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y separately published work icon Tourmaline single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1963... 1963 Tourmaline
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Once prosperous, the town of Tourmaline in outback Western Australia is dying. The mines are drying up and the land is riddled by drought. Those townspeople left have little to do but wile away the hours with drink.

'Salvation of sorts arrives in the form of Michael Random, a mysterious water diviner who emerges from the desert. As the town's reluctant messiah Random begins to spread the word of Christ. Desperate for a reprieve, many of the locals are drawn to his teachings, but a stubborn few remain sceptical of their new leader.

'A post-apocalyptic parable, Tourmaline is Randolph Stow's most allusive and controversial novel. It remains a landmark in Australian literature more than half a century after its first publication.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Text Classics).

Notes

  • Epigraph: O gens de peu de poids dans la memoire de ces lieux ... St.- John Perse: ANABASE
  • Dedication: For M.C.S.
  • Author's note: The action of this novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future. A first draft of Chapter 1 was published in Meanjin, No. 85 (1961).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,      :       MacDonald ,       1963 .
      image of person or book cover 6204212344577895856.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 224p.
    • Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,      :       Ringwood, Ringwood - Croydon - Kilsyth area, Melbourne - East, Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin ,       1965 .
      Extent: 174p.
      Note/s:
      • 'An Australian Penguin Book'
      • Printed in Australia
      Series: Australian Penguin Books Penguin (publisher), series - publisher Number in series: AU15
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,      :       Taplinger Publishing ,       1983 .
      Alternative title: Tourmaline : A Novel
      Extent: 221p.
      ISBN: 9780800877972, 0800877977
    • Port Melbourne, South Melbourne - Port Melbourne area, Melbourne - Inner South, Melbourne, Victoria,: London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,      :       Minerva ,       1991 .
      Extent: 221p.
      ISBN: 074939188X (pbk)
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Text Publishing , 2015 .
      image of person or book cover 3145278875584177096.jpeg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Note/s:
      • Introduction by Gabrielle Carey.
      ISBN: 9781925240306
      Series: y separately published work icon Text Classics Text Publishing (publisher), Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2012- Z1851461 2012 series - publisher novel 'Great books by great Australian storytellers.' (Text website.)
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Other Formats

  • Also sound recording.
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Related Works

Tourmaline (from Tourmaline) Randolph Stow , 1961 extract novel (Tourmaline)
— Appears in: Meanjin Quarterly , July vol. 20 no. 2 1961; (p. 133-138)
y separately published work icon Tourmaline Richard Fotheringham (composer), 1970-1979 (Manuscript version)x400646 Z853676 1970-1979 single work musical theatre
Tourmaline Dickon Oxenburgh , Andrew Ross , 1993 single work drama
Tourmaline i "When I was young and tight of belt", Randolph Stow , 2011 single work poetry
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November no. 9 2011; (p. 153)
VIEW ALL RELATED WORKS (4)

Works about this Work

Ngaangk : Those Sunstruck Miles Catherine Noske , 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)
On the Track to Tourmaline Samuel J. Cox , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 67 no. 2 2022; (p. 109-118) Westerly , August vol. 69 no. 1 2024; (p. 58-75) 'Ever since reading Randolph Stow's Tourmaline nearly five years ago, it has held a strange power over me. It might not have been the most highly regarded or publicly well received of Stow's novels within his lifetime, but within the writing community there appears to be quiet and growing recognition that it might be his most resistantly alluring. Bernadette Brennan's 2004 essay 'Words of Water', which describes Tourmaline as deeply poetic' yet 'silent' (144), gestured towards this renewal of interest '  in the novel over the last two decades. A mentor once suggested to me that the prose-poem of a first chapter might be the best opening to an Australian novel ever, and whenever I meet someone who has read Tourmaline, it always feels like something of a shared secret.'

 (Introduction)
'O People of Little Weight in the Memory of These Places!' : Desert Narration in Tourmaline Martin Leer , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Randolph Stow : Critical Essays 2021;
Tourmaline as Anti-Anabase Philip Mead , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Randolph Stow : Critical Essays 2021;
Groundwater as Hyperobject Deborah Wardle , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Mosaic , June vol. 52 no. 2 2019; (p. 1-16)

'The essay explores ideas about groundwater in terms of its characteristics as a hyperobject. Key hydrogeology concepts and the conflicts and dilemmas in uses and abuses of groundwater in Australia underpin a search for the metaphorical potency of groundwater. Literature uncovers how allegorical tones of groundwater may be expressed.' (Publication abstract)
Remembering Stow Thomas Shapcott , 2002-2003 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December-January no. 247 2002-2003; (p. 64)
— Review of To the Islands Randolph Stow , 1958 single work novel ; Tourmaline Randolph Stow , 1963 single work novel
[Review] Tourmaline James Wells-Green , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , March no. 13 2003;
— Review of Tourmaline Randolph Stow , 1963 single work novel
Allusive but Timely Elizabeth Perkins , 2002 single work review
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , Spring vol. 21 no. 4 2002; (p. 57-58)
— Review of Tourmaline Randolph Stow , 1963 single work novel ; To the Islands Randolph Stow , 1958 single work novel
Special Notices Barry Pree , 1963 single work review
— Appears in: The London Magazine , June vol. 3 no. 3 1963; (p. 87-88)
— Review of Tourmaline Randolph Stow , 1963 single work novel
A Novel Chronicle D. R. Burns , 1964 single work review
— Appears in: Prospect , vol. 7 no. 1 1964; (p. 27-29)
— Review of The Tilted Cross Hal Porter , 1961 single work novel ; The Well Dressed Explorer Thea Astley , 1962 single work novel ; The Cupboard Under the Stairs George Turner , 1962 single work novel ; Tourmaline Randolph Stow , 1963 single work novel ; The Hollow Woodheap David Forrest , 1962 single work novel
Paradoxes of Non- Existence : Questions of Time, Metaphor and the Materialities of Cultural Traditions in Wilson Harris's Discussions of Australian Literary Texts Brigitta Olubas , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Cultural History , no. 21 2002; (p. 81-88, notes 122) Olubas examines the way in which Caribbean writer Wilson Harris's 'account of national traditions and of the national and cultural provenances and imaginitive inheritances of particular writers directs attention ... toward broader, unexpected imaginitive, aesthetic and representational traditions, explicitly colonial, often violent, which yet enhance our readings of the complex high points of national literary traditions and figures ... [and] presents us with other ways to take up the relations between texts, within as well as across (national) cultural traditions' (p. 88).
Messiahs and Millennia in Randolph Stow's Novels Robyn Wallace , 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)
'Just Enough Religion to Make Us Hate': The Case of Tourmaline and Oyster Richard Scott Carr , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 18 no. 1 2004; (p. 9-15) Carr asserts that 'Stow and Hospital use fiction to explore the devestation wrought on a community whose long-suppressed spiritual desires find their outlet in the perverse and destructive.' He contends that 'the residents of Tourmaline and Outer Maroo, in refusing to address their alienation from their environment and themselves, ensure the disaster that closes both novels.'
Words of Water : Reading Otherness in Tourmaline and Oyster Bernadette Brennan , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 3 no. 2004; (p. 143-157)
Literature in the Arid Zone Tom Lynch , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007; (p. 70-92) This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggests fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (90)
Last amended 3 Jul 2015 13:30:19
Subjects:
Settings:
  • Western Australia,
  • Bush,
  • Australian Outback, Central Australia,
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