by Karen Lamb
It was rare for her to speak about her own writing – her presence spoke for it – but her personal contact was encouraging for any aspiring writers. Many of the mature-aged women students saw her as a role model: an academic taken seriously as an author, who was also a wife and mother. One of Astley’s female students majoring in English observed that Astley did not discriminate about disciplines; she concentrated on each individual, on his or her capacity. Astley became a key person who encouraged this student to go as far as she could with Earth Sciences. This former student remembered Astley teaching Australian literature with passion, and with a strong historical and social inflection. In this, she resembled Leonie Kramer, whose lectures on Australian literature also included history and sociology.10 Kramer and Astley were of the same generation, almost exactly the same age, in fact. By this time Kramer was a highly influential person in Australian literary circles, especially because she had taken up an appointment at the University of Sydney in 1968 as the first female professor of Australian literature.
Astley loved her student audience and was quizzical during lectures in a way that appealed to them.11 In their eyes she was a refreshing addition to scholarly life. Astley and the poet Alex Craig were some of the first writers to encourage what would become a national push to involve creative writers in study at university.
Astley formed very close relationships with her students. The young men, she thought, were not unlike Ed, who by 1973 was about their age. The mother of a son is perhaps bound to identify particularly with young men, and Astley was part mother, part teacher and part chum. When Mark Macleod took his first steps towards postgraduate work in the same department, Astley was firmly behind him. They became close friends. He came to understand Astley’s contradictions fully but unlike others he accepted them more readily. He was softly spoken, accommodating and alert to the sensitivities in a woman he had already known and liked as his tutor. It was to Mark that Astley ventured her candid views on the academy as well as staff attitudes towards her.
Astley had sensed a lack of approval from other women on staff and often felt slighted. Rightly or wrongly she felt they regarded her as privileged, somehow exempt from the ordinary issues of domestic life. This irritated her: ‘I cook dinner and I write books,’ she insisted; she felt her workload to be very unfair and sexist.12 She saw in the academic hierarchy the same order of jobs she had seen in the Catholic Church: the men taking the honours and the women doing the lion’s share of the work. As a tutor she worked longer teaching hours than other academics, and her thorough marking habits, carried over from schoolteaching, almost doubled the time it took her to comment on student work.
The role Astley loved most was that of self-appointed counsellor, and she was good at it. Advice beyond academic matters was her specialty. Married woman who were falling out with their husbands, or were just confronted by life, made their way to her office. The tears flowed. One story often told is of how Astley suggested that an appointment at the hairdresser was what her student really needed. Above all, these new interactions were great material for her novels.
However, this could lead to a perception that she wasn’t really listening, but observing for her own purposes. Mark Macleod once confronted her by saying that as a young student he had always felt she was not listening to him as much as watching his hands and face. The remark was met with a silence that he knew was her way of acknowledging a truth. He also saw that she had a way of backing out of an unwelcome conversation, usually by lighting up a cigarette, though she rarely retracted what she had said.13 This was unfortunate since what might have begun in humour could easily turn to anger – for instance, a conversation that allowed her to say anything about women as second-class citizens. It could be too much for people. Astley ‘acted out’ much as she had as a schoolgirl, and would think nothing of leaving a staff meeting suddenly, announcing a dubious attack of diarrhoea. Her anger over time seemed to attach itself to all manner of subjects: the university, students who shouldn’t pass, academics, anything in the political order she didn’t like. She was often quick to judge others but confident in her own judgement. If she got it wrong, she would move on without feeling guilty. Her targets, mostly those in power, hardly needed protection.
Not all students loved Astley’s style – her sarcasm in person could be as scathing as in her novels. Anyone who was noticeably late for a lecture or tutorial suffered nothing short of public humiliation. Astley did encourage young writers, but not indiscriminately.
Jeff McMullen, who later became a respected senior journalist with the ABC, was one of the chosen. When they met just after Astley had joined Macquarie, he was studying part-time as well as working for the ABC. It was a very difficult time in his own life. His mother, who had had fallen into a coma and suffered partial paralysis from a car accident a year earlier, had died from her injuries, at barely fifty years of age. It was not difficult for Astley to enter imaginatively into the sheer magnitude and terror of that loss to such a young man. She was clearly affected, and all she could say, McMullen remembers, looking at him as if he were a child just home from school, was, ‘You have to write about it.’ He did.
His drafts were highly personal and a bit strange – ‘schizo’, Astley said – but she listened, and listened. It was this listening that McMullen took into his own journalism, understanding the space that silence gives to story. Their friendship became a place of remembrance for his mother. She had been a woman of a type Astley would have liked, wide-trouser-wearing, practical, country-born; Astley warmed to her idea that a white tablecloth and a single rose on the dinner table were all that were required for a civilising influence. To those in pain Astley could give the kind of advice that could have been expected only from a family member.14 Both Macleod and McMullen, in their different ways, became for Astley the sons who would never leave.
McMullen went on to travel the world covering major news events and Astley would pump him for all the human detail, mentally writing it down. This was not prurient curiosity: she wanted to understand and to pit external events against her own prevailing fatalism. Her interest, McMullen noticed, was almost obsessively in the small things, joy and struggle, family as the centre of aspiration, tolerance and endurance. Behind this she had a strong sense of ‘the feminine struggle constantly in motion’ as Astley endlessly visited and revisited questions of relationships, fairness and balance.
McMullen was fascinated to see that the long partnership between Thea and Jack was in a state of constant evolution. He knew nothing of Astley’s private life at this time and was instead struck by the way Thea – obviously so individual and spreading her wings at Macquarie – had not ‘signed off’ on Jack nor the marriage, amid what were often plainly scenes of exasperation with each other.
Jack’s world-weariness – usually about politics – seemed to infect Thea with a kind of benign resignation. Jack more than anyone wanted her to be herself, so much so that McMullen came to see that ‘the two of them knew what they had’. Jack at this time was glad of the stability that the Macquarie position had given to Thea. He never gave in to Thea’s manufacture of drama, but always tried to make sure they worked out whatever the problem was. However, increasingly and willingly Jack went his own way and Thea hers, by mutual arrangement. In the next few years Jack would travel alone to the US.15
Students probably sensed some drama behind the politics of the department when Astley spoke cuttingly of her colleagues and other writers, as she sometimes did. She continued to feel undervalued and out of place, an unresolvable issue since promotion would always be tied to scholarly publication and Thea did not publish in scholarly journals. It was also fertile territory for stored resentments (‘what would I know about it, I’m just a writer’). In fact, the creative writing program was a niche for Astley in a way that a scholarly position could never be.
Astley knew that academic rigour had little to do with the originality she wanted to encourage, b
ut she would turn people inside out, exposing vanity or conceit. With only four or so students in a tutorial, this method naturally created nervous tension. It was difficult for students to feel entirely safe; one former student recalled the personal dynamics of the discussion taking over from concerns about the literary quality of the work. Astley came across as accomplished, razor-sharp and disarmingly sure of her own originality, but she also gave her students a chance to shine. She usually praised the student’s voice, and inflated talent with compliments, saying, ‘I wish I could have done that at eighteen.’ She also managed to pull the more talented writers away from mimicry and towards a critical sense of their own work and its value.16
In her teaching Astley indulged her passion for contemporary American writers – especially Cheever and Updike – not always in the traditional syllabus; she had no interest in drawing up boundaries of value and form. Macquarie was still making itself up as it went along. Students walked through the grass paddocks to class and the main library was still under construction; the first groups to study creative writing were abuzz with the sense of being part of an important experiment. The atmosphere was almost intimate, apart from the monolith of the W6 building, where you could find Astley’s door always open.
The writer Wendy Blaxland came to think of Astley as everybody’s favourite.17 This was true for those she favoured: she made sure only the most able students were allowed to take her classes in creative writing. Among the chosen ones, at student parties, she would join in (having a little to drink but never too much); always the informal staff member sans title. The students heard all about Ed, of course, and indulged her unabashed devotion and candour. Astley made her priorities abundantly clear: immediate family then writing. When she was writing a novel, the practicalities of teaching became as they had always been, a conflict between duty and what she knew she was meant to do.
Astley was ferocious in defence of standards of literacy – she was prepared to fail students who wrote illiterate essays – and there were heated arguments on campus about the place of Australian history or literature in the new curriculum. The move from temporary accommodation to the new North Ryde buildings had spotlighted claims for a new ‘Australian university’. In this climate Astley – as serious as anyone about this – was nevertheless determined not to take the situation seriously. She moved into her new office: bare walls, empty bookshelves. Staff shuffled about quietly arranging stationery and chairs when a voice rang out in the corridor: ‘But there aren’t any books!’ The next thing they heard was Astley’s very recognisable ‘posh voice’ on the phone: ‘Is that the bookshop? Could you send a yard of Penguins, please.’
There was a chumminess that hid some unpleasant staff relations of the kind sometimes peculiar to university English departments. Macquarie’s combination of literature and linguistics was somehow uncomfortable for those involved in pure literary studies, with the belief that literature was ‘the key to understanding the universe’ as many, including Astley, felt.18 It was with lecturers in the History department, only one floor below – not necessarily her colleagues in English – with whom Astley found camaraderie. What these friends had in common was that they were all – like American Joan Kirkby – outsiders in some way. John Ryan, in History, was like Astley, having arrived at university teaching via schoolteaching. Even her English department colleague John Bernard had an unusual previous life as a chemistry buff.
John Bernard’s office was directly opposite Astley’s and, like her, he started the day early in the morning. Astley was dashing – always in a hurry, it seemed – and anxiously muttering that she had knocked someone over, or run into a car or something. John was a calm person and his demeanour worked a charm with Astley at such times. He knew she liked to be contrary; had heard she took a book and ostentatiously read it while at a Test cricket match. On one occasion the odd drop of slivovitz Astley happened to have in her office (the presence of plum brandy there was a long story) added to the mix. John Bernard knew Astley was not any kind of a drinker but somehow this crazy out-of-character act matched the moment. Exhausted after late lectures Astley the non-drinker now took to ordering exotic high-powered tipples – the more elaborate the name or colour the better.19
It was Bernard who witnessed at close hand the steady rise of Astley’s resentment about her academic status, and he noticed that this would break out and become attached to literary matters. He said that ‘when Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds was so successful Thea became paralytic with rage’, claiming that she was much better and got no recognition.20 When Macquarie wanted to give Astley an honorary doctorate years later, she flatly refused. She would never forgive the university for what she considered its lack of regard for her.
In John Ryan and John Bernard, Astley found two men she could be frank with about her life, including her marriage, and she often spoke graphically about sex. ‘Ya gotta read Lolita,’ she’d urge John Ryan. ‘Just imagine all those men driving in cars, sitting there with testicles and balls, squashed to nothing,’ she’d say to Bernard.
In the end John Bernard found it hard to know exactly what Astley thought of men, or whether to take any of what she said seriously. John Ryan, too, wondered the same but in relation to the Astley marriage. Jack was somehow central to her views but he seemed a remote figure, watching. ‘He had a stand-back assessment of things and people – as if his work at the Conservatorium meant he was used to dealing with erratic people,’ said Ryan.21 Dinner parties with Macquarie colleagues were odd, with Thea’s male friends privy to a side of Thea that Jack seemed to understand, yet nobody knew to what extent. Thea appeared to be breaking the rules of married life and Jack didn’t seem to mind. Her colleagues liked Thea as a woman and saw a soft underside to her brashness. For all the talk they had as friends, much of it gossip about colleagues, Astley gave off the sense that her world was larger than that. The world of university pettiness, however irritating, really didn’t impinge. ‘If you went over there, there was just the typewriter on a table. That was it,’ said John Bernard. It certainly was. For three years before publication of The Acolyte in 1973 Astley had been working long hours, writing, teaching and lecturing. She was also the watchful mother of a teenage boy and maintained a range of literary friendships, while sometimes attending to the development of her own literary profile.
This attention to her reputation was not always to her liking; she was becoming alert to being manipulated, and her position about this could be contradictory. She was sensitive to any suggestion of her success ‘as a woman’, though she was herself an advocate for women’s opportunities; she was pro-women and anti-feminist. She did everything she could to help married women previously unable to study at university to enter the system now that the Whitlam no-fees era had arrived. She said, ‘If they do not get jobs then they will go mad. They cannot be satisfied with the traditional routine of family charring and social outings. They want something more.’22
Yet, in conversation she reverted to her 1960s comment that ‘women are sad things really’. Unable to resist one-liners – her father’s failing – she would describe the university as ‘menopause manor’. Like many women of her generation, she had internalised a male negative view of women, and it was bound to tie her up in knots. It showed in her work: one critic commented that the women in her novels were ‘mostly nervy if not neurotic … unsure of themselves … building or shoring up defences … often at the mercy of men and abased by them’.23 It would be a long time before her ‘vein of bitchy black comedy’ (as The Acolyte was dubbed) could be understood as a legitimate critique of male–female relations, and in the early 1970s the author was hardly obliging.24
Even twenty years later, she was equivocal about the ‘F’ word, saying in 1990: ‘Even now I’m not entirely comfortable with feminism. I think it has become a perverted term rather than a description of natural justice.’25 She added, ‘I’m a normal heterosexual I think, I hope – but I grew up in an er
a when women weren’t supposed to have any thoughts at all, and if they did express thoughts then either no attention was paid to them or they were considered brash and aggressive … I sound aggressively feminist, don’t I?’26
If feminists wanted her in their camp, they had picked the ultimate non-follower, for Astley still rejected any ‘-isms’.
She thought nothing of declaring that ‘all women are whores’ and, like the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard before her, she tended to look at women in terms of ‘an idealised self’, or a ‘despised alternative’.27 The masculine women in Astley’s novels are like those evoked by Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s phrase ‘always the better men’.28 She hated the ‘approved whores’ – married women – and the ‘tea-makers for God’ women of her Catholic upbringing. Women still had few alternatives that she could see; little chance to ‘invent their own weather’.
This tension between apparent feminism and her innate conservatism was impossible for Astley to resolve. She did not believe one generation learned from the next. Hers, she said, was a ‘feeble hand flapping in protest’ in the face of what would always be an inequality between men and women.29 Fatalism was a stronger force in her than feminism could ever be.
If she was a divisive figure at Macquarie – she could ‘cut through people’ – Astley didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on it.30 Her twin roles as teacher and writer did not coexist comfortably unless Astley was editing a book of stories (as she did with the Angus & Robertson anthology Coast to Coast) or when she set for her students books by writers she admired who were also friends, such as Hal Porter (she set his Handful of Pennies at the earliest opportunity). Porter, she knew, was writing Mr Butterfly, and a collection of his stories was being put together by Leonie Kramer. Much as she was pleased for Porter, and disdainful of academic work, Astley knew she had not yet received that kind of attention from such a noted literary academic.