Billy Marshall Stoneking

William Randolph Marshall (31 August 1947 – 15 July 2016), better known as Billy Marshall Stoneking, was an American-Australian poet, playwright, filmmaker, and teacher. His son C.W. Stoneking is a musician.

William Randolph Marshall was born in Orlando, Florida, on 31 August 1947. He was the second child of Charles and Florence Marshall. His sister, Barbara, named him "Randolph" after her favourite movie actor, Randolph Scott, and his mother selected "William" after an old family friend. The name "Stoneking" derives from his paternal great-grandfather, Reuben Stoneking (of Hundred, WV, Wetzel County).

According to Stoneking's own biographical notes, his early years were spent growing up on military bases around the United States, including Randolph Field (Texas) and Fort Slocum (New York). When his father retired in 1961, the family moved to northern California where he attended high school in Folsom and Rancho Cordova, California. He graduated from California State University, Sacramento, in 1970, majoring in English with minors in philosophy and education.

In 1972, Stoneking migrated to Australia. "The bumper stickers said, 'America, love it or leave it', so I left."

In 1983, after more than a decade living in Australia, four years of which were spent living with tribal Aboriginal people 275 km west northwest of Alice Springs, Stoneking graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, specialising in screenwriting.

"The drama in which the screenwriter, playwright, poet is occupied is the endless struggle between panic and pure anxiety, between the drive for self-preservation and the desire not to falsify the evidence. Whilst these two 'wants' may seem to be eternally at odds with one another, the point is not to surrender one in favour of the other bit to manage and exploit the dynamic tension inherent in the conflict."

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