by Karen Lamb
Working with Astley made a difference to some of the other teachers too. Mary Sainty remembers the day she started at the new Strathfield Girls’ High, where Astley was now settled teaching French as well as English. Thea was collecting material for class when Sainty heard her remark: ‘If I had any more safety pins in my skirt it would be chainmail.’13 It was a style of approach Astley would perfect: when she wanted to make a connection with someone she would often try to make them laugh. She also liked to puncture the pomposity she saw in some of the more conservative teachers.
Mary, for her part, decided that this unconventional woman might just save her from the occasional dreariness of work. The two became firm friends; they had the kind of woman-to-woman friendship Astley had lacked up until now. Both convent-educated, they could communicate with just a wry phrase or a look, and both were aware of the possibilities of ambiguity in language. Mary was someone Astley could talk to about Phil, who was still in Melbourne and now close to being ordained, and about her own anxieties regarding her Catholic faith and the expectations of her parents.
Astley was being candid in a way she badly needed to be; her colleague understood implicitly her need for the self-protection of irony. The two young teachers would whisper with amusement and self-knowledge. Mary came to think of Astley as having helped her discover irony – she had grown up with it but hadn’t recognised it in herself before. Astley knew how to treat ‘everything serious as a joke’, playing the Queenslander to the hilt, sending up pretension.14 This sometimes offended people: they were not quite sure of her tone and something in her delivery could make them suspect personal insult.
Astley took her teaching responsibilities extremely seriously; her anxiety guaranteed more than due diligence. Teaching was a satisfying if exhausting occupation capable of attacking the nerves, something she would one day discover to her cost. In these early years of their marriage she and Jack were both working long days, travelling long distances, and spending the evenings recovering with quiet talk and music.
Astley’s colleagues knew that she was ‘writing something fictional’ because she had started to talk openly about her experiences of teaching up north, but she didn’t want to be seen as ‘one of those intellectuals who wrote’.15 She continued her habit from early teaching days, satisfied to write a little each evening. Poe’s idea of creativity as a process, in increments, still appealed. It was also the only way circumstances allowed her to write.
Within three years Jack and Thea began looking to buy an affordable property in Sydney. This meant moving further out of the city to the newer subdivisions of land where there were settled homes, usually on large blocks of land. Thea and Jack had come to value the spaciousness of the streets in their current neighbourhood and the long wide avenues of suburbs to the north, but house and land on such a scale would have been much too expensive.
As luck would have it, a family living on one of these large acreages on the outskirts of Epping, eighteen kilometres northwest of Sydney’s centre, was considering subdividing their land. What had originally been a tennis court could become a small house-sized piece of land in an established street. Jack and Thea could secure land relatively cheaply and could build their own house themselves. They acted quickly and began an exciting joint project designing a new home from scratch at 44a Dorset Street, Epping. From this address Astley would write and publish eight books over the next twenty years.
Astley was the creative energy behind Dorset Street. She could have studied architecture at university and now she could indulge her interest in building with a purpose. The inside covers of her favourite orange-covered writing exercise books became host to sketches and plans of the new house, a habit she kept up for future house purchases. The sketches show Astley was playful with spaces in a simple way, breaking them up idiosyncratically. She was determined that their house would be different from the standard suburban home. Their limited means would not stand in the way of creating something distinct, expressing their own way of being and living.
When the house was completed, Thea’s efforts expressed a simple dictum: ‘Whatever you do,’ she would say, ‘if you build a house, even if it’s just one room, make it a beautiful room.’16 Visitors would look around at what seemed a modest dwelling yet the expression of this sentiment was evident both outside and within: sparse furniture, an unusual fireplace, furnishings carefully chosen.
There were immediate construction problems. Bricks were still expensive and hard to come by. Fibro was cheaper and more commonly used, but for a girl from Queensland timber was the only choice as a building material. Their next obstacle was officialdom. There were many heated consultations with the conservative local council about this ‘exercise in the modern’. The building was compliant with regulations but considered rather too boxy, and the use of timber set it apart from the more typical brick and tile of the area. Thea and Jack enjoyed ‘talking up’ the narrow-mindedness of these Visigoths, pledging to take them on. It was home theatre, a ‘we’ll show you’ attitude they loved to adopt together, but in reality it never ended in actual confrontation.17 They were not lawbreakers; a few years later Barry Humphries would satirise mercilessly the attitudes and mentality they so disliked. They were suburban anti-suburbanites.
In time an unusual two-storey dwelling emerged, with a side (not front) door entrance. The separations and divisions of space were a natural and agreed extension of their union: Jack needed a good space to listen to music properly and Thea a private space to organise herself and her thoughts for writing. The fact that few married couples planned a house on quite these terms was of no interest to them: neither would have thought that they were doing anything other than carving out a living environment for two individuals. And now a third person had entered the calculations. At thirty, Astley was pregnant. Life needed to speed up and building issues preoccupied Jack and Thea in the little time they had outside work. Thea was to continue teaching as close to the birth as possible, even if some of the women on staff looked askance at her decision.
Sensing the enormity of change ahead, Astley felt that writing at night seemed the way to meld all the changes in her life, the way to keep the writer Thea moving forward, not just the half of Mr and Mrs Gregson, not just a woman with a house and baby on the way. Of course Cecil and Eileen had to be told, the beginning of a rapprochement. They were delighted that they were about to be grandparents, but after some frosty years they were still unhappy about ‘that marriage business’, as Cecil liked to refer to it. In their minds this had remained unresolved for eight years and now the coming birth had raised all the earlier concerns, plus the question of baptism within the Catholic Church.
The move to Sydney had made the impasse easier to ignore but the impending birth ensured that this would not continue. Astley knew from her upbringing the punishment in store for them: the Catholic Church did not regard Jack and Thea as married, the child would be born in sin, could not be baptised, could not be buried according to the rites of the Church and would be spiritually doomed to limbo. Astley was restless and anxious by this renewed fervour about her life choices. It went beyond trying to please her parents: she was still emotionally involved with Catholicism, not because she was devout but because she was inclined to be self-doubting. Pregnancy had made her feel vulnerable too. She was not ready to denounce her faith, but nor was she any more inclined to be bullied by those she saw as bigots.
In such a situation, it was impossible for Phil – ordained in the previous year – not to be involved. He had not yet settled all of his own misgivings about life in the Church; he was shortly to start teaching at Burke Hall, a junior Catholic boys’ school in Melbourne. Phil’s shyness and natural deference were anything but assets for a teacher and he would find himself seriously undermined, cowering in the face of the thoughtless cruelty and irascibility of young boys. Phil, who was immensely fond of his sister, was the unlucky negotiator on the question of Thea’s marriage and t
he Church, since Cecil and Eileen naturally turned to him for expertise.
Astley also began to field regular ‘mission’ visits from clergy informing her of her spiritual wrong-footedness. These visits did not go well. During one of them, the option of a Pauline Privilege was suggested, which dissolves an actual marriage (different from an annulment, which declares a marriage invalid from the beginning). The Pope could be petitioned to allow this, and it would be satisfactory within the Church if she and Jack remained as ‘living companions’ – though not in a sexual relationship. Jack and Thea enjoyed the absurdity of this – but it still left Astley genuinely distressed. She leaned on her good friend Mary Sainty and Mary laughed with her. But the situation was clearly costing her, as seen in this poem, named after an ancient Roman female poet and written around this time, but published the following year in 1957 in The Sydney Morning Herald:
Sulpicia III
Half of my kith and less of my kin
Have long passed me over,
Pursuing no plan but to counteract sin
Of love with lover.
I ask me why years should beacon like this
In diminishing torches
Long galleries of loving that should point to a kiss
And some passionate matches.
Of laughter, perhaps; but the truth is it matters
Far less than the pleading
That thread sighs to thread when the day’s fabric tatters,
While half the heart’s bleeding.18
The title is significant. There are thought to have been two such ancient Roman poets of prominence, so by making herself the third (Sulpicia III), Astley was casting herself within a tradition of poetry about marital devotion and love dating back centuries.
It would take a few more years before ‘kith and kin’ would become a regular part of Astley’s life again. She continued teaching until the winter term of 1955: money as always was an issue. She couldn’t know how she would find her way back to work but hoped there would still be a shortage of teachers. Four months later, on 18 November, Edmund John (after Jack) Gregson was born.
Jack, Thea and baby moved into the just-completed 44a Dorset Street. Disapproval from the Church about the marriage no longer dominated amid the concerns an infant brought into the new house. In the background, however, Phil had advanced the various paper machinations that would at least enable a marriage to take place. What was termed a ‘Validation’ of the civil marriage meant that the couple would go into the sacristy and sign the register and not sign in the church itself, in front of the people. Jack did not have to convert to Catholicism, but it would all take some time. Godparents for Ed had already been settled: Mary Sainty and her husband, Frank.19
It was an emotionally battle-scarred and weary woman who began life as a new mother in this northern suburb of Sydney. Busy as she was with a newborn, Astley was for the first time away from full-time employment and she had time to think. Recent events had been a poignant reminder of her past in Queensland, and her family. She was becoming increasingly reflective about ‘home’ and the ten years since she had been alone and single in Queensland’s north seemed suddenly close in memory. She found herself recalling her Townsville days, her first teaching appointment. Nor had she forgotten her abandoned novel manuscript ‘Moontower’; she had been writing prose now for about eight of those ten years.
As she looked back on her previous life Astley was thinking about a new character, a young woman teaching in remote Queensland towns whom she would call Elsie Ford. It was a plain name for a character who would be naïve and a little self-absorbed, and perhaps painfully self-conscious. There would be room for a little cryptic wordplay and some compassion for this young woman, the central character, for whom ‘the very emptiness of the future gave a sorrowful pleasure’ and whose only self-protection from the menacing townsfolk is the ‘complete isolation of the mind’.20 Elsie was a girl with a monkey on her back.
Astley asked herself who these townsfolk might be, sweating in isolation, with their flaws, doubts and fears. She already knew, as she said, that, ‘Any sort of person can be interesting in circumstances that create antagonism with other people, circumscribing them so that something breaks out.’ She now wanted to understand people differently, to see their complexity, not as much as an exercise of satire. She seemed to know already something she would only articulate a decade later: that ‘true emotional adventure lies in the geography of other people’s minds; as long as a writer has that it doesn’t matter where he is’.21 Astley was safe in the geography of time: a world away from the remote lushness and beauty of the tropical north, in suburban Sydney, she entered her Dream Country.22
7
The Gorgon of Epping North
The neighbours think I’m the Gorgon of Epping North.
Thea Astley to her editor Beatrice Davis1
The care of a newborn was a bigger challenge for Astley than writing, and it brought up the question of her social identity. Her roles in life were multiplying fast: Thea of Barjai days, Thea and Jack, Mrs Gregson, and now mother. To this she added one more, a writing pseudonym named after her brother, Phil: Phillip Cressy. She was convinced that signing a woman’s name to a poem was a distinct disadvantage in getting it published, and Astley needed confirmation that her poetry was of publishable quality. She had always taken risks with inviting appraisal and this would be no different: she was prepared to stake a name on it. To her delight a clutch of poems were published over the next two years in The Sydney Morning Herald.
She enjoyed the freedom that a male persona gave her. In 1956, when the bank cheque for her latest poem didn’t arrive, Astley rang The Sydney Morning Herald demanding payment. The literary editor, Sidney Baker, was forced to write to a ‘Mr Cressy’: ‘If indeed, you are not at [Croydon] as you say in your letter of July 26 this may be less the fault of an unsympathetic commercial world than you imply.’2
Baker’s sarcastic response was because staff at the paper had innocently sent the payment cheque to the address Astley herself had put on the back of the submission envelope. The Croydon address was the home she and Jack had rented just prior to the move to the new Epping house.
Astley was caught up in her own game of hide and seek: she wanted recognition but wished to be incognito. Now she was left wondering: had the poems worked, or had the male name led to their acceptance? Writing as a man, writing as a woman, and the relative value accorded in each case would become an enduring struggle for Astley. It would be many years (not until An Item from the Late News in 1982) before she chanced the first-person female narrative perspective. For now, the only way to assuage that self-doubt was to use another name: Thea Astley.
These were things to mull over amid radically unfamiliar domestic routines. There was little time to look for advice on baby care, so that Astley was as lost as any new mother. The days were long. She felt unprepared, much as she had as a young single woman thrust into teaching in far north Queensland. And in a way new motherhood felt like the same kind of betrayal: nothing in her life had warned her what motherhood might be like. Astley knew that motherhood was seen as central to the domestic ideal of femininity.3 It was assumed women wanted to be, and would become, mothers, and young mothers at that: Astley at thirty was out of step because of her age, and she had spent almost a decade as a professional in the workforce. None of this made her feel more competent or suited to the realities of motherhood. At the same time, Ed the baby was perfect. Their relationship was like a second love affair.
Astley’s nerves were not ideally suited to the care of a vulnerable infant and she compensated by doing everything meticulously and to a schedule. As she had with the Latin Mass during her school days, Astley found ritual a comfort. Thirty-five years later when she was old enough to be a grandmother, Astley still remembered her confusion: ‘When Edmund was born I had no sisters around me, I’d never had the experience of looking aft
er children. I found motherhood a terrible moral burden. I had no idea babies stayed awake twenty-six hours a day. I used to boil everything he ate and drank, even his orange juice, until a nurse told me I was boiling all the vitamins out of it.’4
Life at 44a Dorset Street was uneventful and isolating. Astley had taken little interest in the street or her neighbours when she had been working full-time. She was preoccupied by her own family now and her parents were back in touch with her from Brisbane, and she wrote weekly to her mother. Phil wrote often (though worryingly) of his life in training for the priesthood. Devout as he was, his letters made her think he was perennially anxious about performing his liturgical duties. Astley knew her parents were becoming concerned for Phil, and now she was able to help: what better distraction than to share little stories in letters about a grandson?
Astley plunged headfirst into the ‘horror domestica’ of 1950s suburban life in the conservative suburb of Epping. A familiar sense of entrapment, of surveillance, pressed in on her: ‘It was all about pavlova – I wasn’t interested in making pavlova successfully – this branded me an unsuccessful mother in the area where I lived …’5
She had to get out of the house. Ed was soon old enough to be pushed in a stroller and Astley began another ritual: long walks around the wide streets of Epping. Even though there were a lot of young mothers in the area, she cut a strange figure. Betty Judd was at home one day with her two young children on the other side of Dorset Street when she noticed a slightly built young woman pushing a stroller at high speed. Betty laughed out loud: this woman looked so desperate. So, Betty realised, she was not the only one who felt stuck. A meeting between the two women seemed inevitable. This happened when Thea, en route, turned to shout to her: ‘Don’t you just have to get out of there?’6