Moving among Strangers begins with the mother’s painful death and the daughter’s breakdown. At the same time, a thread from this labyrinth of grief appears when Gabrielle writes to her mother’s old friend Randolph Stow, to tell him of Joan’s illness and then of her death. He answers kindly, with some anecdotes about the past he shared with Joan when they were growing up in Western Australia. Carey realises that Stow, whom she has never met, ‘knew more about my mother, and perhaps my family, than I did’, and continues to correspond with him about the family over the following year. Stow’s own death, in May 2010, becomes the occasion for focusing her grief on the task of speaking with the dead, and produces the stories told in Moving among Strangers. She describes it as ‘a pilgrimage story tracing my search to understand the visionary yet elusive Australian poet and novelist, Randolph Stow’, which is ‘also a story about families, about who gets to tell the family story and who owns the narrative’.

The ‘also’ signals the conundrum presented by this book: what kind of a creature is it? It is both a personal memoir and a kind of literary appreciation. Stow is a major presence in the book, through the quotations from his letters, poems, and novels. Yet, while his letters provide Carey with vital information about her mother, nothing new is revealed about the life of this notoriously private and reticent writer. Carey’s comments on Stow’s work are as random as her insights into his life. She does not offer readings of the novels and poetry but, rather, quotes passages from them, and from his essays, especially negative comments about Australia, which may or may not explain his choice to spend the better part of his life in England. Stow’s role in this book is ambiguous. By contrast, for Fiona Capp, in her reader’s memoir about Judith Wright, My Blood’s Country (2010), the poet is both the inspiration and the object of the journeys which Capp undertakes, searching for ‘the wellsprings of Wright’s art and activism in the landscapes she loved’. For Carey, in Moving among Strangers, Stow may be the inspiration, but he is not the object of her search, her pilgrimage. That object is her mother’s story, and her father’s.

The link between Stow and Carey’s parents is that they all grew up among the old land-owning families of Western Australia, a fact on which Carey hangs some strained parallels. Stow’s clan is well known as the basis of his best-known and -loved book set in and around Geraldton, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965). The Careys had properties in the same region, and Gabrielle learns that her father was expected to take on the family property, as he did for a time, but eventually deserted for a life of the mind as an academic. This she sees as a parallel with Stow’s expatriate life, as well as an explanation for Alex Carey’s conflicted relationship with his family. Her mother, born Joan Ferguson, belonged to a wine-growing family at Houghton, near Perth, where ‘Mick’ Stow used to visit as a schoolboy. He and Joan (who was some years older) wrote to each other while she was nursing in England in the 1940s and 1950s, letters he described as giving him ‘a window on the world’ of theatre and ballet in London. This suggests to Carey that ‘there was at least one person who realised that Stow was a special case’. Stow’s letters, and the responses of readers to her article ‘My Mother and Mick’, reveal more information about her mother’s youth and her parents’ on-again off-again married life; but the information suggests more questions than answers about that still-enigmatic woman.

In this way Carey ‘gets to tell the family story’ and finds much to contradict the version which she had previously taken on from her older sister – of a neglectful father and husband, a betrayed wife, snobbish and materialistic families of origin. But ‘death comes in threes’, and with that sister’s death the year after Stow’s, Carey is left with another family mystery, signalled by her sister’s desire to be buried in England, where she was born. The book ends on a note of reconciliation, as the writer discovers a hitherto unknown passion for gardening, and lays down some elderflower wine in memory of both Stow and her wine-growing ancestors at Houghton.

Moving among Strangers works powerfully as a personal essay on the work of mourning, true to its two well-chosen epigraphs – Cavafy’s poem on speaking with the dead, ‘Voices’, and the resonant lines from Stow’s The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980): ‘We are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly. Why should we love these shadows, which will be gone at first light? It is because in exile we grieve for one another, it is because we remember the same home.’ Where the tone of Carey’s story jars is where she takes on a ‘young Mick’-like disdain for ‘the Australian character’ and his attraction to ‘a certain fineness’ of manner. The book is unsatisfactory as an appreciation of Stow, the visionary writer, in that it does not attempt to read his work in its own terms. It also repeats the stereotype of him as a sensitive soul misunderstood by a philistine Australia, whereas it was more likely his sexuality than his art that caused him to put such a distance between himself and his family and country – where, in fact, his extraordinary early work was highly valued.

I am grateful to Carey for sending me back to Stow’s poetry and fiction and for making me aware of the current revival of critical interest in his work. As well as the obituaries and some insightful memoirs in the special Westerly issue marking Stow’s passing (2010), there are excellent essays on Stow from Nick Jose on Visitants (2011) and Andrew Taylor on Tourmaline (2004), which draw, respectively, on post-colonial and ecological critical thinking, and from some younger writers, such as Kerry Leves and David Fonteyn (in the special Stow issue of JASAL 2010). Most exciting is John Kinsella’s edition of The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems (2012), which includes a generous introductory essay.