Moving Among Strangers
December 2013
Gabrielle Carey / UQP
Beginning with an image of eternal love and existential solitude from Randolph Stow’s The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980), Carey masterfully sets the scene for her investigation into the secret and perplexing life of the insufficiently feted West Australian author, and its meshing with her own family, whose past remains shrouded in grief and secrecy. Following the death of her mother, Carey uncovers several letters exchanged with the young Stow during a lengthy but indefinable relationship, and decides to write her own letter in an attempt to assemble the missing pieces in her family history, and Stow’s pivotal role in it all.
As Carey travels back to the WA of her roots, she not only gains a fascinating insight into the man behind eclectic writings she so admires, and his sense of isolation in a society seemingly preoccupied with sport, money and materialism, but her own sense of isolation as she discovers that the loved ones she thought she knew, were in some ways strangers to her. This is not, as Carey says, “an attempt to offer a biographical account of Stow, nor a conventionally autobiographical work”. She uses Stow, his writings and his life, as a platform for exploring a quintessentially Australian species of artistic alienation, and to fulfil her strong desire to continue talking with the dead, even when “they no longer have a voice”.
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