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'To the Islands concerns the ordeal of Stephen Heriot, an elderly, careworn, and disillusioned Anglican missionary who abandons his mission when he mistakenly believes he has accidentally killed one of his Aboriginal charges in a not entirely unprovoked confrontation. Heriot flees into the desert not to escape justice but to embrace its desolate beauty and its elemental purity as the one objective reality and the one certainty left available to him.
Heriot's flight and his embrace of the desert may be seen as his attempt, as a European Australian, to immerse himself in the landscape, to make himself one with the land. At this realistic level, the novel enacts the ontological and existential dilemma that confronts most — if not all — European Australians, the dilemma that Professor Hassall [in his introduction to the 2002 UQP Australian Authors version] defines as the continuing quest for psychic integration, for reconciliation with indigenous Australians, and with the land itself.'
Wells-Green, James. [Untitled Review.] JAS Review of Books 15 (May 2003)
Adaptations
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form
y
To the Islands : A Play for Broadcasting
(Manuscript version)x401241
Z980707
single work
radio play
Reading Australia
This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.
Notes
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Dedication: To Sally Gare and Bill Jamison with admiration
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Epigraph: My cell 'tis, lady, where instead of masks, Music, tilts, tourneys and such courtlike shows, The hollow murmur of the checkless winds Shall groan again; while the uinquiet sea Shakes the whole rock with foamy battery. There usherless the air comes in and out: The rheumy vault will force your eyes to weep, Whilst you behold true desolation. A rocky barrenness shall pierce your eyes, Where all at once one reaches where he stands, With brows the roof, both walls with both his hands. Marston: The Malcontent
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Author's note: This is not, by intention, a realistic novel; no white character, therefore, and no major incident in the plot, is drawn from life. ... R. S.
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Study guides available.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Braille.
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Ngaangk : Those Sunstruck Miles
2024
single work
essay
— Appears in: Westerly , August vol. 69 no. 1 2024; (p. 79-98) 'I cannot but start with the looming scale of the sun - the half-pictures or contained slice we see in most drawings. Even there, we are obedient to that generic voice, to well-worn wisdom : don't stare direct. The corner of yellow in a child's picture. It's excess and repetition in sunspots and flares on photographic film. The close detail of this Festival's logo, and the scope it implies. Scope and scopic : despite what we are told as children, we are finding ways to see the sun - as Stow did, again and again in his work, from the very beginning, his world viewed through sun-bright lids. Sun in all its power, ripe gold and life miraculous, sun a wild yellow vision. Divine heat and terror, the cognisance of that sun's cataclysm...(Act One 18)' (Introduction) -
Autobiography of a Sickness
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 68 no. 1 2023; (p. 128-139) 'A disclosure: before being asked to do this lecture, I had never read a word of Stow. When I was nineteen, I left Western Australia to study in Singapore. When I graduated, I stayed. If leaving was an intentional turning away from a cultural lineage, or canon, then staying was a decisive choice towards another. Reading, after all, is political—more political, perhaps, than writing itself. Later, when I did return, and began to write, it was the Queer Singaporean and Singapore-based writers and artists I had encountered who formed my creative ancestry and who I felt I might exist in conversation with, if I were to exist in this space at all. But any residence forms lineages, and in returning to live on this land—where I hold legal citizenship, enforced by the world's dependence on borders and the nation-state, and where I was born—authorial ancestries are free to entangle, be speculated over and perhaps even transformed.' (Introduction)
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The Regional Novel in Australia
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023; -
The Mid-century Australian Novel and the End of World History
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 236-253) -
Nation and Environment in the Twentieth Century Novel
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
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Remembering Stow
2002-2003
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December-January no. 247 2002-2003; (p. 64)
— Review of To the Islands 1958 single work novel ; Tourmaline 1963 single work novel -
[Review] To the Islands
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , May no. 15 2003;
— Review of To the Islands 1958 single work novel -
Allusive but Timely
2002
single work
review
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , Spring vol. 21 no. 4 2002; (p. 57-58)
— Review of Tourmaline 1963 single work novel ; To the Islands 1958 single work novel -
[Review] To the Islands
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: Fiction Focus : New Titles for Teenagers , vol. 17 no. 3 2003; (p. 67-68)
— Review of To the Islands 1958 single work novel -
Spiritual Journeys Hold Plenty of Intrigue
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 12 January 1992; (p. 19)
— Review of Corroboree 1984 single work novel ; Tourmaline 1963 single work novel ; To the Islands 1958 single work novel ; The Girl Green as Elderflower 1980 single work novel -
Messiahs and Millennia in Randolph Stow's Novels
1981
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Kunapipi , vol. 3 no. 2 1981; (p. 56-72)'The novels I shall concentrate on in discussing messiahs and millennia in Stow's work are To the Islands, Tourmaline, Visitants, and The Girl Green as Elderflower. Tourmaline and Visitants are the two which most clearly relate to millenarian themes. Tourmaline records the growth, and collapse, of a millenarian cult centred on the messianic or would-be messianic figure of the diviner Michael Random. Visitants is a structurally more complex exploration of three millenarian visions and their communal and personal repercussions, although the connotations of the title are not restricted to cargo or flying saucer cults.' (Publication abstract)
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Australian 'Everymans' : Post-Medieval Spiritual Adventurers
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture 2006; (p. 81-97) Margaret Rogerson demonstrates types of medievalism in Australian literature, through a discussion of the deployment of the 'everyman' figure. -
Remembering Victims and Perpetrators
1998
single work
criticism
— Appears in: UTS Review , May vol. 4 no. 1 1998; (p. 1-17) -
Randolph Stow's Tourmaline and To the Islands
1987
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The International Fiction Review , vol. 14 no. 2 1987; (p. 68-74) -
Vanishing Wunderkind
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 314 2009; (p. 29-31)
Awards
- 1959 winner ASAL Awards — ALS Gold Medal
- 1958 winner Miles Franklin Literary Award
- Western Australia,
- 1950s
