AustLit

'Born in 1935 to a family of early and successful Western Australian squattocracy (squatter aristocracy), the celebrated mid-century novelist Randolph Stow’s early life in rural Geraldton exposed him to the political contexts surrounding Australian pastoralism, particularly the dispossession and racist treatment of the Yamatji and Wajarri people of the central Gascoyne region and associated environmental destruction. This article reads two of Stow’s pastoral poems in light of these tensions, following the work of Stow’s Geraldton countryman John Kinsella’s understanding of settler Australian pastoral as inevitably fraught, for instead of a blank arcadia, even in retreat the landscape is always occupied (“Contrary Rhetoric” 136). The most influential voice in contemporary Australia (if not international) criticism of the pastoral, Kinsella argues that environmental violence is inextricable from violence done to the occupants of the land as functions of colonization, and the pastoral as it primarily operates in an Australian context occludes this violence. Kinsella writes that the “hierarchy of land ownership, a concept imported from Europe in particular, has meant that no nostalgia, no return to an Eden, is possible. These Edens are about dispossession and ownership by the few” (“Is There an Australian Pastoral” 348). Yet, is this necessarily other to the pastoral, which traces one of its many origin points to Virgil’s dispossession from his ancestral property at Mantua following the 42BC battle of Phillipi? How might an understanding of the pastoral as social form—complex, communal, and political—better help unpack the work of Stow and others? In this article, I take this question as my central concern, revisiting the poetry of Stow, which has largely rested in a critical lacunae since his death in Harwich, UK, in 2010. I am interested in teasing out how the pastoral is intrinsically linked to citizenship and community, or as William Empson writes, “the problems of one and the many, especially their social aspects” (21). This is the rusted pastoral of the Western Australian Wheatbelt Stow offers us, one that, through the questioning of human communities, is porous, allowing nature, history, and politics to filter through.' (Introduction)