Visitants : Randolph Stow's end time novel

Within the archive of literary writing from or about Papua New Guinea (PNG), Randolph Stow’s novel Visitants (1979) has a special place.1 Its highly specific location – in the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of PNG in 1959, when Australia was a decolonising administrative power – together with the author’s first-hand experience of that world make Visitants a rare work on any terms, and more so in the context of Australian literature, where writers have not much looked in that direction for material or inspiration. One notable exception is T.A.G. Hungerford, author of The Ridge and the River (1952), to whom Stow movingly dedicates his novel in Pidgin that translates as ‘I want to send this book to my friend’