Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  3

  Barjai: A meeting place

  We believed in one another. In the way of effect being the cause of the effect, we learned from one another, gained that sense of authority that makes brave the urge to go beyond horizons, ‘returning bronzed as from a myth.’ We had come out of a war into the light, not needing the nudge-nudge wink-wink of sly grog or dope. We were high on the prospects of the new world being made.

  Barbara Blackman, Glass after Glass: Autobiographical Reflections, 19971

  Thea Astley returned to Brisbane from Warwick at the end of 1942, mourning the loss of the familiar that All Hallows’ had been as well as the excitement of her very different last year. North of Rockhampton had been declared a war zone, the New South Wales state border was closed to civilians, and Brisbane itself was under the restrictions of a ‘brown-out’, a limit to external lighting. With American servicemen moving about the town, Queensland’s ramshackle capital had metamorphosed into a bustling, cosmopolitan city. Commerce was at the heart of it and local businesses did not waste the opportunity to meet the demands of this ready-made clientele, though they had to deal with very limited licensing options. In the short term, there was the effect of a sudden social uplift – entertainment for the troops meant more clubs and more social activity generally – but the period was also one of social disturbance. Astley would recall the ‘shock of khaki’ upon her return to Brisbane, the olive and blue of the American forces’ uniforms being the most dramatic sign of the changes that had taken place since she was last there. Their presence would continue to affect that city for the next two years.2

  Studying Arts at the University of Queensland, Astley hoped, would enable her to meet the like-minded people about whom she had been dreaming, people who did not necessarily share her background. To her dismay, the university world into which she stepped in 1943 was in many respects as enclosed, if not more set apart, than the convent she had just left.

  The university had changed very little physically or socially for decades. The campus was housed in Old Government House, dignified by the lush palms and trees of the city’s botanical gardens bordering the university grounds. The main entrance was on George Street, one of the city’s main commercial streets crammed with offices and hotels. Astley would recall with bemusement how lectures were in the reception room of the Old Government House building.3 A large modern university was being planned for outlying land near St Lucia (the present site of the University of Queensland) and news of the laying of the first stone in 1937 had captivated Brisbane. It remained an unrealised dream until well after the war had ended, so that in 1943 it was American troops, not Australian students, who were the first to occupy the prefabricated and half-built structures that would one day become Brisbane’s new university.

  Astley’s combined Arts/Teaching degree involved night-time study, as well as full-time day study at university, which was considered a significant privilege. There were more than three hundred students in the Faculty of Arts, split between day, evening and external students; the day enrolment was more like eighty-five. Only a small proportion of these would have majored in English. Because she was attending teachers’ college, Astley was an evening student, though she returned to day status in 1946.

  Tuition fees had to be paid: a three-year Arts degree cost around fifty-three pounds. Astley was glad of the Senior Teachers’ College scholarship at Kelvin Grove that made study financially possible for her, an able student without means. Unfortunately this meant that her lectures and study had to be arranged around her teaching commitments, first at Ipswich, Mt Crosby, and the outer bayside Shorncliffe where Astley stayed at the Villa Marina boarding house, the same name she would use for a boarding house in her 1990 novel Reaching Tin River. At teachers’ college, the division between day and evening students was marked – a reminder of the day girl/boarder distinction at All Hallows’. The rule was: seniors and juniors must not mix. Even university social events were planned separately for the two student groups.

  It was impossible to ignore the practical impact of the war. The police and civil defence authorities, for example, had requested that the university avoid ‘night assemblies’ due to the brown-out light restrictions.4 David Malouf, nine or ten years old at the time, later wrote, ‘Though we hardly knew it at the time, our city was having its moment of greatness, its encounter with History: General MacArthur had arrived and the whole Pacific campaign was being directed from his office in the A.M.P. building.’5

  Pride in Brisbane’s prominence was one thing, but there were less glamorous complications. Astley walked into her teacher training college only to find it doubled as headquarters for the 53rd squadron of the Australian Air Training Corps with young men learning Morse code.

  She soon found that the teaching college was a ‘very sober place’ under the charge of the principal, an ex-World War I colonel who ran the college as far as possible along military lines.6 The front steps were out of bounds to all students. Women had to wear stockings (difficult to come by), which catapulted Astley and her mother into an urgent shopping trip.

  The presence of American soldiers had quite an impact on social mores too; Astley watched as it brought into focus the double standard about the sexual conduct of men and women. Young boys would go to the cliffs around Redcliffe on a search for condoms, called ‘frenchie hunts’, but well-brought-up young women like Astley were not supposed to be sexually active, let alone with visiting American soldiers. Astley claimed years later that she ‘didn’t know a single Yank’ and was likely ‘the only teenage girl in Brisbane who didn’t!’7 ‘Anglo–American’ relations preoccupied Brisbanites.

  At university Astley saw how gossip controlled social behaviour; it further circumscribed what women could and couldn’t do. A female student lying sideways on the university lawn and revealing the curve of waist to hip was thought to be ‘fast’.8 In her books set in this period, Astley would make a link between the American GIs, sex, degradation and perpetual sexual inequality. Here is Miss Trumper in the 1968 novel A Boat Load of Home Folk:

  Still lush in her mid-thirties, but desperately discreet about the exact position of time’s finger (‘I was never good at telling the time!’), she had sported an American Colonel of distinction with iron-grey temples for three mad weeks of invasion summer. Verna Paradise had gone crazy, dyed her hair orange, plastered her eyebrows, built out her bust … Now Trumper could hardly believe it of herself. She had never been the racy kind. But the Yanks were different. Soft as honey. The Brisbane streets filled up with slouch hats once more after the forage caps had gone, so that girls who had lost their hearts or their good sense at bus-stops and good-byeing railway platforms were jolted back to terrible sanities.9

  In Astley’s later works the GI presence remains intact: Connie’s son Reever in It’s Raining in Mango is the product of a wartime affair; Belle in Reaching Tin River seeks out her American father in the US; Kathleen in the late novel Coda reminisces about her wartime romance with an American.

  Astley was one of many for whom the American presence in Brisbane left a strong impression that remained with her for life. The same link – scents of the feminine mingling with death and dishonour – is made in David Malouf’s quintessential Brisbane poem ‘The Year of the Foxes’: ‘… and Brisbane ladies/ rather the worse for war/ drove up in taxis wearing a G.I. on their arm … the rare spoils of ’44; old foxes/ rusty red like dried-up wounds and a G.I. escort.’10 Astley had been primed by All Hallows’ to accept unequal moral standards for women but it was disillusioning to see that the world beyond the convent had its own version.

  Powerful wartime loyalties made local reaction to the American presence in Brisbane double-edged: with so many soldiers to be fed, housed and entertained it was a boon for local businesses. Though there were serious accommodation shortages and food was rationed, the US forces were protected to some extent by being well paid. And as in all wars, the black market was th
riving. The realisation that an up-tempo Brisbane was due to this transient foreign occupation would have done nothing to ease local ill-feeling. Hostilities had been sufficient to cause an all-out brawl at the Grand Central pub between American and Australian servicemen, known as the Battle of Brisbane, late in 1942, killing one Australian solider and injuring many. The impetus for the brawl is thought to have been the simmering tensions over how alluring the cashed-up American soldiers had become to young Australian women at the time. In her novel A Boat Load of Home Folk Astley appears to cast moral disapproval on her female Yank-dating characters Miss Trumper and Miss Paradise. In 1943 the poet Judith Wright encountered the effects of this Americanised Brisbane:

  The well-filled olive-and-blue uniforms of US Army and Air Force and the doughboy caps and skittish sailor-collars of the Navy seemed the only signs of wealth. Beside their sleekly-fitted opulence, the sloppy and worn khaki of the comparatively few Australian soldiers not fighting the wars in New Guinea looked a bit like Brisbane itself.11

  If the streets of Brisbane were packed with men in uniform, it was a different story at the university. Astley was learning that, in the 1940s with a war on, a university education had social implications for a woman. Even a decade earlier, a student had learned, ‘To be a blue stocking in the Australia of this time meant that a girl had an inordinate interest in learning, a strange disregard for male attention, and risked most foolishly the fate of not being attractive to men.’12

  In the 1930s universities had abounded with men, now war had tipped the gender imbalance in favour of women. In all probability, Astley’s experience of young men was limited to the sneak-out milkshakes with schoolboys of her own age. Like most women of her generation, Astley had grown up with ambiguous messages about men. ‘Man was the enemy as well as the provider. Don’t talk to strange men …’13 But these men she had been taught to fear were not around. Of the seventy or so students to graduate in Arts alongside Astley, an unprecedented two-thirds were women. The Arts faculty had simply ‘emptied of men’ and now had ‘exotically low’ class numbers.14 It irritated Astley years later to know how quickly this situation reverted when returned servicemen on war education allowances took up study, entrenching male domination of staff at Australian campuses right through the 1950s and 1960s.

  Astley was horrified that being in the majority did so little to change the prevailing sexist attitudes towards women. Wartime restrictions probably didn’t help social matters: the 1942 bombing of Darwin had made the Brisbane authorities anxious enough to impose brown-outs nightly. The university magazine persisted in regarding university life as a cavalier romance, with men in the lead roles, something that Astley and her contemporaries knew was comically remote from reality:

  No longer can the Varsity’s lusty sons come forth at night, ready to do battle with the elements, in order to meet the fair damsels on a social footing … Alas the heart of Romeo can no longer play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ ’neath his breast as he walks a fair damsel around the grounds when the shades of night are firmly drawn.15

  Astley realised that her fellow students felt, as she did, that they had little personal freedom; most were still financially dependent on their parents. When it came to matters of dress, the university Faculty Board set the standards. Social activism hardly existed and changes were confined to absurdly petty and marginal issues. In her early months as a university student Astley had read about such a ‘win’: men would now be allowed to ‘attend lectures wearing shorts’ as long as ‘tie and stockings’ were also worn.16 On-campus segregation was also firmly maintained, with separate clubs for men and women.

  Sport was still the most socially sanctioned activity, where the ‘lusty sons’ of the university could display their much-vaunted masculinity. However, Astley realised that men and women could mix socially at certain clubs that reflected her own interests, those dealing with music, drama and debating, though even here social expectations were still the arbiters of female morality. Astley and her peers spent much of their time ducking and weaving through often ambiguous demarcations of what was considered feminine behaviour.

  One of Astley’s contemporaries, the writer Amy Witting, whom Astley later befriended, recalled how women of her generation were ‘thrust into competition with men’ but left somehow feeling ‘robbed of womanhood’ by the very teachers who had been ambitious for them to achieve.17 Witting was at the University of Sydney and a member of literary circles that included poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. An interest in literature did nothing to moderate an atmosphere drenched in sexism, said Witting: ‘Women were a subject race. You were accepted only on the most humiliating terms: you had to be somebody’s girlfriend, or you were a dead failure … A logical mind as sexual bait was about level with facial hair.’ 18 That last sentence drew an appreciative howl from Astley when she and Witting shared these memories twenty years later. It wasn’t that Astley disliked men; even in the 1940s she was closer to feminism than she realised, despite her discomfort with the term in middle age.

  Astley was now surely aware that the convent had been busy refining her brain for the intellectual long haul but had offered no training on how this might relate to matters with the opposite sex: men did not want women for their brains. Even her course of study had been gendered as lesser. The study of literature, her Arts major, would never be publicly esteemed in the same way as the study of Medicine or Law. But Astley allowed nothing to rob her of the pleasure she was finding in her literature studies. The courses were rich and thorough tours through English literature: Chaucer, Marlowe, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Keats, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. Poetry, essays and drama were dominant. Astley won two prizes in English during her degree studies: The Ford Prize for the best poem in English in 1944, and the Henry Monteith Prize for English two years later.

  Little Australian literature was on offer: the single reference was Percival Serle’s An Australasian Anthology, first published in 1927. But change was coming. One day Astley walked by the campus notice board to see talks about Australian literature advertised. The 1940s Commonwealth Literary Fund Lectures series about Australian writers and academics to universities had begun. Astley would have seen Frederick Robinson present his lecture in Australian literature at the University of Queensland in 1944. Nationalist sentiment was taken for granted in the Astley household and she knew how it pleased Cecil to see the work of the bush balladists and convict novelists as early subjects. In these years Astley and her father had time to indulge a shared love of Australian literature. It was serendipitous since she was also thinking more about writing, beyond her poetry.

  At the same time Astley was discovering European poetry and modernism. Like others at the time, she would not have wanted Australian literature to become defined by images and symbols that isolated it from other modern sensibilities, the experiments in visual arts and literature that were taking place overseas. The national literary bounty, long overlooked, had competition. Students took up their national literature in one hand while others were grabbing T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and French symbolist poetry in the other. Loyalties and tensions over nationality and style are best seen in Astley’s own writing at the time. Stylistically at least, she was still imitating English Romantic poets, studying, hearing more and admiring much of the classical bush repertoire of Australian writers like stories of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton, while thrilling to the excitement of the language of an interior world that came with modernism.

  As Astley entered her second year of Arts in 1944 it was becoming clear to her that literary and cultural matters still engaged relatively few people in Australia, including among the student population. As little as three per cent of students took an active interest in the university’s literary magazine Galmahra. Compared with Astley’s experience at All Hallows’, this was an apathetic reaction that even the editor lamented.19

  The irony of the title Galmahra, from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘spokesman of a tr
ibe’, was probably not lost on Astley at the time. In her first year Galmahra was not published because there were so few submissions of an acceptable standard.20 In her desire to be published Astley turned to the support of her Catholic background. She wrote to the poet Paul Grano, then President of the Catholic Poetry Society:

  Dear Mr Grano,

  I’m sending along these poems (as I dare to call them) in the hope that one or two may meet with your approval. When I read my own puerile work I feel horrified to think that I dare criticise anyone else’s. However, I really would appreciate your opinion – as scathing as you like – because I do want to learn wherein to improve.

  Yours sincerely,

  Thea Astley21

  This was a brave move, one she would repeat over her lifetime with other writers, sometimes with disastrous and crushing results. But this was her first real attempt to move beyond the opinion of her peers or the protection of teachers’ affirmations. The fact that she did this when she was still craving a teacher or mentor shows what she was prepared to risk if it meant moving forward in her writing. It was important that Grano was not a peer, not even close. He was an established poet about to publish Poems, New and Old (1945) to a good critical response.

  Astley needed to belong socially to a group that shared her literary and cultural values, and she needed to feel safe too.

  Grano was directly and indirectly involved in several Catholic writing groups, some set up under the guiding hand of Archbishop Duhig. Two of the most prominent were the Catholic Poetry Society and the Catholic Writers’ Movement (CWM). The latter was known to Astley; All Hallows’ had run essay competitions on their behalf. Grano was influential beyond Catholic circles, and knew many other writers, such as C. B. Christesen, Brian Vrepont and James Picot, with whom he would set up the journal Meanjin (first called Meanjin Papers).