Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey

considered him to be a kind of prophet. Former director of the Brisbane Powerhouse Museum, Andrew Ross, who’d written and produced stage versions of Tourmaline and The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, believed that Stow’s insights into the Australian psyche were as prescient as ever. In an online outpouring after Stow’s death, the poet John Kinsella said that Stow was one of Australia’s greatest writers, and poet Bob Adamson commented that A Counterfeit Silence remained ‘one of the most important and powerful books of poetry written by an Australian ’ . And in an interview with the magazine Indigo , Tim Winton said, ‘I still revere Stow as probably my favourite Australian writer,’ and paid homage to Stow’s ‘sacred apprehension of matter, of country’.
    *
    That afternoon I sat at my desk trying to make sense of the notes I’d gathered in Western Australia.
    â€˜Mum, are you doing Stow stuff again?’ my son called.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because he’s ruined your saucepan.’
    I had left milk on to heat for my coffee and then forgotten all about it. This was the love one has as a child, when you are in awe of that impossibly out-of-reach older other, the man or woman who seems to be the ideal you of the future. The kind of love that the young Rob, in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea has for his older cousin Rick, who is away at war:
    â€˜If I think to him,’ the boy said, ‘he might hear me thinking.’
    â€˜Yes, think to him,’ Margaret Coram said. ‘That’s what all the rest of us are doing. And perhaps, when you thought you saw him –’
    She had enough of the Celt in her not to laugh at what she was saying. And the boy, who was all Celt, believed utterly.
    â€˜I know,’ he said, grinning now, gap-toothed and scab-faced. ‘I know. He was thinking back.’
    I was going to do the same. I would think to Randolph Stow and hope that he would think back.
    *
    For weeks after the publication of ‘My Mother and Mick’ the phone calls, messages and letters continued from people who had something to say about Randolph Stow – the woman who sat next to him in primary school, sharing one of the old double wooden desks; another who’d met him on a bus and never forgotten the encounter with this strange, intense young man: ‘Remember my name,’ he told her as he alighted the Guildford bus, ‘I’m going to be a world-famous writer.’
    The odd thing about this business that Atwood also calls ‘negotiating with the dead’ is that while you are digging away with your spade at a particular grave, you inevitably hit upon the bones of other, unexpected individuals. After reading ‘My Mother and Mick’, an elderly man from rural South Australia wrote to offer one very significant spelling mistake.
    Dear Doctor Carey,
    I was interested to read the account of your mother’s friendship with Randolph Stow. Of particular interest was Stow’s recollection that your mother’s favourite ballerina had been Elaine Tyfield. I feel that most likely he was referring to Elaine Fifield.
    I went back to Stow’s card to check. Was this Stow’s misspelling or perhaps I read his old-fashioned hand-written ‘F’ as a ‘T’? (As James Joyce says, when it comes to language, there are many opportunities for ‘missed understandings’.)
    Elaine Tyfield was indeed no one – but Elaine Fifield, it now turned out, was a legend. Born in Homebush, Fifield grew up in a Seventh Day Adventist family who were opposed to her love of dancing. Thanks to a doctor who advised that dance lessons would toughen her up, at fourteen Elaine won a Royal Academy of Dancing scholarship to study in London. Less than a year later she was taken into the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet and was soon performing major roles. Critics compared her to Margot Fonteyn and Pavlova. ‘Elaine