by Karen Lamb
She was negatively drawn to this for the most understandable of reasons: in her early emotional world there was certainly care, but also an absence of closeness. Intimacy and emotional frankness – things she craved – were not part of ordinary life in the household in which Astley grew up. The Astleys were stoics, though Thea as a child was vulnerable and exposed to differences within the home and allegiances outside of it – particularly religious ones – that she could hardly have been expected to understand. They marked her life unmistakeably.
Thea Beatrice May Astley was born in Brisbane on 25 August 1925, a sister for her older brother, Phil, then aged four. The name ‘Thea’, meaning ‘gift of the god’ or ‘goddess’ (Thea was the Greek goddess of light), was a logical choice for Astley’s pious mother, Eileen. If Astley could have read the future, to see the renowned editor who would give her a start in writing would share her middle name ‘Beatrice’, meaning ‘traveller’ or ‘voyager’, she might have preferred that name.
Brisbane in the 1920s bore almost no resemblance to the sky-scrapered commercial city of today. It was considered the hick cousin of Sydney and Melbourne. Throughout Astley’s childhood and young adult life, being a Queenslander conferred a particular kind of status, sometimes negative. Migrants, from the 1940s through to the ‘ten pound Poms’ of the 1960s, were drawn to this place’s exotic mix of shambolic suburbia and hillside wooden shacks high up on stilts all set amid lush tropical foliage. Some foreigners saw the place as unspoiled, others as backward, depending on their background and personal circumstances. For the locals, however, loyalty and acceptance of ‘home’ led to parochial defensiveness. It was an attitude that became inseparable from what it meant to be a Queenslander. For Thea, Queensland was a home she loved to love, and loved to hate. Brisbane and memories of her childhood there created an intense emotional world for her writing.
She is not alone. Other well-known Australian writers have written about growing up in Brisbane, including Thomas Shapcott, Matthew Condon, Rodney Hall and Rhyll McMaster. And David Malouf has written of Brisbane’s gullies and vistas, how the senses become drenched in tropical downpours, and the steepness of the streets make buildings cast long shadows, a town built on hills, a river that changes direction so often it seems like many rivers. The Queensland child in this dilapidated and makeshift world, he wrote, was somehow more exposed to the vulnerabilities of the world beyond it.6 From these same origins Astley created an emotional geography inseparable from her sense-memories of home. The emotional aura of the Astley household made the two very different worlds seem imaginatively inseparable.
The Astleys had settled in Waterworks Road in the relatively new suburb of Ashgrove. The suburb was only five or six kilometres from the city and accessible by tram, the major mode of transport, and it developed around a long and winding main road. In the late nineteenth century this had been the road used to drive livestock to market. While the area was originally noted for its genteel rural estates, it was the new Waterworks Road that redefined life for the first residents who lived along it. By the time Astley left the suburb it was readying itself for the post-World War II baby boom and an influx of thousands of families looking for relatively cheap houses near the city.
The atmosphere at home when Astley was a primary school child was quietly tense, characterised by silences between her parents, punctuated with many arguments. Sister Mary, who taught young Thea at Rosalie Convent primary school, could see that Cecil and Eileen Astley were not much of a match.7 Astley’s mother made frequent visits just to talk to Sister Mary, who remembered conversations with one or the other parent but never both.8 In the days before school counsellors family tension was not for discussion.
For Astley’s parents, marriage was disappointing, after what had been a promising romance. When Eileen first met Cecil she saw at least a superficial resemblance to her own father, for Cecil Astley was also a journalist. However, beyond that, the resemblance was not particularly obvious. Canadian-born Cornelius John Lindsay, Eileen’s runaway father and Thea’s maternal grandfather, left his family for the ‘wild’ city life and, as his granddaughter Thea would say pointedly, his wife never forgave him.9
Eileen Lindsay was born in 1897 and from about the turn of the century until the 1920s endured a very straitened upbringing with her two sisters in a single-parent household. The Lindsays were related to a well-to-do family from Ballarat, Victoria – Eileen’s great-grandfather was Judge O’Dee – but this did little to alter the poverty of her small family group. The derogatory term ‘deserted wife’ epitomises what would have been the practical and emotional reality.
Thea and her older brother, Phil, came to understand their mother as a troubled personality, and they slowly understood how her background was very different from their father’s. Eileen was embarrassed by her lack of education and made amends by reading the classics by candlelight late into the night. Phil and Thea watched shame flicker across a great many of her actions and hard-set attitudes. She seemed too aware of social pride. Instead of the merely customary politeness of returning generosity, every little favour or act of kindness had to be returned in greater measure: a gift of jams meant a jam-cake for the giver.10 This developed into an exaggerated solicitousness, awkwardly annexed to anxiety, ideas about God and duty, and guilt – behaviour that would affect the lives of both Phil and Thea.
Eileen’s father had, however, been modestly successful in his writing and was a reasonably well-known figure in Sydney journalistic circles throughout the 1930s and 1940s.11 Cornelius, known as Con, published articles in The Bulletin and was a member of the Dawn and Dusk Club, a bohemian society of writers, formed in the late 1890s, which met for drinks and conversation; Henry Lawson was a prominent member. When Eileen’s father moved to Melbourne he quickly gravitated to similar circles, joining the Bread and Cheese Club, an all-male club based on ‘mateship, arts and letters’ and associated with prominent book collector J. K. Moir and his set. During the 1940s the club was an important champion of Australian writing, publishing books that dealt particularly with regional and bush Australia. Con later edited its left-wing magazine Bohemia, for which he wrote a column under the pseudonym ‘Mr Grouch’. He was well liked, with a larrikin sense of humour and irreverence towards artistic pretension. He could puncture egos in a flash. One day, enjoying a quiet drink in a Melbourne wine saloon, discussion turned to the famed bush balladists of the 1890s:
Drinker: ‘Con, did you know Henry Lawson?’
Con: ‘Who didn’t?’12
Thea Astley didn’t really need to meet her grandfather Con (in fact she did so once, when she was about thirteen, a couple of years before he died); he was a ‘type’ she grew up knowing.
By the time Con died in 1940, Eileen, who had married Cecil Astley in 1918, would have appreciated the irony that her own husband of choice was a man whose interests were almost identical to those of the father she barely knew. Eileen was three years older than her young journalist husband. He was conservative in his habits, seemed settled. In Cecil she could enjoy a little of the allure of a man in the same profession as her absentee father, but one who might offer the security she had lacked as a child.
The family of Cecil Astley was English. Cecil’s father, Charles, born in Deptford, Kent, in 1869, had migrated from England at the age of eighteen. He lived briefly in New South Wales, where he married Mary Rankin at Wagga Wagga in 1894. The couple then set sail for Tasmania, where Cecil was born in 1896. Charles was extremely versatile. A highly regarded violinist with the Hobart Philharmonic Orchestra, he moved his family to Queensland’s Darling Downs in 1902 and became a well-known painter, woodcarver and potter, as well as a teacher of these crafts. Cecil, an only child, would have watched his father establish himself and make his mark in a growing arts and crafts movement in Toowoomba, Queensland, and the nearby Warwick Technical College. Charles’s artwork was praised and valued: the Queensland Art Gallery purchased his 1926 waterc
olour Rose of Evening and an intricately carved wood hallstand.13 His work has survived and is still traded in the contemporary art world – two watercolours were sold for nearly 7,000 British pounds in 2011.14 Charles’s painting Condamine at Warwick gave Astley a placename for her to use in her novels, one that resonated with her grandfather’s artwork and her memory of him. Condamine would become the setting of several novels.
Thea inherited her grandfather’s gifts as a fine pianist and as a teacher. Charles was something of an experimenter with style in his painting, and Thea as a writer never gave up working on style. Most of all Charles Astley passed on a passion about Australian culture. His was quite unlike other immigrant British households with their morose backward-looking glances at the ‘home country’. Charles Astley stamped that independent spirit – the joy of valuing where you are, not where you come from – on his entire family, and Thea grew up with pride in being Australian. Charles Astley made a prodigious series of paintings of seascapes, early settlers’ homes, swagmen and the Australian bush. Because he was also a teacher these views made him a pioneer in his field, encouraging Australian artists to use their own locale as a subject. He fought for recognition and funding, since the cost of art equipment and materials was a real threat to his art at the time. Charles obtained local clay – unheard of then – and pressed it himself.
Throughout his childhood Cecil grew up with a father whose artistic reputation was building. Two-year-old Thea stood proud among her family at the presentation of the potpourri jar Charles had designed for the Duchess of York on her 1927 visit to Australia. The inscription on the pot ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you’ acquired pathos, since Charles died, aged only sixty-one, just two years later.
Cecil was then in his early thirties. After his father’s death Charles’s achievements were kept alive in conversations at home. There was no boasting or pretension in this; as parents Cecil and Eileen wanted young Phil and Thea to appreciate their grandfather’s habits of self-discipline as much as his art. In years to come, Astley would say little of Charles and his art unless prompted, though she grew up knowing about his achievements. The novelist Patrick White once tossed off a remark to her that Queenslanders were ‘back in the woods’ when it came to ‘the visual’.15 Astley said nothing.
As a young man Cecil had wanted to write, and at just nineteen years of age, in 1915, he published a ditty (not unlike Charles’s cheerful potpourri jar inscription):
Comin’ into Work
You a-comin’ in.
Me a-goin’ out.
Passin’ ev’ry day
In life’s roundabout.
Passin’ by to work
Not a word to say:
Only smilin’-like,
As we meet each day.
Winter comin’ on.
Rain a-fallin’ fast:
Courage in me hands.
Passed the word at last.
Held me gingham up—
‘Come in from the wet’:
Then you smiled an’ spoke.
An’— I’m glad we met.16
He managed to get it published in The Bulletin. At that time, the magazine had separate sections of its literary pages devoted to writing from Queensland, titled ‘Queensland Gossip’ and, rather disparagingly, ‘Bananaland’. Cecil kept writing and soon some more poetry and a short story were accepted.
Facing the inevitable choice between his own literary ambitions and the necessity to earn a living, as well as personal responsibility for a wife and young family, Cecil took the only job he could that enabled him to work with words: he became a journalist, joining the staff of the newspapers The Queenslander and then The Courier-Mail. His experience led his daughter to understand that journalism could be the enemy of literary ambition.
Cecil became a sub-editor, a job that was highly responsible and utterly preoccupying. The newspaper routines of going to press were, by today’s standards, gruelling and the day’s shift long. Cecil had taken the job to support his family, but he hardly saw them. He left home in Ashgrove at around five in the afternoon and didn’t finish his shift until the early hours of the morning. The working culture among the subs meant socialising after their long night, then spending their daytime hours playing sport. Cecil was not a member of the sporting group, but subs generally were regarded by other newspaper workers – including reporters – as a different breed. Belonging to a separate and all-important part of the news process, they cast a watchful eye over the work of their fellow journalists. Cecil set himself further apart when he was promoted to senior sub-editor, preferring to wear a suit and tie instead of the more casual clothing of his co-workers. He looked every bit like the popular image of a newspaper sub-editor, bent over pots of glue and working intensely with stories and galley proofs. Newsroom histrionics were not for Cecil: he was private, quiet; he preferred to work under close direction from his superiors. Even though subs were known to be sharp-minded with better than average general knowledge, Cecil’s colleagues wondered about this man with an unusually strong intellect, apparently so intent on dealing with the matter at hand.
He took the job very seriously and personally. A sub-editor was responsible for a section of pages with deadlines at exact times, in minutes, in succession. There was no possibility of extension of time for alteration. Correctness in spelling, grammar and punctuation was paramount and the sub was the all-important end-line in the editing process. The job could be stressful but it seemed to suit Cecil’s temperament. Because correct use of language was close to his heart, he approached his duties with fervour. He must have known that the subs’ desk was a waiting-line to nowhere, with no hope of promotion.
As senior sub-editor he seemed content to carve out a reputation on home ground. The censure of ‘Cec’ Astley was feared by junior colleagues, perhaps because he was known as a ‘man of extraordinary wide knowledge’ with a ‘finer sense of language than you would sometimes find in a sub-editor’.17 His small physical size seems at odds with a photograph of him at about this time: sitting, the impression is of a reasonably tall, upright, stern and constrained man. Cecil was like his father, Charles, in having the instincts of a teacher. When it came to cadet errors, he was cruel to be kind: embarrassing mistakes were quickly dealt with and not passed on to the editor. His daughter’s firm attitudes about language standards owed as much to her father’s legacy as to her own traditional education, which she often cited.
By the early 1960s, when writer Hugh Lunn was a cadet at The Courier-Mail and first met Cecil Astley, the chief sub-editor was close to retirement. The years had made him seem ornery and angry.18 This could have been interpreted as personal unhappiness, but Cecil was politically engaged and felt life’s injustices very keenly. Like many workplaces, the world of newspapers often delivered a microcosmic view of the abuses of power. When Thea was a teenager Cecil warned her against a career in journalism because of the nepotism he saw within it. Nevertheless, Thea Astley claimed to have been once tempted by journalism when she was about twenty-one, but was saved from a job at the Brisbane Telegraph because she was considered too old.19 What she saw was that journalism had brought her father teasingly close to words, but not to writing.
Cecil’s principal interest remained literature: ‘daily work’ was something else, a sense of a divide that Thea also inherited. That cheerful ‘stickability’ of his early Bulletin ditty ‘Comin’ into Work’ had served Cecil well in its way. He had strong values about effort and service to pass on to his children and they were the values he and Eileen shared. Both parents encouraged Phil and Thea to read widely, to play music and listen to music with real attention, to pursue and develop their abilities. When eight-year-old Thea was encouraged to publish her first piece of writing in ‘Bubbles Corner’ of The Courier-Mail, parental approval would have been undemonstrative: it was important to be humble about one’s gifts.
Music was highly valued in the
Astley home. Thea soon learned to play the piano, working her way through studies and pieces by Heller, Clementi and Beethoven. Later she would claim to have ‘written the hands’ of her favourite music teacher, Arthur Sharman, into the character of Bernard Leverson in The Slow Natives.
But Cecil also knew how to enjoy family life. Beach holidays held the Astleys close in a way that the daily routines of their life in the city could not. In these rented ‘sea-rotted houses’ at the beach, usually at Kirra near Coolangatta on the Gold Coast, Cecil would finally relax and even sing shanties.20 Thea and Phil saw a different Cecil, a different Eileen. These were the happiest occasions for Phil and Thea. Back in town, Cecil occasionally took them on news-related outings (such as viewing the damage caused by the 1930 Brisbane floods when Thea was only five) but it was nothing like the free-spirited loose time of these holidays. It was a rare treat to spend time with Cecil, something Astley did not do again until her university days.
When Cecil was in the house his presence was large; on the light side, he was irresistibly drawn to the ‘one-liner, or the smart-arse crack’, and he relieved the tense and rather staid atmosphere at 358 Waterworks Road.21 The tension in the marriage gave an edge to these witticisms, and Cecil, while funny, could also be a standover merchant, a bit of the ‘bully of the Lawson type’, as Astley would later describe him.22 Eileen was the ever-present parent who needed a confidant. At first this was Phil, who from early teenage years was becoming increasingly religious and close to his mother, then it was Thea’s turn to stand by her mother’s side. Cecil was a stronger and more dominant personality than Eileen and he and his daughter shared a strong interest in writing and literature. Thea was naturally more ebullient than her older brother, and drawn to her father, especially as he encouraged her to read ‘almost anything at all’. Later in life Astley would fondly recall him reading The Magic Pudding aloud to her. She identified from an early age with this male approval, under the watchful eye of her mother, Eileen, whose demands in the end were of a moral kind.23 Cecil and Eileen were diligent, good parents but ‘conservative’. It is not clear exactly what lay behind the friction in the Astley household: possibly Cecil’s long working hours, which left Eileen alone for extended periods. They might even have quarrelled about the size of their family, for Cecil was an only child and Eileen had two sisters. There was a four-and-a-half-year gap between Phil and Thea, which was unusual for the times, and the Astleys were a small family by Catholic standards. In any event both children tried to make sense of their family situation, and responded as their temperaments dictated.