A post-university stint as a storeman at the Forrest River Mission (later known as Umbulgurri) in the Kimberley in early 1957 had given him a taste for out-of-the-way places and, after a period studying anthropology at Sydney University, he had been encouraged by Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck, a fellow-West Australian, to apply for a job with the Department of Native Affairs in Papua and New Guinea.

In Port Moresby, during the three-week orientation course that supplemented his five weeks’ training at the Australian School of Pacific Administration, or ASOPA, at Mosman in Sydney, Mick was quickly inducted into the heavy drinking culture that took place, in strictly segregated bars, among the town’s white inhabitants.

Within a few weeks, however, the novelty had worn off.

“I am rapidly developing the most strong antagonism towards Civil Servants,” he wrote in his diary. “New Guinea should be cleared of Europeans as much as possible as soon as possible. But I haven’t ‘been thirty years in the Territory’ so I wouldn’t know.”

Embarking on a biography of Randolph Stow, an introspective author widely thought to be a recluse in his later years, had not been easy at the best of times, but writing about his time in New Guinea in 1959 was troubling on several levels: not least because during his last months there he had experienced a mental and physical breakdown that brought him close to death.

I was probably not the first researcher, too, to discover that Stow’s Department of Territories personnel file—or the portion of it that dealt with precisely this period—had gone missing from the Australian Government Archives.

When I tried to get in touch those ex-Department officers who had been in closest contact him, I was met with silence.

The events, occurring not long after the death of Mick’s father Cedric Stow, a country town solicitor, had caused great distress to his surviving family members, and still did.

Stow himself would not discuss it with his mother and sister at the time, and their fragmented conjectures had led them to believe that, as a barely-trained CPO, he had somehow been left unsupervised in a distant outpost.

This combination of circumstances was inclining me towards the conclusion that a cover-up might subsequently have been put in place to protect the reputations of those further up line.

…….

For Mick Stow, things had soon begun to look more promising. A few weeks after his arrival he learned that, instead of being posted out on patrol, he was to be attached to Charles Julius, the Department’s anthropologist.

In early May he and Julius would go to Kirwina island in the Trobriand group, to investigate the disputed paramount chieftainship of Omarakana. The authority of the Trobriand chiefs appeared to be waning as various factors underpinning their prestige—polygamy, and faith in their power of magic and beneficent sorcery—diminished with the encroachment of European ideas. If the breakdown of order continued, it was believed, lawlessness might result.

On the morning of Saturday 2 May 1959 Mick and Charles Julius left by Canadian Otter seaplane for the tiny island outpost of Samarai in the Milne Bay district, from where they would travel by boat to Kiriwina.

At Omarakana, they would study what might happen if Mitakata, the elderly paramount chief of the Trobriands, disinherited his heir, who was thought to have slept with one of his younger wives. The two men would spend some five months together before Julius returned to Moresby to make his report, while Stow reverted to his role as a CPO.

These experiences with Charles Julius in the Trobriand Islands, and later on his tour of duty with his supervising senior Patrol Officer Peter Gall, would eventually result in the novel Visitants.

Before that happened, however, in December 1959, after a spell in Taurama hospital in Port Moresby, Mick would resign and be repatriated to Australia. Subsequently Stow was circumspect about these events, publicly as well as privately, and within weeks the larger part of his Public Service file (after being inspected by the ‘the minister’, Paul Hasluck) had been moved to a restricted category.

Hints dropped by Mick about his loneliness had led his family to believe his mental crisis had been brought on by malaria. Certainly, in later life, Stow himself also thought so.

Neither Peter Gall, who was still living in Port Moresby, nor Gall’s immediate superior, Robert Blaikie, the Assistant District Officer at Losuia on Kiriwina at the time, whom I had traced to Queensland, would respond to my letters or emails.

When I tried to ring Peter Gall directly from Australia, the operator in Port Moresby told me his telephone had been disconnected. Finally, from Bob Blaikie, I had received a courteous two-sentence email thanking me for mine, and stating, “I have nothing to add that would be of any use to you.”

Blaikie, who had correctly guessed that I knew nothing, was evidently prepared to leave it that way, and my research so far amounted to little more than a distillation of gossip, hearsay and speculation.

This is a rivetting and elegantly written long-form article, and if you are interested in writing, writers or Papua New Guinea you should read the full version here. Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow has just been published by University of Western Australia Publishing