Tourmaline (2 page)

Stow was so perplexed by the Australian response to the Taoist elements in
Tourmaline
that in the mid-1960s he published a series of poems entitled ‘The Testament of Tourmaline: Variations on Themes of the
Tao Teh Ching
’. The original Lao Tzu text is:

Stow’s version reads:

The search for real water in a desert can only be a mirage. Stow suggests that the country needs not the divining of gold or water, but rather, as Hassall has observed, ‘the divining of a true identity that will unite the land and its people’.

Metaphysics and mysticism aside,
Tourmaline
is a richly poetic novel with a visceral Australian atmosphere: ‘the smell of sweat was overlaid with the clean and bitter tang of dust. Perhaps a sharper scent was there, too, from the leaves of myall baking in the sun.’ So lyrical is the prose that an opera of
Tourmaline
was drafted in the early 1970s, with a libretto by Richard Fotheringham and music by Robert Keane. The performer and composer Iain Grandage has set extracts of
Tourmaline
to music, and the theatre director Andrew Ross has staged adaptations. Rachel Ward is writing the screenplay for a film version.

Tourmaline
is more relevant now than ever. A note at the beginning instructs the reader that ‘The action of the novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future.’ Stow’s apocalyptic vision of a formerly wealthy mining city is prophetic. As I write this, there are reports that Broken Hill may run out of water. Its mayor is assuring residents of the treatability of bore water. Ours is a country immeasurably rich in resources, yet our most precious resource is also our most scarce.

In one scene of the novel the townsfolk congregate at the war memorial at the call of the bugle. It seems like an ordinary Anzac Day ceremony, the kind that most Australians have attended. But the Law tells the assembled people that there is a curse on them all—for the unexplained ‘terrible things’ that happened there in the past.

This is partly why the townspeople fall for the cult of the diviner. They hope for the town to be reborn; the Law looks forward to a change in the weather and plans an Edenic garden free of sin. Yet, in the world of
Tourmaline
, there ‘is no sin but cruelty. Only one. And that original sin, that began when a man first cried to another, in his matted hair: Take charge of my life, I am close to breaking.’ Stow suggests that cults prey on two common human frailties: the desire for someone else to ‘take charge’ of our lives, and self-loathing. (Tom Spring argues with the Law: ‘And how is it, anyway, that you’ve lived all these years and not seen that a man who hates himself is the only kind of wild beast we have to watch for?’) Michael Random offers to relieve the townspeople of the burden of responsibility, of living for themselves.

Spring’s final words, and perhaps the key to the philosophy behind all of Stow’s fiction, are: ‘Honour the single soul.’ With this new edition of
Tourmaline
, we honour the singular soul of Randolph Stow.

Tourmaline

For M.C.S.

I say we have a bitter heritage, but that is not to run it down. Tourmaline is the estate, and if I call it heritage I do not mean that we are free in it. More truly we are tenants; tenants of shanties rented from the wind, tenants of the sunstruck miles. Nevertheless I do not scorn Tourmaline. Even here there is something to be learned; even groping through the red wind, after the blinds of dust have clattered down, we discover the taste of perfunctory acts of brotherhood: warm, acidic, undemanding, fitting a derelict independence. Furthermore, I am not young.

There is no stretch of land on earth more ancient than this. And so it is blunt and red and barren, littered with the fragments of broken mountains, flat, waterless. Spinifex grows here, but sere and yellow, and trees are rare, hardly to be called trees, some kind of myall with leaves starved to needles that fans out from the root and gives no shade.

At times, in the early morning, you would call this a gentle country. The new light softens it, tones flow a little, away from the stark forms. It is at dawn that the sons of Tourmaline feel for their heritage. Grey of dead wood, grey-green of leaves, set off a soil bright and tender, the tint of blood in water. Those are the colours of Tourmaline. There is a fourth, to the far west, the deep blue of hills barely climbing the horizon. But that is the colour of distance, and no part of Tourmaline, belonging more to the sky.

It is not the same country at five in the afternoon. That is the hardest time, when all the heat of the day rises, and every pebble glares, wounding the eyes, shortening the breath; the time when the practice of living is hardest to defend, and nothing seems easier than to cease, to become a stone, hot and still. At five in the afternoon there is one colour only, and that is brick-red, burning. After sunset, the blue dusk, and later the stars. The sky is the garden of Tourmaline.

To describe the town, I must begin with the sun. The sun is close here. If you look at Tourmaline, shade your eyes. It is a town of corrugated iron, and in the heat the corrugations shimmer and twine, strangely immaterial. This is hard to watch, and the glare of the stony ground is cruel.

The road ends here. There is a broken fence to show it, its posts leaning, its barbed wire trailing to the ground. Facing this, the Tourmaline war memorial, a modest obelisk, convenient for dogs and the weary. Some sons of Tourmaline, it seems, patronized the empire in the days of the Boer War, but not much is remembered. To the right is Tom Spring’s store, the white paint flaking from its iron and the purple paint from its ancient advertisement for Bushell’s tea. In the window, shaded by a rough veranda, tinned food, soap, cutlery and boots cradle the immemorial cat of T. & M. Spring.

On the left is Kestrel’s Tourmaline Hotel, of stone and rough plaster, once whitewashed, but now reddened with dust. The roofing iron is also red, and advertises a brand of beer no longer brewed. A veranda shades the bare dirt on three sides. In this hot metallic shade Kestrel’s dog wakes and yawns, and sleeps again. The windows are closed, and painted inside. It is dim in there.

Following the raw red streak of the road are the houses of Tourmaline: uniform, dilapidated, stained with the red dust. There are not many. At last, and apart, is a cube of stone, marked by a wooden sign as the police station. And behind it rises a fortress, a squat square tower open to the sky. This is my tower and prison; for I am the Law of Tourmaline.

On two stony hills to the north of the town stand the toppling masts of the mine and the hulk of the abandoned church. The church is of tender brown and rose stone. Beside it, an oleander impossibly persists in flowering. Planks are falling from the wooden bell tower, but the bell is there still; and in dust-storms and on nights of high wind its irregular tolling sweeps away over Tourmaline to the south.

From there you command the whole town: the rust-red roofs, the skeletal obelisks of headless windmills, the sudden green of Rock’s forlorn garden. That is all there is of Tourmaline.

A man called Hart found gold here, many years ago. Others came. The gold was sufficient, it seems, and there was water in those days. I can remember the water. I can remember rain in Tourmaline. I am not young.

It is not a ghost town. It simply lies in a coma. This may never end.

On the day he came, the diviner, we had a death in Tourmaline. But it was not one of importance. Billy Bogada, in the native camp, was noticed by his nephews, when they rolled out at daybreak, to have departed. The women mourned a little, out of courtesy, and the nephews went to Tom Spring for a packing-case the size of the deceased. I watched them, later in the day, carry him down the road to the cemetery; their skins shining in the glare of the stony ground, the box on their faded blue cotton shoulders. SPRING—it said. PERISHABLE.

Charlie Yandana sang, squatting on the ground outside my door, in the narrow shade of the dead pepper tree. He was young, and not bereaved, but he liked to sing. It was a hymn, perhaps.

His voice, young and flippant, made me desolate. I had had my morning rendezvous with the world, my walk to the war memorial, and so come to the time of day when I doubt the reality of myself. Those names give me a name. But when I am quiet and alone, and have turned on the wireless (as on every morning for—ah, too many years) and have spoken, and have listened, and as on every morning since these terrible times began have heard no answer—when I am quiet and alone I cannot believe in it. Who gave me this name? And beside the name, what is there? An unnamed and naming ghost, perhaps, formless, but forming for some obscure purpose of its own a room of pale stone, ledges heaped with red dust, a shelf of tattered books, a cupboard, a safe. Then detail derides the egoism. What use has this mind for the rusty handcuffs hung on the doorframe, the map of Western Australia, the legs of Charlie Yandana sweating in the sun? The house I haunt is furnished and inhabited. A terrible loneliness is touched by the young voice.

So I resented Charlie Yandana. But I did not speak to him. Silence is a habit as enslaving as the most delicate vice, and as time goes on to talk (to talk, that is, to anything but the waiting, perhaps, but forever unanswering wireless) becomes embarrassing, as if, shaving, one should address some remark to the mirror and be overheard. I find that there is no speech that is not soliloquy. And yet, always, I sense an audience.

When the singing stopped, the silence reached around us. Morning and noon passed with variations of shadow, slight mutations of light. The blotches on my hands made me think of age. What enormous and desolate landscapes are opened by the voice of a lone crow.

There is much I must invent, much I have not seen. Guesses, hints, like pockets of dust in the crevices of conversation. And Tourmaline will not believe me.

But (dear God) what is Tourmaline, and where? I am alone. I write my testament for myself to read. I will prove to myself there has been life on this planet.

The cells are unroofed, the bars are gone. Records of intriguing crimes and acts of justice blow in the yard. In other places, it is believed that Tourmaline is dead.

There is no law in Tourmaline: this is known there. The gaol abandoned and crumbling, the gaoler dead. So all must assume.

Yet I live on, prisoner of my ruined tower; my keys turned on myself now all the locks are gone.

The Law of Tourmaline. Guessing, inventing. Ghost of a house furnished and inhabited, tormented by the persistence of the living.

On the long bar of Kestrel’s hotel (that day and every day, you must imagine) were three fly-traps. And the prisoners climbed and fell back continually with a soft, intermittent, sickening fizz. Glasses and elbows and stains of liquor surrounded them. The window-panes were painted over, the air was close, but cooler; the smell of sweat was overlaid with the clean and bitter tang of dust. Perhaps a sharper scent was there, too, from the leaves of myall baking in the sun.

A road of daylight led from the open door to the cash-register, striking deep jewel-tones from liqueurs that will never be drunk in Tourmaline. It struck, also, a gold bangle on the wrist of Deborah, in which the sombre green of the walls merged with the tawny glimmer of her half-caste skin.

It rose on Deborah herself, very tall, very straight; her back uncompromising and austere, her calm hands folded. That tallness had entered into her character, making her remote; almost, at times (that aloofness partly obscuring her), invisible. But she was timid, too; the profound darkness of her eyes unwilling to be looked into. Imagine her there.

Unlistening, wrapped in her clouds of exile; absorbed in her bangle, in which the room had intruded a confused and gentler impression of itself.

While Kestrel, a thin black line in the bangle, leaned over the bar and talked to Rock; the black forelock overhanging his black Celt’s brow, and his face suggesting experience of every bitterness the world had to offer. And yet he was not old (at thirty-five, alas), not ugly, not acquainted with life beyond Tourmaline. The bitterness lay not in the lines of his face (which was smooth, almost a mask) but in the thin, bent, vulnerable lips; and there was a little, more than a little, in the soft voice. And yet, at least until Deborah came to distract him from drink, there was something altogether conflicting to be surprised at times in his eyes. Imagine him there.

And (Rock speaking) looking round, perhaps, at her. And she then, aware of him, of course, in her bangle, lifting her head to meet his eyes. But never smiling, neither one. It was always and only that: the encounter of eyes staring as through windows, and the whole room filled with despair.

A strange love indeed. Yet they loved—bitterly.

Once he said, interrupting Rock: ‘What are you dreaming about?’

And Deborah, her eyes down on her bangle again, murmured: ‘When will the truck come?’

And so, a communication made. Incapable of conversation, both of them, except with others. But all day and night they would be throwing words at one another, words meaning all one thing. Look, I am here, I have not gone from you, not yet.