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Tourmaline

Tourmaline: Text Classics

Text Classics

Randolph Stow

Introduction by Gabrielle Carey

There is no stretch of land on earth more ancient than this. And so it is blunt and red and barren, littered with the fragments of broken mountains, flat, waterless.

Tourmaline, in outback Western Australia, is dying: its mines lie abandoned and drought has taken hold. When the enigmatic diviner Michael Random emerges from the desert, desperate townspeople see him as a messiah. Random begins to spread the word of God—and to promise them water, that most precious resource. Both a complex spiritual parable and an enduring apocalyptic vision, Tourmaline is Randolph Stow’s most controversial novel.

Read a feature in the Australian on Stows legacy by Nicolas Rothwell.
Review on Whispering Gums blog by Emma Gibson

Randolph Stow
About the Author

Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student.

While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature...

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Extent:
288pp
Format:
Paperback
Text publication date:
26 August 2015
First published:
1963
Region:
WA
ISBN:
9781925240306
AU Price:
$14.95
NZ Price:
$17.99
Australian
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Praise for Randolph Stow
andTourmaline

‘Intense and extraordinary.’

‘Brilliantly evocative…disturbing.’

‘Atmospheric…There is no denying its power.’

‘It is a rare pleasure for those of us who are already fans to have these works at our disposal…[Stow was] the most talented and celebrated Australian author of the post-White generation.’

‘It should be taken as no commentary on contemporary Oz Lit that I choose Text’s fistful of Randolph Stow reissues for my local favourite(s) during 2015. Their appearance reminds us that a gentle, wise, wounded, and immensely talented poet in prose once lived among us.‘

Other editions ofTourmaline
  • Tourmaline
    ebook
    ISBN: 9781922253118
    26 August 2015
    Buy ebook