Aboriginal testimony, trauma and fiction: transcribing massacre in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands

Abstract

In 1957 the young writer Randolph Stow travelled to Forrest River Mission in East Kimberley, Western Australia to conduct research for a new novel. His experiences and observations at the mission over four months resulted in the publication of his Miles Franklin Award-winning book To the Islands (1958). A novel that fluctuates between the symbolic imperatives of the central narrative and the material realities of Forrest River, To the Islands is both a remarkable and uneasy representation of place. Particularly unsettling is Stow’s inclusion of an oral account of massacre taken down verbatim at the mission in 1957. Arguing that this massacre narrative represents a moment of slippage in the novel – whereby the localised trauma of Forrest River can be seen to infiltrate Stow’s King Lear-like narrative – this paper draws on recent archival research to suggest the massacre account in To the Islands allows a momentary and profound register of colonial violence, not otherwise expressed in the novel.