by Karen Lamb
It had been a while coming. In 1971, when Astley toured Queensland on behalf of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, she had surprised herself in her encounters with isolated rural audiences in such towns as Mount Isa – bringing ‘the miners to heel’, as Porter had expressed it.8 These were the same people she pilloried in her novels, though not apparently those who attended her readings. Engaging with such audiences was Astley’s idea of sensibility in a hot climate. Not since the days of Barjai had she experienced this sense of culture besieged, undone by mediocrity and crass materialism. Astley even thought of dedicating her next novel to the avowedly anti-intellectual ‘screwball’ Joh Bjelke-Petersen, then premier of Queensland.9 The fight was on: literature to the rescue.
Astley would soon be steeped in nostalgia, comparing the gallant efforts of the early settlers struggling to offer Shakespeare to miners with the ‘middle-class pretensions of first-nighters in Sydney’, forgetting for the moment that by education, disposition and cultural tastes she herself was one of those first-nighters.10 The CLF experiences and those Queensland towns had melded in Astley’s mind and were ideal settings for novels, especially the one she was now writing (A Kindness Cup).
She was also extending her imaginative range, looking at the colonial devastation of the South Pacific rim. Despite Davis’s opinion that the public did not read novels set in the South Pacific, Astley continued researching the history of ‘blackbirding’ – native populations of Pacific islands forced or tricked into working in the canefields of the north – but that book (Beachmasters) was some years away. For the moment she was preoccupied with the absurdities of life in Queensland. She was attracted to perversity, and her home state delivered that.
Eileen, on the other hand, was dubious about Astley’s possible move to the far north. She had urged her daughter to give up smoking so that she could enjoy this new home ‘amongst the trees’ – despite the ‘mosquitoes’ – and concluded with, ‘the heat is dreadful’. Eileen would never understand why Astley rushed towards it.11
It was both incredible and somehow predictable that as an ex-but-always-to-be Queenslander, Astley would run into her own past, even in the far north. After almost forty years she wrote to Moira Knudson, her rebellious pal from All Hallows’, asking whether Moira knew somewhere Astley and Jack could sit on top of a mountain in the rainforest and look over the sea and play loud lieder and chamber music. There must be total privacy and room for one very large piano.
After telling Astley that her books reminded her of the work of Carson McCullers – ‘You couldn’t have said a nicer thing,’ Astley replied – Moira told her that a property right on the nearby creek had come onto the market. In no time at all Thea and Jack were looking at the Kuranda house they would buy, while Thea and Moira observed each other with the curiosity of girls who suddenly realised they were fifty years old.12
Meanwhile, Thea continued ‘rushing about in Sydney’, as Eileen saw it, and there was plenty of evidence that life back in town was indeed very, very busy. It was not just that Astley’s life was full and her reputation developing rapidly; change was in the air, much of it brought on by the election of the Whitlam Labor government the previous year, in 1972. With that came the much-talked-of changes to cultural funding, with the Australia Council replacing the old Commonwealth Literary Fund. The cultural powerbrokers of the time, later to be called the ‘first eleven’, were to make up the first Literature Board. Astley was invited to join.
She was finding the work at Macquarie more than enough, with rising student numbers, and she was now being called upon for advice as an experienced member of staff. Without the title or the salary to match, she was less than flattered. She pushed on, quietly furious, unable to find people who would understand and care about her feelings. Several of Astley’s award-winning books had been displayed at a university open day, and she took to pointing out how much more creative work she had produced than other staff members, many of whom were likely to be paid more than she. So the invitation to be a member of the Literature Board, a part-time commitment, was a welcome acknowledgement of her worth. This would not be about the academy: it was about books, writers, her world.
Many on the original Literature Board were people she knew: Richard Walsh, A. D. Hope, Elizabeth Riddell, Thomas Shapcott and Judah Waten, for example. Rodney Hall, an English-born writer from Brisbane whose path (surprisingly) had not crossed with hers at any point, had helped set up the new board. Astley worried about meeting him. Years back she had written a negative review of one of his books, saying that an Englishman couldn’t write about Australia, a comment she now regretted.
From Hall’s point of view, Astley had published a story about unpleasant characters that he was convinced were modelled on two of his closest friends. Without having met her, he decided he didn’t like her. Astley could have guessed he would feel like this. Australia’s literary community was a tight-knit one; Hall had not been in the group favoured by Beatrice Davis or Douglas Stewart. And Astley had her own bone to pick with newly appointed chair Nancy Keesing, who had written a negative review of Boat Load. There would always be this kind of tension in such circles with occasional genuine feuds, offset by what Astley called ‘flummery gossip’, which she enjoyed.
With the 1974 Adelaide Writers’ Festival coming up, she decided the best thing was to be direct with Rodney Hall. She spotted him talking in a doorway, went straight to him and said, ‘Oh, we haven’t met and I’ve got a bone to unpick with you.’ It was not friendship – yet – but Hall recalls it because ‘it was such a ringing sort of thing. Very Thea, to start off with, “We’ve got a problem, let’s see what it is.”’ She carried this approach into board meetings. Hall said that when Astley came out with ‘incredibly definite ideas’ at board meetings, often expressed humorously, they would lead to ‘wonderful conversations because she wasn’t locked in – she’d fire a whole lot of shots across the bow and see what came out of it’.13
Literature Board meetings were efficient and members got through a great deal of work, but with Astley the meetings were also fun. She could spark off others in the group who were also lively and outspoken characters. Members had dinner together after meetings and visited each other’s homes. Partners, including Jack, added to the throng once the work was done.
The room was unapologetically smoke-filled. Between them, Astley and Fay Zwicky created an oxygen-free zone that would be impossible for today’s non-smokers to survive. Michael Costigan, then director, thought the two women were very similar in personal style – throaty, confident and outspoken. While they ‘talked kids’ he appreciated that they seemed sympathetic to him as the father of a family of young children.
It was a friendly board during these years, and there was little open hostility about decisions. Astley was polite enough but others sensed ambivalence in her attitude towards government funding for writers. Her often generous attitudes always had an underside like this: she affected a ‘nobody helped me and I did it, why can’t they’ attitude, which broke out now and then in off-the-cuff remarks.14
Astley had a similarly ambivalent response to the growth in university creative writing degrees, which she sent up even though she had been one of the first teachers of creative writing.
Like so many of her positions on issues, this condemnation of government support for writers didn’t ring true in practice. Whenever Astley met beginner writers, she couldn’t wait to share the hopes and woes of the ‘craft’. She did this, while trying not to question government help for writers per se; indeed, she was well aware that she could never have written at least two of her books (The Well Dressed Explorer and The Slow Natives) without help from the Commonwealth Literary Fund.15
The hard work involved in being a board member must have weighed on Astley at this time: before external assessors were a part of the assessment process, the board members did all the work. This meant reading hundreds of applications from writers about propos
ed books, and dozens from publishers about subsidies for books they hoped to publish. Back in the early 1970s, Costigan recalls, Thea did not generally oppose many of the decisions, including a contentious publishing subsidy for the multinational William Collins, who were bringing out the monumental Poor Fellow My Country by Xavier Herbert. She was no fan of big money going to publishers (at the expense of writers, in her view) but she knew that an Australian novel that took on the dispossession of the land from its original inhabitants had to be published.
Aboriginal history was now in any case foremost in her mind. She had been appalled by the living conditions of Aboriginal families in the north, near her Kuranda house. She had just spent over two years, between 1972 and 1974, writing a novel based on an old true story from the area about an Aboriginal woman who was terrorised, chased and forced to suicide, child-in-arms, over a nearby cliff edge (known as ‘The Leap’).
Astley knew that this newest novel, A Kindness Cup, published in 1974, would bring nerve-wrecking public exposure because she was examining the politics of race. The central character is bitter teacher Tom Dorahy, who returns to the town where he had brought classical education to the unwilling outback inhabitants with a ‘zealot’s earnestness’.16 The book is particularly violent – something Astley had objected to in a novel by the American author Robert Coover some years before.17
In a radio interview she had said that Australian writers were ‘jumping on the US bandwagon’ and that such issues were overriding the importance of character.18 However, in writing a novel about the cruelty of white settlement and its effect on the Aboriginal people, she needed to describe physically gruesome episodes. It was the only outlet for her anger, apart from activism.
Jeff McMullen, now a friend of some years, had initially been surprised by Astley’s empathy with the Aboriginal population near Kuranda. He knew that socially and politically he and Astley cared about the same things; their discussions were always animated. For Astley, the answer to ‘what was to be done’ always came back as ‘she’d write the story of how it came to be’.19
When the heat wasn’t overwhelming, Kuranda in the long university breaks breathed freedom into Astley’s writing. She would always be drawn towards ‘that do-it-tomorrow feeling … the plants, the rainforest, the water cobalt off the shore, the tropicana’.20 When Tom Dorahy announces, ‘I’m single and thirty-seven and in love with landscape’, it is a fair expression of Astley’s sentiments at this later time in her life. Astley became defensive – ‘I’m not really trying to be Jane Austen of the rainforest. The setting is as much an emotional one as a physical one’ – and had to reclaim her work from the trivialising effects of the exotica of the north that she herself had nevertheless stamped on every page.21
It was hard for readers to decode this odd combination of ‘stern high-mindedness’ and ‘a whole-hearted delight in the sensual qualities of the physical world’.22 A Kindness Cup won the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award in 1975 (worth $3,000 and therefore twice as much as the last Miles Franklin), only the second year of the award. The advance against royalties she had signed with Nelson publishers had been $600 on signature – prizes were becoming more generous than advances. Astley’s change of direction and subject in an ‘incipient tragedy’ that ‘degenerates into uneasy comedy’ did worry some reviewers.23 Some saw a writer running out of teachers, small towns and islands.
Astley felt hesitant about being seen as part of the established literary culture. New, younger writers had been the subject of discussion – not only at the Literature Board meetings but in publishing circles and in the press generally. The culture of publishing had changed as these emerging writers such as Peter Carey and Murray Bail were ‘chatted up’, encouraged and offered deals by publishers in competition.24 Nobody was going to chat her up because, as she took to saying, she wasn’t part of the ‘ghetto de Balmain’.25
As a member of the board Astley saw some of this new writing, and was less than impressed with it. She was sensitive to what she saw as a lack of writing craft in these new works, all present-tense sludge piling up, with little authorial shaping. An in-house memo at Nelson paraphrases her: ‘If only they could see the crap I’ve been reading accepted by other publishers.’26 However, as she watched these new writers become increasingly prominent, she feared ending up left behind or overlooked as a writer. Her multifarious resentments now included lack of critical attention; publishers and their trickery; disrespect for the ‘craft’ of writing; disdain for the academy and its view of writing; poor treatment of her by Macquarie University; and declining literacy standards.
She had championed the cause of writing but was also convinced that these ‘new writers’ were getting serious critical attention that had been denied her. Frank Moorhouse and others were writing short fiction – Moorhouse’s were ‘discontinuous narratives’ with a group of characters, known to each other, floating in and out of each other’s story – but she had always written stories too. Astley chose not to acknowledge her very public awards, not to mention the growing list of her titles now coming out in paperback. Instead, she brooded over the worst examples of her treatment by journalists, such as the time New Idea magazine had run an article on her handwriting, describing it as ‘slightly emotional but realistic’ and asserting, ‘I have to repeat that Ms Astley’s writing shows a wonderful brain.’27 No, she wasn’t associated with the ‘ghetto de Balmain’, Astley’s phrase for a local inner-city-based arts culture of younger writers she didn’t in fact want to be part of, but she also didn’t want to lose readers. Astley’s need for approbation would always be too strong to moderate this mood. Mark Macleod wondered whether she was becoming a ‘victim of her own diffidence’.28
Doubts fed other doubts. Years before, in The Slow Natives, she had written of the ‘brain in splints limping home to its last haven’; now she felt as if hers were in the same situation, without the haven. On the surface everything was fine but there was always an underside. Ed was making great progress with his music – but what about a secure job? Her brother, Phil, was settled at Campion House in Melbourne but his fragility could not be denied; Eileen was less scornful than she had been but repeated herself in letters, her health declining. Evidently it was Thea’s health that bothered her mother.
Thea and her family had survived Eileen’s most recent visit well enough, with Jack doing the cooking and Ed offering a trip into the Conservatorium, but Astley sometimes found difficulty in enjoying even the pleasant things.29 This was Eileen’s last visit before Jack departed for his 1975 trip to the United States as a sixtieth birthday present to himself. Thea, who was to be a writer-in-residence at Rollins College, Florida, and Ed would join him later. It would be a welcome break for Jack and Thea. ‘Thanks for putting up with me,’ she had written in his birthday card.30
In the meantime, Astley got through at Macquarie as best she could. Little things niggled; her responses flooded even simple conversations with what seemed to others disproportionate angst. Astley took perverse amusement in her own rages.
She was enjoying a new-found public reputation as a curmudgeon. What did she have to lose? Her chief target was the ‘numbers game’ of education, the need to pass a certain proportion of students, who knew already that she could be more likely to fail them than other staff members might. This echoed her own irritation with the university’s treatment of her. And besides, she always insisted on the primacy of correct as well as beautiful language. Speaking on radio in 1977 Astley was blunt: ‘I do think the new systems that are less demanding of performing the basics have given an enormous tail to the unis.’31 What she saw was like a beast, growing beyond its habitat; the politics of education driving it towards the commerce of numbers, with drastic results.
She had burst into print in the national newspaper The Australian on the same subject in 1975: ‘Grammar’ was ‘now the dirtiest seven-letter word in the language,’ she declared. Referring to Judith Wright’s ‘Bull
ocky’, she quoted a student: ‘In the poem “Bullocky” she describes the bollocks and their tracks that are gone and made what for a different type of life.’32
Frank Devine, who would later become a columnist and editor at The Australian, had sent the draft of Astley’s article to the poet A. D. Hope, now nearing retirement from the Australian National University. His reply to Astley made writing the article – and the frosty looks in the staffroom – worth it for her. Hope reminded her of better days, ‘that splendid lunch’ at Macquarie with Alex Craig and Professor Piper, and her ‘even more splendid irreverent asides – not always so sotto voce that their victims could miss them’.33
He had spotted a despairing recklessness that had crept into Astley’s sense of persecution.
Jack’s letters from the US, arriving almost weekly, had been a real comfort – pages and pages of news and concern for her. Astley did not express her bitterness about Macquarie. She was looking forward to her trip to the US the following year, a punishing backwards and forwards plan from Florida, to Orlando, Seattle, San Diego, and back to Florida, visiting university campuses. Ed would go his own way but fly in from Las Vegas to meet her in San Diego. Then there were four more years to her retirement in 1979, when she and Jack would move to Kuranda.
The first few months of 1976 passed without major event. Astley’s university position was discussed without mention of retirement, and she agreed that she would like a lectureship. There were quite a few issues of concern closer to home. Eileen had developed the irritating habit of commenting on the works of Australian writers Astley was teaching; Patrick White’s The Vivisector, she decided, should be banned.34
This might be ignored, but Phil was again not well, and that was much sadder. He never missed a family birthday and always visited when he passed through Sydney, preferring to stay at the Stella Maris Club for Catholic Seafarers than with his sister; some of his hideouts were exotic enough for Astley’s novels. She enjoyed the warmth of their shared bond. He kept in touch – not just politely – but in letters fondly reminiscing about their favourite poems and music. She still had the poems he had written in 1943 as a novice priest for The Canisian – all Gerard Manley Hopkins-type imagism – and his musings on music in the form of poetry.