In 1962, tired of his lecturing job at Leeds, Stow complained that he was ‘coming to loathe literature and everything to do with it on account of the monotony of this constant repetition of platitudes’. In her Introduction, Rendell recognises that not only has there been a change for the better in the assessment of Stow’s significance in the past ten years, but that the discussion of literature itself has become more complex and accountable. Platitudes are less likely to be standard critical fare, and the essays in this collection are compelling and informative.

Stow was born in Western Australia in 1935, into a country family of comparative privilege that moved through one another’s lives and properties like the Maplesteads in his most widely read novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965): ‘The Maplestead clan came and went, bringing flowers and fish, bringing novels and cream, and all the gossip of the town and district.’ Warmly interlaced and mobile, the Maplesteads move from property to property in comfortable wartime evacuations. The landscape is gorgeous, the sea that edges the town fascinates the child Rob, whose story this is, yet snobbery, dispossession, racism, and sectarian divisions are an inextricable part of the society Rob observes. After the war, Rob’s cousin, the returned soldier Rick, leaves Australia, stifled by the complacency of the world that he enlisted to defend. In Rendell’s book, Sam Carmody argues that in this novel a conventional pastoral retreat from urban life involves a further retreat from the land itself. The sea is dangerous, but the land has a complicated history and the social stability of the child’s world is questionable and illusory. In Graeme Kinross-Smith’s biographical piece, also included in Rendell’s collection, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is described by Stow as ‘the writer allow[ing] himself the indulgence … of turning his childhood into a novel’. This is too modest. Stow engages with much more than personal history, he documents a changing world and an alteration in the way of looking at that world. This is characteristic of his writing, which is often preoccupied with suffering men and communities at tipping point or worse, with slippages of faith and emptiness. The writing is also formally confident and adventurous. Visitants (1979) and The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) show Stow’s willingness to use a segmented narrative form. Visitants is told in a shimmer of note-perfect alternating voices. Drusilla Modjeska, in her introduction to the Text Classics edition, calls it ‘a modernist novel of a colonial moment’. Perhaps literature was a kind of palatable currency in Stow’s early life, part of the circulation of ‘flowers and fish’, ‘novels and cream’, that families like the Maplesteads might offer one another, but his own writing is significant now because it offers such important observations and cultural challenges. Randolph Stow: Critical essays is a recognition of this.

The essays are wide-ranging. Several discuss specific novels. Rachael Weaver writes on Stow’s poised and winning children’s novel Midnite (1967); Kate Leah Rendell argues for a rereading of To the Islands, giving primacy to the Indigenous community it describes; Philip Mead establishes connections between Tourmaline and French Modernist poetry as he charts the disintegration of the imperial project in Tourmaline (1963); Martin Leer writes elegantly about the planning and metaphysics of Tourmaline; Sam Carmody has a new perspective on the ocean in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; Nicholas Jose contributes an expansive essay on the narrative originality and significant literary legacy of Visitants. Michael Farrell considers John Kinsella’s collection The Land’s Meaning, coining the wonderful phrase ‘unsettler poetics’ to describe an empty outback town.

There are important thematic essays, as well. Roger Averill writes about Stow’s affiliation with his family and the contradictions that sets up; Klaus Neumann has a strong essay about the fraught history of massacre and disputes over Aboriginal dispossession in relation to Stow’s work; Catherine Noske writes about Stow’s work as an act of personal restitution and healing – an important topic, which as she suggests, also lends itself to a larger canvas; and Margaret Rogerson connects Stowe to the neat and grim world of medieval retribution in Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’. The directly biographical essays – Kinross-Smith’s partly photographic study of Stow’s life and Falkiner’s account of Stow’s residence in Malta – are important inclusions, for Stow was a deeply autobiographical writer, and his writing often arose from his most difficult experiences. Stow’s life was far from easy. At various points he was stricken to the point of serious self-harm, he abandoned undertakings, for long periods he was unable to write. But when he did he was exceptional.

Randolph Stow’s work may become even more interesting as Australian literature develops in ways he could not have foreseen. Nicholas Jose discusses a lapse in Stow’s kind of writing in the 1980s, when ‘Australian fiction found another path’ and writers engaged with the ‘urban, domestic, sociable, concerned with the friction of like with like, the quotidian rather than end time’. This has changed, he argues, especially with the contribution of Indigenous writing – he cites Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006). There are affinities with Stow in so much contemporary Australian writing. Ceridwen Dovey’s camel in Only the Animals (2014) and the articulate creatures in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) remind us of Stow’s comical talking Siamese in Midnite, but the connection is more subtle than this. An early, anonymous review in The Times complained that Stow was ‘inclined … to imply significance to weather and animals’. A new generation of writers, concerned with climate change and the non-human, joins him in this. His work points to the future as well as the colonial past.