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Title: Visitants
Author: Randolph Stow
Narrator: Humphrey Bower
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 06-09-16
Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
I want to die. I do not want to be mad.... It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come and attacked the person who lived there.
After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a disturbing story to tell: strand by strand, the mystery of the officer's past is unravelled. But what of other visitants, like the unidentified flying object and the cargo cult it has inspired on the island?
Informed by Randolph Stow's experiences, Visitants is an astonishing original investigation of colonialism.
Members Reviews:
A Modern Australian Classic
A few modern novels contain pivotal scenes that have stopped me in my tracks. These scenes I must carry around, like rogue radioisotopes in the bloodstream. Randolph Stow's Visitants is one such novel.
Born in 1935 in Geraldton, Western Australia, Stow had produced three novels by the age of 23. Any young Australian deserves a dose of the fifth, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), suffused with love and memory from Stow's wartime childhood. Each should also be served his tart and rambunctious children's classic, Midnite (1967), which sends up Colonial Empire and Patrick White in equal merriment. These two are linear narratives in form, more so than Visitants, first published in 1979 but mainly drafted in the early `70s.
Stow was a Papua New Guinea patrol officer in 1959. In that year, a Trobriand Islands UFO incident was reported widely, but not to his isolated spot. His introductory note recalls that locals in his own sub-district described a similar phenomenon around the same time. A number of years passed before the incidents morphed into fiction. The wait was worthwhile, for Visitants is a finer artifice than To the Islands or Tourmaline, the novels that sprang from Stow's earlier bush sojourn in the far north of Western Australia. Visitants is its own satisfyingly complete neighbourhood, like no other place before or since. Well, maybe that's not 100 per cent true, given the allusions to (among other things) William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Stow comes out at least equal on points with Golding. He was more the one who could draw on tangible life experience of remote tropical islands. He dares and succeeds with an ambitious structure for his short novel. The structure is an overlapping series of "witness statements" to a 1959 PNG "inquiry" into violent events of cargo-cult and tribal intrigue in and around Kailuana Island, home for the crusty old planter MacDonnell. Another white witness is Mr Dalwood, a greenhorn patrol officer who shares Stow's memories of Perth WA and its riverside university. Also testifying are MacDonnell's attractive young housemaid Saliba, Osana the sub-district government interpreter, and Benoni the tribal heir-apparent of Kailuana.
The main object of testimony is Alistair Cawdor, a patrol officer sent "troppo" by his wife's elopement. "It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there," he says.