to lean on him to showcase the enduring and contemporary relevance of Stow’s writing as we try to come to terms with the complexity, irrationality, and seemingly ubiquitous horror of the world around us, be it local, national or international.  

Accordingly, I will quote at some length from a section of Lynch’s lecture under the heading Trauma:

The protagonist of the story, an ageing Anglican missionary, Stephen Heriot, has lost his sense of purpose in life, and believing he has killed an Indigenous man, wanders into ‘Dead Man’s Land’, thinking about ‘being born out of crimes’: ‘  “It was because of murders that I was ever born in this country. It was because of murders that my first amoebic ancestor ever survived to be my ancestor. Every day in my life murders are done to protect me. People are taught how to murder because of me”  ’ (To the Islands 159–60). Heriot feels personally implicated in an endless cycle of violence. Part of this feeling comes from self-obsession and melancholic introversion, but part of it comes from his increasing inability to disconnect the work of his mission from the broader mission of colonial exploitation. In his pastoral life, he looks for a fusion of Indigenous and European cultural expression. But, as a white man, he comes to see himself as an aggressor to the local people, and his attempts to identify with them create a sense of survivor guilt. Typically of Stow’s protagonists, Heriot’s ending is to find himself alone. Yet in his aloneness he takes the next step on an inner journey, as at the land’s edge he looks out over the sea for the islands of the dead:

The old man knelt among the bones and stared into the light. His carved lips were firm in the white beard, his hands were steady, his ancient blue eyes, neither hoping nor fearing, searched sun and sea for the least dark hint of a landfall. ‘My soul,’ he whispered over the sea surge, ‘my soul is a strange country.’ (208)

In a final section of the lecture under the heading Love and Home, Lynch observes, inter alia, that for Stow:

Love brings grief, but it is the creative energy that survives trauma and death, and allows continuity.  

And later summarising the concluding revelation of the protagonist of a later novel, The Girl Green as Elderflower, Lynch notes:

It’s not ancestry — ‘where are you from?’ — but where you love that makes ‘home’.

If this makes sense, if we agree with the sentiment, then it raises important issues for we Australians, as the corollary is that if we want Australia to be and to remain our ‘home’ in that deeper sense, we must find ways to ensure that love (or if you prefer, values such as deep respect, generosity, acceptance, and forgiveness) are present in and hopefully permeate our civic society and our lives: our personal lives, our professional lives, our institutional lives and even our political lives.

The alternative is to live out our days in a strange country, infected by xenophobia, inhabited by strangers, estranged from each other, and importantly, estranged from our own selves.

 

15 December 2025