Journal Article

Farm novel or station romance?: The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth

2018

Overview

Randolph Stow set three of his novels in and around Geraldton on Western Australia's mid- north coast. These were his first two novels, A Haunted Land (1956) and The Bystander (1957), written during his late teens while a student at the University of Western Australia, and his fifth novel, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965).1 In this essay, I would like to introduce a more closely-grained treatment of the material dynamics of colonisation that sit beneath Stow's Geraldton novels. These dynamics-in particular, the mode of agrarian land usage-tend to be mystified by the metaphysics of alienation of a certain school of Australian criticism, and occluded in the more typological forms of postcolonial critique. In this task, I am following John McLaren in locating Stow's work firmly within a global extension of agricultural production into new zones of exploitation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in regarding the symbolic estrangement (i.e. 'alienation') of Stow's characters as a manifestation of the vicissitudes of these material colonial processes.

• Publisher: Association for the Study of Australian Literature,Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)
• Subject: 20th century / Agricultural production / Ambiguity / Australian literature / Biographies / Colonialism / Colonies & territories / Cultural heritage / Economics / Epic literature / Erotica / Eschatology / Farms / Fiction / Gothic fiction / Heroism & heroes / Historiography / Libraries / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Literary studies / Literature / Livestock / Manifest Destiny / McLaren, John / Narrative structure / Narrative techniques / Narratives / Native peoples / Nineteenth century / Novels / Plot (Narrative) / Postcolonialism / Schools / Settlements & damages / Short stories / Social aspects / Stow, Randolph, 1935-2010 / University of Western Australia / Wolfe, Patrick (1949-2016)