Stow himself may have visited the site in Newtown. At one point he stayed at St Paul’s College, University of Sydney, in the adjoining suburb of Camperdown; this was when he was studying anthropology and linguistics. Stow’s note reflects an interest in history typical of his writings, and illustrates his exactitude. His Donnithorne piece arose from his current pre-occupations. He wrote to me in 1973:

I think Miss D. will become more famous after the Fires of London and Mary Thomas have toured the world with Peter Maxwell Davies’ and my new music-theatre work, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot which will have its premiere at the next Adelaide Festival. She already seems to have captured the imagination of the music journalists, to judge from the clippings which keep arriving here. In the programme note I’ve outlined as much as one knows about her, quoting extensively from the contemporaries quoted by J. S. Ryan, with due acknowledgment to him and ALS.

Stow was clearly fascinated by Miss Havisham. ‘A point of interest’, he added in the same letter: ‘while wandering about Rochester Cathedral one day my eye was caught by a memorial tablet to someone who lived at Satis House [Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations]. Dickens doesn’t seem to have invented very much of that character.’ Stow’s comments reveal a deep interest in Dickens.

At the time of this correspondence, Stow responded (19 December 1973) to my suggestion about including a volume on his work in the UQP Australian Authors series, for which I was general editor:

About the reader/anthology of my work: this is being discussed at the moment between my agent and Penguin, who have shown interest but not committed themselves. As they have four volumes of mine still in print, they are bound to have some reservations. As regards the University of Queensland Press, I can only say there is a possibility of our offering the hard-cover rights of such a selection to you. But Penguin have their ties with Longmans, and I have mine with other London publishers … I certainly couldn’t agree to the reprinting of any work earlier than To the Islands, which I intend to revise somewhat if Penguin give me the opportunity.

A Stow volume, edited by Tony Hassall, was eventually included in the series in 1990; this contained the complete novel Visitants, plus a selection of verse and prose.

In the same letter, Stow recalled meeting me some years earlier at Leeds University: ‘I tend to fight shy of personal appearances, and have never done much more than dip a toe in the waters of academic life now and again, as I was doing when we met at Leeds some years ago.’

East Bergholt is a village in the south of Suffolk, just north of the Essex border, in East Anglia. Though tiny, East Bergholt is one of the largest villages in the Stour Valley. The nearest railway station is a small one at Manningtree, two miles away. Stow arranged for a neighbour to pick me up by car; he did not have one himself. He often walked around the village, which did not cover a large area. He took me first to see the church of St Mary the Virgin, built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In the churchyard, Stow pointed out some graves of forebears of his friend John Constable (a painter himself, great-great-grandson of the famous one). Some of Stow’s own ancestors were buried at the nearby town of Hadleigh. I felt that the long span of history represented by the East Bergholt church and grave-yard was important to Stow, an expatriate moving from a new to an old world. Belonging to a landscape and to a society is a central theme in his novels.

Stow, on both sides of his family, was a fifth-generation Australian. His Stow forebears on the male side came from Hadleigh, and the Sewell’s; on the female side, from nearby Maplestead Hall, in adjoining Essex. In East Bergholt, I sensed increasingly on my visit that day, Stow was on ‘home ground’, conscious, and quietly proud, of a relation to the district and its countryside. In an interview in 1981, he commented that although Suffolk had not become his ‘spiritual home’ (he was not born there), he did ‘feel very comfortable in Suffolk – in East Anglia generally ... It’s mainly that I just like the place, I think. I wouldn’t have stayed unless I felt that it had something that appeals to me. I don’t stay here for reasons of family piety, but there may be some trace of atavism in my response to the landscape, and to the dialect, which I am very fond of – I love the East Anglian voice.’

After our tour of the churchyard, Stow took me to the local pub for lunch. He has expressed affection for such places in interviews, and they remained an important part of his life. They seemed attractive to him for their undemanding but genuine sociability, perhaps providing distraction from a disposition towards solitariness. Stow was obviously known at the pub we visited, though there were no demonstrative greetings. (He did some part-time work there.) As we sat chatting, I recalled the value he placed, in his work, on silence; he even regarded poetry as ‘a counterfeit silence’. I did not find his manner inhibiting or feel compelled to fill in the gaps occurring naturally in our desultory but companionable conversation.

Stow next took me to a nearby historic site, the setting of Constable’s classic painting The Hay Wain, which depicts a wagon crossing the Stour River dividing Suffolk and Essex. An old cottage, ‘Willy Lot’s cottage’, still stood, recognisably, on one bank. The scene is said to look much the same as it did when Constable painted it in 1821: a tranquil picture of what would have seemed familiar, unchanging country life, and combining the transitory wain and the enduring stream: a picture of the traditional life and landscape of the old world. I do not recall Stow dwelling on the painting’s significance for him, but he was evidently deeply attached to it and the setting; even proud that the latter was ‘just down the road’ from his home.

Landscape is a dominant feature in Stow’s novels. Its presentation is remarkable for the way he captures it vividly yet realistically, while investing it with a larger significance. Stow’s complex sense of the artist’s approach to landscape is suggested in an early article (‘Raw Material’): ‘There is a feeling of Australia in the landscapes of Drysdale and Nolan, but essentially they are mindscapes of the artist …’

My visit in 1975 occurred midway through Stow’s long silence between A Counterfeit Silence (1969) and Visitants (1979). As I learned later, Stow felt that before he could finish Visitants he had to complete its sequel, The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980), which was, in his own words, ‘the optimistic side of the very black story of Cawdor [in Visitants]’. Stow regarded the time between the two novels as ‘a journey back from alienation, of the finding of a home’. The Girl Green as Elderflower, set in twentieth-century Suffolk, draws on its twelfth-century legends and also on Stow’s love of the locale and its history. He has spoken in interviews of the attraction of living in Essex and Suffolk, next door to one another as they are, as in the Constable painting, both of them ‘ancestral’ places. On the evening of my visit, I recall Stow painting a glowing picture of London as it had looked for a recent royal occasion, thereby suggesting that he felt a wider sense of kinship with his adopted country.

After visiting the Constable setting, Stow and I walked back to his cottage via an earlier residence of his. He had moved to higher ground because it was so cold in winter, he told me. Foxes inhabited the area, a reminder that this civilised place still had a wild side, albeit different from the empty, violent settings of his Australian novels. This earlier residence, where Stow lived for five years, was called Fishpond Cottage. Next to Fishpond Wood, it became Clare’s rented cottage in The Girl Green as Elderflower.

Before I returned to London that evening by train, Stow cooked a meal and we chatted about art and literature. He mentioned Henry Kingsley’s forgotten work, The Boy in Grey (1871), set in Australia, and spoke of his preference for the much longer and little-read version of Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874). We discussed Australian landscape art, discovering a common interest in the emigrant William Glover. I had seen some of Glover’s paintings in Tasmanian collections. He was one of the first to capture aspects of a distinctive Australian landscape, relatively free of the distortions of British visual habits and expectations. Stow was particularly fond of Glover’s My Harvest Home, a scene of carting hay in northern Tasmania. Bernard Smith has written of the painting:

In My Harvest Home the old blends with the new. A bountiful harvest has sprung from what was an antipodeans wilderness. The eucalypt forest glows in the mellow light of Claude. It is a vision of a pioneer’s paradise. But the sense of plenitude and physical well-being which the painting figures forth is no pictorial device, for it expressed the living experience of the Glover family as Australian farmers. Northern Tasmania became a granary for the mainland in the early 1830s and played an important part in the prosperity of the island.

Long after my visit, I sent Stow a photograph of this painting and he wrote to thank me: ‘It came when I was very busy with an exhibition [on Terra Australis Incognita] of old maps etc, and dashing madly between here, London, Holland and Denmark. I got a young photographer friend … to do a big blow-up in black and white of “My Harvest Home” … and used it as a coda to the story of the Southland in myth and map. A security Guard at the Aarhus Town Hall, where the exhibition was held (it included very valuable signed maps and books from the Royal Library, Copenhagen) took me aside to say that he was crazy about the picture ... The light, he said – magnificent’ (9 December 1978).

Stow wrote to thank me for a review I had sent him of the Bernard Smith history: ‘Glad to see Glover’s stock is rising. I’ve framed the reproduction of “My Harvest Home” from the catalogue you sent me. I wish though that I’d reserved for myself a copy of the big black-and-white blow-up …’ (11 December 1978).

The Patrick White Award granted to Stow in 1979 enabled him to buy a house in Harwich in Essex. He wrote on 18 March 1981:

I have been able to buy a little old house by the water in what the Observer recently called ‘the sacred streets’ of Old Harwich, which I’ve always fancied. It reminds me of Dickens’ description of the City, particularly of the difficult approaches to Mrs Todgers’ [Martin Chuzzlewit] boarding house, but with the added attraction of being girt on three sides by sea. There’s always something to look at, as the ships come and go … All in all I am very pleased with things. The company in the pubs is largely nautical, and quite entertaining …

Nevertheless, he was reminded of places far away, some close to Western Australia, where he grew up and about which he wrote: ‘The chap that told me that Old Harwich has 40 men to one woman was probably exaggerating, but it does remind me bit of places like Darwin and Port Moresby and Fairbanks, Alaska.’ If one includes the United Kingdom, with its historic layers, and the Trobriand islands, it is hard to think of any other Australian expatriate novelist who has written so memorably about such a range of places and cultures, covering East and West. Appropriately, Harwich, while part of Essex and within view of Suffolk, is also an international gateway, with an historic link via the Hook of Holland, to European colonising nations that influenced the regional area from which Stow himself derives. Other Australian expatriates are usually based in a metropolis, writing about Europe and sometimes Australia. Perhaps Stow was not an expatriate – an ambiguous term – in the usual sense.

Stow’s final novel, The Suburbs of Hell (1984), is set in ‘Tornwich’ (based on Harwich), which, as Tony Hassall has observed, is both ‘intensely and recognizably local and a microcosm of the larger world’ – as with all Stow’s settings. In the novel Stow uses an historical sweep of Harwich’s urban history, reaching back to the Middle Ages, with accompanying literary dimensions extending through Beowulf to Chaucer, Elizabethan and Jacobean writing to the modern murder mystery genre.

Randolph Stow was unusually kind in inviting me to visit him. My recollections are shaped by hindsight and by the vagaries of memory. Nevertheless, the outlines stand out with vivid clarity. I sensed his deep attachment to Suffolk, to its history and culture. I met him during the long and complex process of his attachment to East Anglia and of his turning the place into a new home.

Randolph Stow died in Essex on 29 May, aged seventy-four. I am grateful to him for permission to publish the letters cited here, for correcting errors of fact and for adding a couple of observations about his work. L.H.

Four of Randolph Stow’s novels are in print with the University of Queensland Press: To the Islands (1958, revised edition in 1982), Tourmaline (1963), Visitants (1979) and The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980). References in the text to Tony (A.J.) Hassall are to his two books, Randolph Stow: Visitants, Episodes from Other Novels, Poems, Stories, Interviews and Essays (ed. Hassall, 1990) and Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow, both published by UQP (the latter is now out of print). The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) and Midnite (1967) are in print with Penguin Australia.