Lucretia on the Island: Revisiting Randolph Stow’s Masked Poems

Abstract

Non-Traditional Research Output, Statement of Intent

Dr. Caitlin Maling

Research Background
This practice-led research was originally composed for the 2022 “Big Sky Writer’s Festival”, where it was presented as the “Randolph Stow Memorial Address”. It forms part of an ongoing wider creative practice research project on Stow’s poetry, involving the eclogic “re-singing” of/to his poems.

Research Contribution
Through a collaged, composite, unpacking of how islands appear across Stow’s poetry, this research reimagines the centrality of the Batavia wreck to both Stow’s poetry, and to settler Australian mythos. A hybrid text, comprising both essayistic and poetic components, it practices something like what ecocritic Jed Rasula terms “wreading”, the blending of texts into a deliberate polyphony, de-centering any idea of singular authorship (xii). In this NTRO, this is primarily achieved through repurposing the mythic figures from Stow’s poetry as masks adopted for Lucretia Van Der Mylen – a central, misunderstood, figure in the Batavia story. Through voicing Lucretia under Stow’s masks, this work problematises the masculinist underpinnings of Stow’s understanding of Batavia and of settler Australia society.

Research Significance
The key significance of this work, lies in how it fills a lacunae in Stow scholarship around his poetry, while it also represents a distinctive and original creative practice methodology. Other critical sections of the project have been published in ISLE and Feeding the Ghost 1: Criticism on Contemporary Australian Poetry, while poems in my ongoing response to Stow have appeared in my sole-authored volumes of poetry Fish Song and Spore or Seed. One of the poems from the wider project was profiled by Sarah Holland-Batt in Fishing for Lightning (originally in The Australian), attesting to the significance of the project as whole.