by Karen Lamb
In her second year, Astley also decided to join the CWM. She set off for the Movement’s monthly meeting at the Catholic Aquinas Library in Queen Street, Brisbane, hopeful that a new chapter in her life was finally beginning. She found that the meetings were fairly formal affairs, regular and minuted, but she attended for the whole of the next two years. She became a well-known member of the group and was asked over the Christmas–New Year period of 1944–45 to travel interstate to Melbourne on CWM accounting business. Only in 1946, when she was out of the city of Brisbane on a teaching appointment, did her involvement lapse.
The atmosphere in the CWM was still relatively constrained, with large doses of talk about ‘the faith’. However, Astley discovered other meetings of like minds. Once again, the presence of American soldiers was the new ingredient in Brisbane’s cultural life. Now new unknown American writers and readers from overseas, joined, albeit briefly, the local literary scene.
Judith Wright had just begun helping Clem Christesen with the new journal of literary and social comment Meanjin Papers, in which readers now found contributions from American soldiers appearing alongside the Australian content. Christesen had been working as a journalist with The Courier-Mail and in government after completing his studies at the University of Queensland, as the magazine was without full financial support. This would change quickly in its favour, and he and Meanjin would shortly move to Melbourne.
By comparison, the university’s literary culture remained conservative. The student magazine Semper Floreat dismissed the first issue of Meanjin Papers as ‘largely coloured by the war, a little bitter on the tongue’ but now at least it recognised a strong counter-current.22 Astley no doubt noted this resentment of the new but would have been heartened by these new cultural congregations that seemed to be emerging, sweeping up lively and eccentric personalities, individual talents. It could only offer her more opportunity for writing. Little magazines flourished throughout the 1940s in Australia, and drew from a pool of writers whose names at least were now familiar to Astley. She read as much as possible: Poetry, edited by Flexmore Hudson; A Comment, edited by Cecily Crozier; Angry Penguins, edited by Max Harris and John Reed (who with his wife, Sunday Reed, was the patron of the artistic community at Heide, on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne). Both Harris and Reed would later become entangled in the Ern Malley poems hoax.
The next event in Astley’s life would have far-reaching ramifications. She had become aware of a writing group for young people called Barjai, from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘meeting place for youth’. This had metamorphosed from Senior Tabloid, a school magazine of Brisbane State High. Its contributors, like Astley, were now out of school and interested in writing and literature. The original schoolboy editors, Barrett (Barrie) Reid and his friend Laurie Collinson, were now university students interested in the group as a meeting circle. Between 1943 and 1947 they continued to edit their little magazine Barjai, named after the group, with Reid as the editorial commentator on literature and society. The magazine declared its youthful edict: ‘All published writers must be under twenty-one.’
This was the moment Astley had been waiting for and she wasted no time in joining the group. Barjai lived up to its name for her: it was the meeting place where she formed many of the literary friendships she valued for life. And many of Barjai’s members, especially Thea herself and Barrett Reid, went on to become distinguished and vital members of the Australian literary community. Reid’s influence, in particular, is notable. He was a published poet; he had a long involvement with Heide and its support of contemporary art; he was involved in the major initiatives to promote Australian books (National Book Council, Australian Book Review); and he edited the influential Australian literary journal Overland.
Socially, Barjai provided a vital network. Astley had to confront the fact that many of its members already knew each other and that she was something of an outsider. Her confidence was tested but she seemed to fit in, was accepted. This affirmation was all-important to her. The interests of the group were liberal in the true sense and Astley could express her views on literature and on creativity. Among friends she could start to enjoy words that did not fit with the academy, a crucial new freedom she immediately embraced.
Barjai helped Astley to find and begin to develop her own voice. It built a social bridge between the CWM, her Catholic background and the larger world and hinted at a creative future. The group was serious and seriously fun, though not especially bohemian and certainly not dissolute. Barbara Patterson, who had not yet met her artist husband Charles Blackman, was one of Barjai’s younger members (she had attended Brisbane State High with Reid and knew him well). At the fortnightly meetings in the ladylike Lyceum Club near the city centre of Brisbane she couldn’t help being rather impressed by the ‘well dressed, well spoken, very couth’ sophisticates of the Barjai gang.23
Now twenty, good-looking in an angular way, Astley read her poetry to her fellow Barjai members in the crackling and acrid style that became so distinctive in the world of Australian writing, deepened twenty years later by her constant smoking. This younger version was slightly high-pitched with just a hint of the Queensland drawl. She changed her natural vocal rhythms with sudden pauses for effect which would one day turn into her trademark timing. It was almost sex.
The young intellectuals and artists of Barjai were a formidable bunch in some ways. Barrett Reid was the ‘essential romantic hero – but with a rascally wit’; Laurie Collinson ‘personified avant-garde subversion’; artist Cecil Knopke was ‘swaggeringly serious with a drawing-room lisp’.24 Astley gloried in their company; no longer just a ‘marked out’ schoolgirl, she had fought her way to literary comradeship of a high order. Astley thrilled to hear Judith Wright read her first book of poetry, then unpublished, at one of the evening soirees. She was intrigued by Wright’s philosopher husband J. P. McKinney’s compelling papers of a non-academic nature, highly sympathetic as he publicly staked a claim to an independent viewpoint about social and philosophical ideas. She valued this because her father, Cecil, had passed down to her an egalitarian sense of the right to free speech.
The CWM no longer seemed completely separate either: Paul Grano floated through the Barjai meetings and mingled with the Barjai set, as did Clem Christesen. Astley’s friendships with women were based on intelligent rapport. She became close to the writer Vida Smith (later Horn) and Thelma Forshaw, later a prominent journalist, short story writer and book reviewer in Sydney. Here, too, were opportunities to mix socially with men, even if behaviour was still conservative. Astley later remarked: ‘When a male hand brushed against your arm or, even more thrillingly, a waist or hip … did you know it!’25
Astley’s literary circles were broad enough yet sufficiently safe to accommodate homosexuality. She became close to Collinson and Reid, both openly gay. For the first time she was given an insight into differences that perhaps she had intuited from living with her brother, Phil, now studying philosophy with the Jesuits and still in Melbourne. She at least had a social context within which to think of men who were not lovers of women or husbands or fathers.
Barjai also provided a connection to her artist grandfather, since Collinson was a painter of watercolours, as well as being interested in psychology and writing, and so brought along some of the artists of the Miya studio, a group closely associated with Barjai from the outset. The Miya group had formed as a separate young artists’ collective, away from the Royal Queensland Art Society’s Younger Artists’ Group. Laurence Hope is thought to have painted the Barjai group in his 1945 artwork Literary Circle.
Ambitious as they were, all were vulnerable young artists and writers; the most important aspect of Barjai meetings for Astley was the supportive atmosphere. Nobody needed to fear ridicule. Years later, the students in Astley’s university creative writing courses would benefit from her experience. Barjai gave Astley all-important focus, recognition, and esteem; here she felt she coul
d trust in a measure of objectivity without inviting anything like the ‘scathing’ critique she had requested from the poet Paul Grano only a few years before.
The Miya studio artists and Barjai writers enjoyed mutual social interaction and publishing opportunities in the Barjai magazine but they also shared a wish to challenge the conservatism of the local audience. At this stage in her life Astley was not really prepared to identify publicly with the competing issues of nationalism and modernism raised by Barjai. She was still living at home and felt keenly the debt owed to Cecil and Eileen, and all these new experiences and relative freedoms did not erase the fundamental conservatism of her upbringing. She had befriended openly homosexual men in the group and might have wondered about Phil’s sexuality, as well as her parents’ views about that. What might they think of a radicalised daughter? The need for change that energised the group would have been at odds with her personal reticence. Astley was different, too, in her particular fascination with language; creativity was not to be sidetracked by activism. One day she would attempt to bring the two together in fiction.
4
We’ve Freud and Nietzsche at our finger-tips
Is meant to represent a breadth of vision
Such as all these great Bohemians have …
You wonder that the artist called it ‘Life’?
Then note the hand that clasps a little dust
(Of bone, no doubt.) It’s clear that you must read;
We’ve Freud and Nietzsche at our finger-tips,
And all that sort of thing.
‘Culture, 1945’ by Thea Astley, 19451
Astley was alert to the heady mixture of art and politics that membership of Barjai represented. The group’s credo was becoming known: ‘The poet must become a politician in the cause of culture.’2 Given the times, Astley’s Barjai was infused with literary modernism, the philosophies of youth for a new world, and a whole generation’s response to World War II. CWM, on the other hand, believed that the poet should become a politician in the cause of Christ. It was a worldwide organisation preoccupied with ‘a positive programme to restore Christ to culture’.3 However, politics and art – let alone religion, politics and art – sat uncomfortably with Astley’s still developing views on such things. Her own ‘faith’, if she’d been asked to name it, was simply in the vigour of the creative life. Self-belief was the ‘belief’ fundamental to her membership of two such different organisations.
Barjai and the CWM were similar in reflecting the mood of the times. The war was almost over, a new order beginning. And Barrett Reid and others like him thought the talents of artists and writers should play a part in this new Australia. He expressed this ‘call to arms’ in his poem ‘These Leaden Weights’:
We can no more allow the warped will of old men
to fashion for us the future. It is ours.
Cast off the leaden weights that make the drab decrees.
Climb the high heart’s wall and cry out Action.4
Astley was no activist. She was more at peace with her own inwardness, that tendency noted in her even at school to be ‘possessed of her own internal world’.5 However, she naturally shared the sense of expectation that the war’s end would bring about extraordinary change. High spirits bound together the cultural hopes of that generation. As the poet Judith Wright would recall: ‘If the end of the war was not far off, they implied, a new wave of art and literature might cross the continent and sweep before it all the old conventions and imitations of European nineteenth-century writing and Georgian shibboleths.’6
Barjai preached cultural salvation: war had sidelined culture. (‘Most people lay aside their books, store their musical instruments, forget their art shows.’)7 Reid did not want their group to seem frivolous but at the same time he knew it was not a political organisation. Astley certainly did not want it to be seen that way either: she always inclined to the human, the people behind the politics. The writer in Astley would have been fascinated by the interplay of personalities and she had a way of stepping sideways, to see more – she hated being forced to believe anything. Astley was hugely fond of Reid, not for his stirring views on what the future could be but because he was an irrepressible young man, a humanist with a great flair for living. His discussions in the pages of Barjai about social order and democracy were youthfully zestful but Astley liked it best when he tired of fighting the dour spirits of wartime and asked the question more to her liking: ‘What time, then, is left for living?’8
Arguments about life and art, beauty and art, did engage Astley. Modernism had come to Australia, was embraced by many in her circle like a long-awaited lover, but the fervour made her uneasy. A lot seemed to be claimed in its name that had little to do with soaking up the poetry of Eliot, Spender and Auden. Australian artists and writers wanted to affirm their relationship with the culture of other places. Wasn’t there a risk, Astley would have wondered, that the valuing of Australian writing (old and new) might be at stake?
Astley inserted herself with gusto into all-out debate about the traditional forms of literature and those emerging. Reid tried to defend what he saw as literary experimentation: it was not a desertion of cultural tradition and nationhood. He was committed to the ‘reforming impetus of youth’, an energetic agent provocateur for a postwar ‘blueprint for happiness’. When working by instinct, as a poet, making his own images of the country he loved – or as an editor of Barjai – he felt a responsibility to encourage innovation, assuring his readers that ‘although there are many classical forms and metres in which the elder BARJAI writers could excel, a little experimentation would not be out of place’.9 At this time Astley was struggling with questions of value, craft and form. Her education helped her in this: she had encountered Edgar Allan Poe’s essays ‘The Poetic Principle’ and ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ and Poe’s views that the ‘Poetry of words [is] the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty’.10 Poe debunked ‘aesthetic intuition’ in favour of process towards an effect (‘like a mathematical problem’), a view that appealed enormously to the young writer-in-the-making who loved logic and maths.11 ‘An appreciation of beauty’, with its olde worlde colourations of truth and order in art was to come under increasing pressure from modernism.
Astley began to take a personal interest in these issues – the mixed messages often embedded in discussion – subjecting them to a scarifying logic. Reid pilloried the Anglocentric Australian book trade (demanding that bookshops carry at least twenty-five per cent of Australian titles) while lecturing on the pitfalls of clinging to Australia’s colonial past. Astley, for her part, saw how the value of her own work might be threatened by Reid’s advice to writers: ‘Twentieth century ideas simply can’t be expressed in 18th and 19th century language. “Thee”, “thou” and “thy” sound hollow and forced in most contexts; epithets such as “stilly” are now near-extinct; and if the writer does feel about nature the way Tennyson did, it’s no use writing about it in a Tennysonian manner because (1) Tennyson has already done so, and (2) written to-day it is artificial and stilted.’12
From the time Astley was a teenager she had enjoyed imitating the traditional metres and forms of classical poetry. She loved to match her poetic skills to those Elizabethan and Victorian metres. As she would boast, ‘At eighteen I could turn out a Petrarchian sonnet easy as winking.’13 Greek legend, Anglicisms, classical allusion and dramatic mannerisms and punctuation are all here in this poem:
From Troy
Sing of the sunset sky, the strange, chill plains
Of pallid evening; the wings
That passing make a music murmuring low,
Sing of the golden love
That mocked the night of woods,
Where Ida sang the love of woman’s heart.
Sing of the flashing trees, the star-lit night,
With wonder from the shrouded years
Up shooting through the liquid ce
nturies,
Sing of the golden flame
That mocked the night of woods,
Where Ida cursed the love of woman’s heart.14
Love, love lost, loneliness; (however self-consciously interested in form) many of Astley’s poems are directly emotional, such as ‘Saturday Night’:
O aching sear!
I sit and long for life—
And pen a sick love poem, to a star …15
These autobiographical pieces were reflective and melancholic in the Romantic tradition, rather than being experimental in form in any way, so Astley was slightly uncomfortable with the arguments in favour of experimentation.16 She decided she would have none of it.
Astley was beginning to do something that would become characteristic of her from time to time: she wrote against the trend, using satire. Hints of dogma, like the smell of incense, always brought her fighting spirit to the surface. Using references to Poe, Astley denounced the avant-garde. She was anti-elitist about literature but desperately interested in creativity and in writing, a difficult standpoint to reconcile with her formal stylistic preferences. Her Barjai essay ‘Poetic Fire’ tells a story about a ‘butter magnate whose sonnets were found hobnobbing with butter consignments and quotas’, revealing Astley’s penchant for cryptic titles.17 This exotic placement of sensitivity among the mundane would become a trademark of her novels, which often deal with characters caught out being gifted in unlikely places, such as a pineapple plantation. It was a reaction to modernism tainted by cultural insecurities she had breathed in first as an Australian, then as a Queenslander. Astley was well on the way to inventing an angry persona out of parochial defensiveness, outbursts that eventually became affectionately known as ‘Thea being a professional Queenslander’.