When Gabrielle Carey wrote to reclusive Australian novelist Randolph Stow to tell him her mother — his childhood friend — was dying, she could not have anticipated the journey of discovery that would unfold.

The ensuing literary-pilgrimage-cum-family-quest is detailed in Moving Among Strangers. The journey sees Carey: reconnect with extended family; explore places in Western Australia of meaning to Stow and to her parents when they were young; uncover secrets about her mother and father; and travel to England where Stow had lived for some time in self-imposed exile from his country of birth.

It’s a simple enough tale and was written in Memory of Randolph (Mick) Stow (1935-2010) and Joan Carey nee Ferguson (1922-2009).

It’s also told with poise and flair.

Randolph Stow was a regular visitor at the Ferguson home in Perth during his days as a schoolboy at Perth’s Guildford Grammar and Carey’s mother Joan recalled him wading across the river with his uniform above his head in order to do so.

When Joan left the Swan Valley to work in Geraldton as a nurse, Stow was still at school. It was in Geraldton that she met Stow’s aunts and, later, Carey’s father, Alex. From Geraldton she moved to White Peak, the Carey family’s sheep station and later spent some time in the UK.

One of only two letters that remain from Stow’s correspondence with Carey’s mother is from 1952 and addressed to her, as was customary, in her husband’s name, at her Wood Lane address in Highgate, London.

As Carey observes: “It seems quaint that a handsome school-leaver was bothered to write so candidly to a woman of thirty on the other side of the globe. Perhaps Joan seemed like just another aunt, like the ones who’d surrounded Stow all his life — ‘the monstrous regiment of women’, as he called them.”

It was also in 1952 that Stow wrote a four-page letter to Guildford Grammar’s headmaster explaining his difficulties with the school — a letter Carey says indicates that the young Stow felt himself a social outcast.

“If a teenage boy with an interest in ballet still feels slightly odd in contemporary Australia, we can only imagine how strange it must have been more than half a century ago in an old-fashioned grammar school in Guildford.”

Ballet and art were interests Randolph and her mother shared.

Unfortunately, Joan died before Carey was able to explore what else might have bonded her mother to a man she called “Mick” and sent Christmas cards to for 50 years.

In fact, Joan was so discreet about the relationship that Carey once thought her mother might have had an affair with the man 12 years her junior. She has since dismissed the notion.

The outsiders

In a 2010 piece in The Australian Carey wrote, “I suspect now that what bonded them [Joan and Mick] was a certain sense of being outsiders in that conservative and parochial world of rural WA.”

Carey also confessed that when she first read Stow’s children’s book Midnite she had no idea that her mother had grown up with the book’s author. And this, “despite the fact the scene in the book where a drunken Midnite is caught by a Mr Macpherson is an anecdote directly based on her great-great-grandfather’s discovery of the bushranger Moondyne Joe in his Houghton cellars”.

Her brief reflection in Moving Among Strangers on the Houghton inheritance holds a splash of resentment.

“Many people can recite tales of a lost family fortune, but not so many are reminded of it whenever they’re in a bottle shop. The Houghton label always reminds me of the Ferguson family farm, the beautiful acreage that my mother grew up on, and the tradition that decreed that, despite being the eldest, as a woman she would never inherit the fruits of all that Scottish Protestant industriousness.”

Carey also observes that the last thing her mother ate was a grape. “A fitting thing for a woman who had grown up on a vineyard.”

Unwrapping the onion

Carey was — and is — a devotee of Stow’s writing but he died before she was able to meet him.

She is frank that her motive in exploring the connections between Stow and her forebears was not, at least at first, so much to bring Stow back from the dead but to bring back her mother.

The search ultimately led to her reunion with the Carey clan — family members who’d been lost to her for decades.

It also enables much-welcome light and attention to be cast on the enigmatic Stow.

Here are a few titbits about Stow to tempt you to buy the book and read further:

Stow was entranced by shipwrecks — including the wreck of the Batavia. This, and the narrative of Quiros’ Austrialis de Espiritu Santo, led him to his belief that the twin motifs— Australia as prison and Australia as Eden — symbolised something significant about Australia and Australian identity.

Bill Grono, Stow’s life-long friend and fellow poet, believed Stow gave up a Whitlam fellowship in 1974 because he thought Australia was “uncivilised and unsympathetic towards, almost wilfully ignorant of, the world’s problems, and that he considered Australian culture ‘a celebration of yobbishness’ … Stow believed Australians were still ‘smug, bigoted and way too pleased with themselves’. To remain living here would, therefore, be the equivalent to a death sentence.”

Stow thought Western Australia was arid geographically and spiritually (for a white man) and that his native land afforded him no opportunity to “honour the single soul” by giving it freedom.

Stow won the Miles Franklin Award win in 1958 for his novel To the Islands and soon after departed for Papua New Guinea and then the Trobriand Islands.

Carey has written novels, memoir, essays and articles and her first book, Puberty Blues — co-written with Kathy Lette — has been adapted for film and television. She teaches writing at the University of Technology in Sydney, where, she says, her “infatuation with Randolph Stow is happily tolerated”.

Carey is not alone in lauding Stow’s prose and poetry and others who have done so include the poets, John Kinsella and Bob Adamson, the novelist Tim Winton and chief literary critic for the Australian Geordie Williamson. Nonetheless, it is her portrayal of Stow in Moving Among Strangers that has (finally) prompted me to seek out and read more of his work.

So far, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is working its magic and The Land’s Meaning: New and Selected Poems (edited by Kinsella) is reeling me in. Tourmaline and The Girl Green as Elderflower could well be next …

The real merry-go-round in Geraldton that Stow and Carey’s father played on and which is described on the first page of Stow’s captivating novel is long gone. And for safety reasons that which is now in its place is fixed — so doesn’t spin.

But as Carey writes, “The ultimate merry-go-round is the most real and enduring, the one that will keep moving after all the others have been demolished or demobilised: the mysterious, sunken merry-go-round of Stow’s imagination — the merry-go-round in the sea.”

Moving Among Strangers
Gabrielle Carey
UQP, $29.95