Cirrus@Austlit

'Ever since reading Randolph Stow's Tourmaline nearly five years ago, it has held a strange power over me. It might not have been the most highly regarded or publicly well received of Stow's novels within his lifetime, but within the writing community there appears to be quiet and growing recognition that it might be his most resistantly alluring. Bernadette Brennan's 2004 essay 'Words of Water', which describes Tourmaline as deeply poetic' yet 'silent' (144), gestured towards this renewal of interest '  in the novel over the last two decades. A mentor once suggested to me that the prose-poem of a first chapter might be the best opening to an Australian novel ever, and whenever I meet someone who has read Tourmaline, it always feels like something of a shared secret.'

 (Introduction)

'I cannot but start with the looming scale of the sun - the half-pictures or contained slice we see in most drawings. Even there, we are obedient to that generic voice, to well-worn wisdom : don't stare direct. The corner of yellow in a child's picture. It's excess and repetition in sunspots and flares on photographic film. The close detail of this Festival's logo, and the scope it implies. Scope and scopic : despite what we are told as children, we are finding ways to see the sun - as Stow did, again and again in his work, from the very beginning, his world viewed through sun-bright lids. Sun in all its power, ripe gold and life miraculous, sun a wild yellow vision. Divine heat and terror, the cognisance of that sun's cataclysm...(Act One 18)' (Introduction)