Visitants

by Randolph Stow

Book Overview

Patrol Officer Alistair Cawdor's suicide triggers a colonial inquest in New Guinea. Five testifying witnesses reveal disturbing stories. First published in 1979, Visitants was informed by the author's time in the Trobriand Islands two decades earlier. It is one of the most potent examinations of Australian colonialism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1925240274
• ISBN13: 9781925240276
• Release Date: June 2016
• Publisher: Text Classics
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A Modern Australian Classic

A few modern novels contain pivotal scenes that have stopped me in my tracks. These scenes I must carry around, like rogue radioisotopes in the bloodstream. Randolph Stow's Visitants is one such novel. Born in 1935 in Geraldton, Western Australia, Stow had produced three novels by the age of 23. Any young Australian deserves a dose of the fifth, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), suffused with love and memory from Stow's wartime childhood. Each should also be served his tart and rambunctious children's classic, Midnite (1967), which sends up Colonial Empire and Patrick White in equal merriment. These two are linear narratives in form, more so than Visitants, first published in 1979 but mainly drafted in the early `70s. Stow was a Papua New Guinea patrol officer in 1959. In that year, a Trobriand Islands UFO incident was reported widely, but not to his isolated spot. His introductory note recalls that locals in his own sub-district described a similar phenomenon around the same time. A number of years passed before the incidents morphed into fiction. The wait was worthwhile, for Visitants is a finer artifice than To the Islands or Tourmaline, the novels that sprang from Stow's earlier bush sojourn in the far north of Western Australia. Visitants is its own satisfyingly complete neighbourhood, like no other place before or since. Well, maybe that's not 100 per cent true, given the allusions to (among other things) William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Stow comes out at least equal on points with Golding. He was more the one who could draw on tangible life experience of remote tropical islands. He dares and succeeds with an ambitious structure for his short novel. The structure is an overlapping series of "witness statements" to a 1959 PNG "inquiry" into violent events of cargo-cult and tribal intrigue in and around Kailuana Island, home for the crusty old planter MacDonnell. Another white witness is Mr Dalwood, a greenhorn patrol officer who shares Stow's memories of Perth WA and its riverside university. Also testifying are MacDonnell's attractive young housemaid Saliba, Osana the sub-district government interpreter, and Benoni the tribal heir-apparent of Kailuana. The main object of testimony is Alistair Cawdor, a patrol officer sent "troppo" by his wife's elopement. "It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there," he says. "My house is bleeding to death." Cawdor, on the face of it just a swarthy Scot, almost doubles as some kind of dark king spoiling for self-sacrifice, his increasing disturbance a lightning rod for the delusions of race and conquest. As you read, you don't really have to perceive subtler aspects on any conscious level to receive the organic imprint of the piece. As it takes shape, its striking choreography and comedy are made real by spates of colour, scent and humidity. Inside such an arena, the evening may be "a pond of turquoise deepe