AUSTRALIA DAY SPECIAL: Randolph Stow, Visitants and the call of the UFO part 2
In Part 1:
Randolph Stow was one
of our great writers and I encourage you to embrace the literary legacy of Mick
Stow and the highly anticipated 890 page biography "Mick: A Life of
Randolph Stow” from UWA (University of Western Australia) Publishing by
Suzanne Falkiner.
Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian
writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands –
written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission – won
the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven
remarkable novels and several collections of poetry, Stow’s literary output
slowed. This biography examines the productive period as well as his long
periods of publishing silence.
In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Randolph Stow’s
quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulously
researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner’s biography pieces
together an intriguing story from Stow’s personal letters, diaries, and
interviews with the people who knew him best. And many of her tales – from
Stow’s beginnings in idyllic rural Australia, to his critical turning point in
Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex, England – provide us with keys
to unlock the meaning of Stow’s rich and introspective works.
Suzanne Falkiner kindly
shared some extracts of her Stow biography and aspects of her wider research.
I had written to her
on 24 August 2015:
I am
very much looking forward to your bio on Randolph Stow. Part of my
interest stems from his wonderful novel "Visitants" which I mentioned
in my own book "The OZ Files - the Australian UFO Story" (1996, Duffy
& Snellgrove).
You
may be interested in my posts on Bill Gill and his 1959 experience:
It is
fascinating to see the multiple witness enquiry literary template that exists
in both Randolph Stow's "Visitants" and John Fowles "A
Maggot" - both with "alien contact" threads - 2 extraordinary
books that weave "the other" in fascinating ways through their narratives.
I
recollect Randolph had a UFO sighting with William Grono in 1966.
I
would be very interested to learn of what Randolph Stow's private papers
expressed on his thoughts about the 1959 Boainai events, which he learnt about
upon his return and the other reports of that period. Does he elaborate
on his own experience?
Best
wishes,
Suzanne replied the
next day:
Dear
Bill,
Stow
did elaborate briefly on the events in his unpublished papers, and kept a
cutting about the Gill experience. I attach the refs.
However,
if you don’t examine the papers yourself in the interim, I’d appreciate it if
you didn’t quote from the unpublished text attached until after (or at least
nearer to when) my book comes out (February 2016), and then credit it if you
do.
I
think the key to Stow’s approach is his comment that it's not whether such objects did or did not exist, which he
couldn’t have any firm opinion about, ‘but why so many people want to believe
that they exist.’
He
applied the same precept to the 12th century stories of the ‘Green Children’
and the Merman of Orford, etc, written in Latin by chroniclers as if they were
history, that he explores in The Girl
Green as Elderflower. He draws a parallel here to Trobriand creation
myths (and Christian myths), but maintains an open mind.
Hope
this helps!
All
the best,
Suzanne
At the same time Suzanne shared extracts
from her forthcoming biography.
Stow was in Papua at
the time and while he did not hear of the sightings at the time, he was made
aware of a similar event on Kitava (part of the Trobriand Islands (the customs
and people of that island group were described in Malinowski's classic study
"Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (1922)) and a strange
disappearance. Stow incorporates both into the novel and the sightings of
"star machines" are a recurring thread in the novel.
Suzanne’s extracts cover
both of these aspects – Stow’s encounter with Kitava locals who described their
“star machine” encounter, ostensibly shortly before their meeting and some
months after the Boianai sightings.
She explains that the
Kitava information served as “the kernel of a second plotline in
“Visitants.” She quoted from Stows
papers held at the National Library of Australia – Stow’s typed notes on
Trobriand myth, magic and ‘cargo’:
“One night we were visited by a group of men
who wanted us to settle an intellectual dispute. The question was, whether or
not the war with Japan was over. We told them that it had ended fourteen years
earlier, and wondered why they were interested. They said that a ‘star’ or
‘machine’ had been passing over the island, and they wanted to know whether it
was a Japanese or Allied ‘star’. They said that they were frightened, but they
laughed as they said so.
We assumed that they had seen a satellite or
space probe (though it should have seemed obvious at the time that they would
never connect such a small pocket of light with a war-machine) and fobbed them
off with some photographs of rockets in an old magazine. They [were]
dissatisfied, and said that the rockets were the wrong shape—sketching a shape
with their hands. But I was too tired and too much the know-it-all Dimdim to
pay much attention.”
Suzanne also quotes
from Tony Hassall 1982 interview with Stow – “Breaking the Silence.” I was already well acquainted with this
fascinating interview through Professor Hassall’s excellent book “Randolph
Stow” (UQP 1990). It had been originally
published in “Australian Literary Studies” (1982):
No doubt there was a lot of talk about Boianai
at the time, but I didn’t hear of it. …I thought they were talking about a
Soviet Lunik, which was in the sky at the time and I dug out a copy of Time
magazine, or something which had a picture of rockets on the cover, and said:
‘it’s like that, it’s like a bullet’. And they said: ‘no, no, it’s not like
that’, and made a shape of it with their hands, which I think was, as far as I
can remember it, a disc-shape. But I can’t actually swear to that now. Anyway,
they told me that it certainly wasn’t like a bullet going through the sky, it
was a machine that had a big light, and it chased some men along the path, when
they were coming home from fishing, and they were frightened. And I suppose
that I just put that aside; as I couldn’t answer the question I just forgot
about it until years later…
In her book Suzanne elaborates:
Six years on, at Point
Barron in Alaska, Stow recorded, in an American magazine he came upon an account of the ‘New Guinea episode of 1959’ — a similar
sighting of a flying object, some five months earlier in late June, at Boianai
on the New Guinea mainland about 150 miles
southwest —and found himself trying to recall every
detail of the conversation.
She notes:
“This was an extract
from Jacques Vallee’s Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Henry Regnery, 1965), describing
a sighting in June 1959 by Reverend William Booth Gill and 37 local people at Boianai, in
Goodenough Bay, and in which the astronomer made a plea for statistical
analysis of the incidence of sightings. See also NLA MS
10.128 Papers of Randolph Stow, Box 6, Pkt
23 - printed report on Reverend Gill’s 1959 sighting of a UFO at Boianai.”
Suzanne further shared:
“In the same typed-up
account found among his unpublished notes, Stow mused on the topic of faith,
belief and rationality, particularly in relation to ‘cargo cults’, or ‘Vailala
Madness’, as a particular variety of the Millenarian movement was called.
It is a tragicomic business, and the
temptation, especially for a writer of fiction, is to emphasise the comic
elements and to treat the cultists as a crowd of savage idiots. But we Dimdims
are by no means always rational in ‘spiritual’ matters….The people of Kitava on this occasion conducted themselves like
scientists—and the ‘miracle’ of Our Lady of Fatima might be considered a major
event in the history of cargo-cult.
Was missionary work allowing Fatima to
leak into Kitava thinking or was this Stow just wondering about Fatima 1917 in
general in this belief context?
There
were Methodist and Catholic missionaries on Kiriwina at the time, but Mick
makes little mention of the RC one, whereas the Methodist one, whose wife was a
nurse, lived near the ADO station at Losuia and was more of a friend. No
other mentions elsewhere in Stow's papers or correspondence of his being aware
of, or interested in, any other incidents or sightings, or again of the Boianai
or Kitava sightings. Or indeed of Fatima.
In terms of the Fatima books originally
published in Portuguese if Mick had ever encountered them they would not have
challenged him. He had a command of the
language that supported his intriguing wider speculations on the madness that
may have informed the Batavia tragedy.
But as Suzanne Falkiner
notes Stow probably didn’t go down the deeper “rabbit hole” that is the wider
UFO mysteries intertwined with these matters.
Suzanne and I did meet briefly at the
special Stow event, which was a wonderful celebration of the life and legacy of
Mick – Randolph Stow.
“What interested Stow
more, Stow told Hassall in 1982, was not whether such objects did or did not
exist, which he couldn’t have any firm opinion about, ‘but why so many people
want to believe that they exist.’
In response to Suzanne’s kind sharing of
this research I expanded in my 26 August 2015 email:
Hi
Suzanne,
Thank
you for sharing this information. It seems to replicate much of the
material Tony Hassall aired in 1982 and 1990.
I
have Tony Hassall's 1990 "Randolph Stow" (UQP) which features
"Visitants" and his detailed interview. I was going to quote
from that in "The OZ Files" (1996) but in the end I only referred to
"Vistants" and brief background on Mick.
Given
that Mick didn't offer "any firm opinion" on UFOs but key was
"why so many people want to believe that they exist" the nexus of
belief, fact and fiction seemed to be important to him.
Given
that Rev. Bill Gill wrestled with the very same dynamic, I thought the evolution
of thought he went through was worthwhile drawing to your attention:
“….
my understanding of the evolution of Bill Gill's thoughts on his sighting.
Not really belief, but anchored in fact, and apparently privately
mediated by his faith. But he put that out there as just an idea for
thinking about. Perhaps the glowing "radiance" "sparking, etc
that surround the "men" and the object led him privately in that
direction. Publicly "aliens", "Americans" or
"aliens", he did not know, but he was certain of what he saw.
Perhaps
that’s where Mick resonated. Your reference to Bill Grono's belief that
he saw a weather balloon with Stow at Greenough in 1966, doesn't seem to sit
well with Mick's description of "a point of light making a falling-leaf,
and then going away and vanishing with great speed, and then coming back at great
speed from another direction, and going through the falling-leaf motion
again" (Stow to Hassall) all this about 45 minutes, and they just gave up
watching it. This appears to be a remarkable "weather balloon",
unlike any I have investigated over decades of research. Perhaps Bill's
response was mediated by belief, rather than the facts of the event?
Was
there an actual date, apart from year - month, day, time? Direction?
I
note that Bruce Bennett wrote in the Westerly (55:2, 153) that when Stow died
in 2010 he had "some half-century of memories of this region of England
(Suffolk) to supplement his still vivid memories of Western
Australia."
I
have read Bruce's interview in both the Westerly & Tony's anthology and was
left wondering (after Bennett in Hassall, 375) if the interview had been in
1983 rather than 1981, whether the nexus of belief, fact & fiction may have
played out differently, given the Harwich & East Bergholt Suffolk location
and the mix of memories of place.
I
suspect while Mick may not have favoured "News of the World" as
reading material, locals of Suffolk would no doubt been agog with the front
page of 2nd October 1983, which went global and was reported upon even here in
OZ:
There
seems no evidence that Stow revisited the dynamic of "Visitants"
published in 1979 with its famous 1959 sighting as a prologue. Only
slightly removed and certainly in close proximity in sense of place and time
and maybe belief - December 1980 Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, aired by the
"news of the World" in October 1983.
I
suspect at least that Stow would have heard about it?
I was
struck by reference to "Our Lady of Fatima" in Stow's musings about
it "might be considered a major event in the history of cargo-cult"
by "the people of Kitava. Is there an accurate date to Stow's
encounter with locals on Kitava (presumably between September 1 and November
1959)? Was there a sense that the locals were telling Stow about
something that had just happened, maybe only by days?
Was
missionary work allowing Fatima to leak into Kitava thinking or was this Stow
just wondering about Fatima 1917 in general in this belief context?
He
may have wondered even more if had been exposed to recent writings on Fatima
(2005, 2006, 2008, all before Stows passing in 2010, published earlier in
Portuguese.
These
are very intriguing recent works and in part extend Vallee's research in his
1975 book "The Invisible College - What a Group of Scientists has
discovered about UFO influences on the human race". Therein he had a
chapter focusing on Fatima: "A morphology of miracles."
Stow
had "an open mind." Had he come across all this - Fatima
"re-envisioned", Rendlesham Forest 1980 in Suffolk, one can only
wonder in light of "Vistants" and its cousin "The Girl Green as
Elderflower"?
"Visitants"
is considered by many as one of Stow's best books and possibly one of the
finest novels in "Australian" literature, therefore these connections
are I think are of merit and worth sharing.
Although
the Saturday event appears to be "sold out" I plan to dally at the
library to see if I can get my foot in the door.
Perhaps
we can have a chat there if we cross paths.
Best
wishes,
Bill
Suzanne kindly responded with the following
additional clarifications on 26 August 2015:
Dear Bill,
Thank you for all that interesting
information. I hope I’ve answered your queries below:
Suzanne added:
“Bill Grono told me that he himself believed it was a weather balloon
that he saw with Stow at Greenough.”
Was there an actual date, apart from
year - month, day, time? Direction?
I
agree the weather balloon theory seems unlikely, especially as Bill Grono saw
the object or light shooting up into the air as well (do weather balloons have
lights?). Nearest I can date sighting is sometime between about 7 January 1966
(approximate date of Stow's arrival back in WA from USA, after 3 week sea
voyage from 17 December 1965) and 4 February 1966 (the date he mentions the
trip north in a letter, after returning to Perth), and probably more towards
the end of that period than the beginning. It was their last night staying in
the holiday shacks on the Greenough river before their return, and after
they’d had 'a few drinks’ (which probably would have been rather more than a
few), and presumably quite late, ie after they'd had dinner, as Stow
wanted to wake the guy in the neighbouring shack to see it also, and he
wouldn’t be in it. I imagine the shacks would be looking out to sea, but that’s
a guess.
Is there an accurate date to Stow's
encounter with locals on Kitava (presumably between September 1 and November
1959)? Was there a sense that the locals were telling Stow about
something that had just happened, maybe only by days?
Stow
was on Kitava, on and off between visiting other islands, between 16 October
and Friday 13 November 1959. No indication of when in this period the men told
him about the object. No indication either of whether it had been a recent
sighting, but presumably it was, as other patrols had recently passed through.
Suzanne’s kind sharing and my revisiting of
“Visitants” and particularly its curious sister novel The Girl Green as
Elderflower immediately alerted me
to one more Suffolk mystery that may have (but probably didn’t?) become known
to Stow – the strange incident of the Aldeburgh flying platform which took
place in the middle of World War One (1914 – 1918).
Stow had
a literary connection with Aldeburgh through his appreciation of the
near-forgotten poet George Crabbe (1754-1832), who is perhaps more widely
remembered through Benjamin Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes,” which was based on
a chapter in Crabbe’s lengthy piece “The Borough”. While the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh is not
mentioned by name it is generally understood that Crabbe’s birth place of
Aldeburgh is its basis. Britten founded
the Aldeburgh festival in 1948. Stow was in good company for Crabbe’s work was
admired by the likes Byron, Tennyson, E.M. Forester, Jane Austen and Walter
Scott to name a few. Stow mentioned
Crabbe and Aldeburgh in an interview by Bruce Bennent in 1981 (Westerly, No. 4,
December, 1981).
While
Randolph Stow was living in England (either London or Leeds) during the period
1966 – 1969 the son of the Aldeburgh flying platform witness from World War One
sort to share his mother’s fascinating story beyond the circle of family and
friends where it had circulated since it happened. His letter appeared on page 16 of the Daily
Mirror of August 8, 1968.
There
are some similarities to Father Gill”s Boianai sighting. “Return to Magonia –
Investigating UFOs in History” (Anomalist Books) gives an excellent analysis of
the Aldeburh Platform incident and gets into the kind of mythic aspects Stow might have been interested it.
We
can’t be certain Randolph Stow became aware of the Rendlesham Forest case via the “News of the World”
account or the Aldeburgh Platform story via the Daily Mirror letter. We can be sure he was intrigued by UFOs, had
first hand testimony given to him from native witnesses, and had his own
sighting in 1966 with his friend Bill Grono. This was in the period of the well
publicised Queensland “Tully flying saucer nest”. There were also sightings by farmers in
remote parts of Western Australia.
Discover
the literary legacy of Randolph Stow and read of his life – a great Australian,
a “Visitant” here in OZ, Sussex and Papua New Guinea. For a little while he was intrigued by the
UFO mystery and became focused on “why so many people want to believe that they
exist.”
posted by Bill Chalker at 12:58 AM
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