Randolph Stow’s walk is the thing that practically everyone who knows him mentions when describing him. His friends and acquaintances sometimes differ about other of Randolph’s physical characteristics, but they all give the same picture of his walk. He covers the ground with long legged strides, head up, shoulder square, his eyes fixed in from of him, as if his mind had just sidled around the corner on a journey of his of its own. His novel, a Haunted Land, The Bystander, and To the Islands, and his poems could have only come from the kind of mind which often goes sidling off on a journey of its own. Randolph’s personality cannot of course be captured in a few revealing words, for he is at least as complex as any character in one of his own novels, and more complex than most of them. Either a as man or writer, Randolph cannot be ticketed, in accordance with some approved and easily recognizable formula. This makes him a little disconcerting to those people who like their writers to fit neatly into established pigeonholes. Some daring, or, more likely, bash, critics have attempted now and then to pin one or another of the conventional labels on him, but any literary label looks wrong on Randolph, even though, like every writer, he has been influenced by the work of other writers. Randolph will never be a mere echo of any other writer. The thing that stamps all his published work is not its similarity to anything anyone else has written, but its immense and imaginative originality.

What his ultimate achievement will be is only to be guessed, but it will be something of himself, not something borrowed or adapted. It is not surprising at all events that some of his admirers consider him to be, in the words of one of them, touched with the blighted hand of genius. Randolph’s, fine boned and delicately cast, is five feet ten inches tall, but his slender build makes him appear taller. (He weighs only nine stone, and this led a drunk in a country pub, a few years ago, to offer him a job as an investigator for international human rights.) His naturally brown curly hair is grey, and his skin fair. He has a fairly full mouth, and exceptionally bright blue eyes, which are often fixed in a somewhat puzzled expression. Randolph’s eyebrows are incongruously heavy, one of his friends called them stage Irishman brows’, and he tends to twist them when concentrating on a conversation. In a group, Randolph is apt to listen rather than talk, confining himself to an occasional comment, but with two or three friends, he talks well. He has a good sense of humour, and his remarks, although never the weighty pronouncements of the intellectual, are often penetrating. Like many sky people, he is a man of strong theories. He does not obtrude these, but if necessary, he will resolutely defend them. Randolph’s politics, like most other things about him, cannot readily labelled; when pressed to declare himself politically, he once said I am a human being.

Music, especially classical music and folk songs is among his major interests, and he has a fair collection of recordings. At some of his parties, if drunk enough, he extemporizes on the piano, often quite brilliantly; he is great at reading music, ad has a true ear and plays with feeling. He sometimes sings also in a voice which some people find agreeable, even though it is melodious. Randolph is most logically humble. Although his three novels and his verse had been highly praised by responsible critics, he decided in 1959 to abandon writing, and went to New Guinea, meaning to settle down, to a non-literary career; at that time, he was twenty-three. In New Guinea, his work as an assistant to the government Anthropologist, was mainly linguistic, and this interested him, because he has a gift for languages; he majored in French, which he reads fluently, at the University of Western Australia, and is hardly less fluent in Spanish. His health was poor in New Guinea, however, and he resigned his post after eleven months, and came back to the Australian mainland. He went to England in 1960, and stayed for nine months, living in Suffolk. Randolph did no writing in England, but while there agreed with his London publishers to make a new collection of his poems. The appearance of this volume, Outrider, with illustrations by Sidney Nolan, was delayed for several reasons, but it ultimately came out late in 1962.

Randolph came back to the house in 1961 to live in Western Australia and went back to the University of Western Australia to do post graduate work in English. Early in 1962, he returned to England as assistant lecturer in English, at the University of Leeds. While back in Perth, Randolph shared a flat in the suburb of Nedlands with a former college friend, Mike Thornett. Randolph enjoys city life well enough, but states, “I have always vacillated between town and country, never quite a countryman but a constant weekender and vacationer. I am still in much the same position, though I now know bigger towns and wilder bush. If forced to make a definitive choice, he would probably choose the bush. This is suggested by a passage in an article he published in the Western Australian literary magazine Westerly (No. 2, 1961). “In the cities,” he wrote, “personality is fenced in by personalities of others.” However, alone in the bush…a phrase like “liberation of the spirit” may begin to sound meaningful. Randolph was born at Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935, the son of a country lawyer; the only other child was a girl, two years younger than Randolph. His forebears on both sides were early Australian settlers; his father’s people helped to establish Adelaide and his mother’s family were pastoral pioneers of the Geraldton district. He was educated at the State schools in Geraldton, then went as a boarder to Guildford Grammar School, near Perth, and there he discovered Christopher Fry’s plays.