Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  Astley had been a schoolgirl when she knew that she wanted to be in the world in a way that Phil wanted to be out of it. Music and poetry were pathways to another world, one they could both be in. Yet here was Phil all these years later, unable to hear confessions because of his poor hearing and unable to preach because of a nervous stutter. Eileen was depressed by Phil’s fate, blaming it on the treatment for his previous breakdown.35 Astley now recognised in letters the nervous mannerisms that seemed to belong to the whole family, each of them taking turns to worry out loud about someone tampering with the mail or trying to steal it.

  Eileen was still living alone at the Ashgrove house but her future was becoming increasingly problematic. She was growing older and her memory was failing. Thea and Phil were in constant contact about her, though Phil did most of the writing. Astley promised him she would write to their mother every few weeks from overseas; Phil planned to be in Brisbane the following year. Neither of them expected Eileen to deteriorate quickly; they did not know what to expect from an elderly parent of increasing frailty.

  This experience with the parent–child bond led Astley to look at her relationship with her own son. Perhaps because she had accomplished so much already with her writing, she could always see what motherhood had brought to her that nothing else could have or would do. She declared, ‘I’d give all my books away for the privilege of having a child … Ed was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.’36 Theirs had been a strong bond from the start and as Ed entered adulthood their witty rapport only got stronger. There were no jokes better than those they shared; Ed came to understand her not just as his mother but as the individual she was. He was exasperated by his mother’s behaviour and their relationship was often tempestuous, but they could always overcome such times. Humour and music guaranteed a deep affection.

  Astley’s novels, and the stories she was now assembling for a collection to be called Hunting the Wild Pineapple, were full of portraits of sensitive young males, such as the narrator Keith Leverson (the young boy from the 1965 novel The Slow Natives). Beatrice Davis at Nelson was uncomfortable with Astley’s shift in literary style from novel to short story, but also her change in tone, to harsher satire about ‘youth’; she was writing about ‘the modern young seeking escape and the good earth and the dole queue’.37 Davis wrote to publishing director Robert Sessions: ‘I wish it were one novel rather than a series of stories. But there seem to be few rules these days (Wilding, Moorhouse etc) and the writing is outstanding.’38

  Hunting the Wild Pineapple would be launched (reluctantly) as a discontinuous narrative, interlinked stories much like Frank Moorhouse’s work. Two in-house editors had to be mollified by Davis’s promise that Astley would follow her editorial advice and all would be well. Davis’s attitude to Astley’s writing was typically blunt, and it would have infuriated Thea had she ever seen it, repeated often as it was: Astley was ‘no best-seller’ but ‘a writer who adds distinction to our list and we can’t afford to lose her’.39

  Astley still had one last salvo to fire at the university. She noticed on return from her overseas study leave that all talk of a lectureship had evaporated under the familiar excuses about policy and promotions. She wrote to the Head of School, Professor A. Gibbs:

  It is now abundantly clear to me, the oldest senior tutor in the Commonwealth if not in living memory, that the school has neither the wish to make me a lecturer nor the slightest intention of doing so. I find the attitude grossly expedient and cynical towards me as well as the students in this matter; it becomes a case of Leacock’s boarding-house geometry: ‘All Double rooms being taken, a single room may be said to be a double room.’ … I have been teaching for ten years at Macquarie now. During those ten years I have produced three books of my own (two of which won three major national awards) and edited a fourth. Four books more, I would suggest, than ninety per cent of the staff has produced. Admittedly they were fiction; but listening to critical theories of some who are hierarchic seniors while being twenty years my junior I must confess to curiosity in another branch of fiction whose inane currents I have never ridden.40

  In fact, Astley had been thinking of adding critical writing to her credentials. She and Mark Macleod had been sharing lectures, with Astley speaking on Barbara Baynton and Patrick White, but she wanted to write about the poet Bruce Dawe and her friend Tom Keneally. The Pineapple stories must take precedence, however, and she would see what (if anything) came of the other academic work in due course. Towards the end of 1977 she was appointed a fellow in Literature and Creative Writing. It was a placatory gesture on the part of the university and it came too late to please Astley, though she accepted it. Why should she be grateful?

  Her mother was of the opinion, as usual, that God had been good to Astley and that she should thank him by going to Mass. God was nearer than even Eileen thought. Cecil had now been dead sixteen years and she had managed a life alone extremely well, keeping close to neighbours and family, but also managing a house and garden with a degree of physical stamina that alarmed Phil (‘I hope you don’t mow the grass. It is really too much for your years.’).41 Thea and Phil’s letters about Eileen were never about her physical frailty: aged eighty she was old, of course, but her mind was the issue. In recent months Astley had noticed a plaintive tone creeping into Eileen’s letters, hints that perhaps she should be in an old people’s home.42 In the New Year, in tremulous handwriting, she confessed she had forgotten her daughter’s address. ‘Time, the great heel’, was getting ready to stomp.

  By May of 1978 Eileen was miserable and every small task was a huge effort. She told her children that she intended to go into a nursing home, an unusually self-possessed decision given the circumstances. Phil used his networks in the Church to find the right one, and eventually discovered Villa Maria in Fortitude Valley, about ten minutes by car from the Astley family home in Ashgrove. The home was dedicated to the so-called Black Josephite order, not the Brown Josephs, as Phil told his sister, a distinction Phil made in deference to his mother’s devoutness as much as from his meticulous knowledge of ecumenical history.43 According to one of Eileen’s neighbours, Eileen was crying for joy because the nuns would be close.

  A protection order that let the state trustees deal with the estate would help see to the sale of the family home and distribution of the assets; neither Phil nor Thea had any wish to be involved with those details. From Villa Maria they received weekly reports on Eileen’s wellbeing – much of it heartening (she was gaining weight). However, on 26 August 1979, the day after Astley’s own birthday, the ‘war against clocks’, as Astley liked to call it, was lost for Eileen when her death came suddenly. She was buried next to Cecil, whose gravestone carried the traditional ‘may his soul rest in peace’. The wish for Eileen was that she would also rest in peace, though there was no mention of her soul.

  14

  Jane Austen of the rainforest

  I’m not really trying to be the Jane Austen of the rainforest. The setting is as much an emotional as a physical one and a gesture towards the long-standing love affair I have had with the geography of this state.

  Thea Astley, ‘Writing in North Queensland’, 19811

  Her mother’s death was a reminder to Astley that all human life is the victim of time. She hardly needed to be reminded: this was something she’d expressed in her earliest poetry – ‘Enter – harshness/The facing of the world’.2 The 1979 move up north in the December heat had been taxing, the weather turning thoughts into electronic circuits with tiny filaments charging each other. Weather had its way of making all wounds fresh wounds. Living seemed a paltry business; so too the business of writing.

  In the months following Eileen’s death Astley was facing publicity for the Pineapple stories in a grim mood, as usual talking down any possible success: winning the Miles Franklin Award, she announced, was the ‘kiss of death’. Writing was ‘private’. ‘Mixing with other writers is wasting you
r time.’3 In reality, Astley was now mixing with many writers, and was engaged in a more social network of literary activity than she had ever been. The move north would not change any of that. Her life had become steadily more gregarious since her Literature Board involvement, which had brought some close friendships with other women writers on the board such as Fay Zwicky. Fay shared Astley’s view that bringing the arts to regional Australia was important; she was an advocate for Western Australia, knowing how much more was needed for a region just as geographically remote as Astley’s Queensland.

  With increasing invitations to writers’ festivals and residences and with Kuranda as a refuge, Astley moved back and forth as needed, just as she had been doing during university breaks. Ed remained at 44a Dorset Street. He was happy there with his ‘little pals’, quite the grown-up and even giving dinner parties. Irritable as Astley could be with life, Ed could do no wrong.4

  Back in Sydney, Astley took a bath to remove an engorged tick (‘Jack, watch out for them in the jungle’), which had safely transported itself from Queensland, and contemplated her split existence. Kuranda was next to rainforest. Astley was awed by the place, which was already indivisible from the characters forming in her mind. She was now moving away from the urban satire for which she had become so well known; she was discovering a different voice for herself in this fresh situation, drenched in the tropics she loved. She thought about the Djabugay people’s ownership of the land. She knew that for them it had been a place where young people were taught stories, culture and language, a far cry from the hippie culture that had supplanted it.

  Or was it? The bohemian young people who sought an alternative life in the wilderness had their stories too, like the character ‘Wait-a-while’ in the Pineapple collection. Astley had named him after the plants (Calamus spp.) that were all over the forest, boasting little hooks that allowed them to climb tree palms and stick to visitors’ clothing. New tracks over several swampy low-lying areas had been built so that visitors could ‘walk one track’, as the elders said. It was a sentiment that appealed to her.

  The place, the stories, and the stories to come were always on her mind whenever she returned to the city, which she did for remaining commitments at Macquarie and with the Literature Board. Leaving Jack behind, she wrote, ‘The south is so dull after the north’, ‘Uni is the same’, and, ‘There’s more social life where you are, love. It ain’t here.’5 It was half of the truth: their comfortably divided lives were blossoming in Kuranda among the conviviality of the Knudsons and near neighbours, a community in which a new ‘Thea and Jack’ seemed to be forming. This was now a partnership without the rancour of the earlier years of their marriage and with all the good things – wit, history (theirs alone), Ed, tenderness – still intact. It was like love as a form of benign fatalism, perfect for Astley.

  She and Jack always exchanged letters when apart (though to others Astley would claim ‘letter-writing quite an effort’ and that she actually wrote few), and among the domestic trivia of car bills, power bills, banking and tools for hacking away at tropical undergrowth, all tallied in columns of figures by Thea, there was real warmth of feeling. ‘When are you are coming up, Thea?’ Jack wrote at the end of one letter and, more intriguingly, ‘You are in for an absolutely delightful surprise when you enter the second bedroom.’6 He had bought her what she most desired: a piano. He was missing her.

  Because Jack was ten years older and had been such a strong emotional support, it was hard for Astley to think of him as frail. Back in the late 1960s he had had ‘giddy spells’, as Eileen had called them; now he was complaining about his eyesight. He had macular degeneration and needed to have an eye operation in Cairns.

  Eileen’s estate was worth $17,530, shared equally between Phil and Thea. Cecil and Eileen and Ashgrove and Brisbane and all that life added up to $17,530.7 There it was, thought Astley. No matter what the amount, the sum was the same: you live, you work, you die. We ‘walk one track’.

  Jack and Thea shared this fatalism, laughing in the face of it all. Here they were, two ‘superanuands’, as Astley took to calling them, with sixty years of the ‘daily grind’ between them. Now in retirement the habits of frugality persisted, even though Jack and Thea were not short of money. Being careful with finances was a state of mind rather than a necessity. Bare simplicity in matters of house and furnishings might have been aesthetic, but Jack and Thea’s meticulous care with expenditure was psychological and emotional.

  Good things came Astley’s way but always, from her point of view, too late. Her one venture into literary criticism, Three Australian Writers (on Bruce Dawe, Barbara Baynton and Patrick White), seemed amusingly post-the-point, published in 1979, just as she had left academe. Kuranda had its dangers: living there gave Astley time to think, worry, imagine, visit and revisit wrongs. The litany often started with Macquarie’s treatment of her but embraced her publishers’ treatment too, ranging over her critics’ misunderstanding of her and the underestimation of her work. She used acceptance speeches for her awards to air frustrations about writing and her jaundiced views of readers, a perverse thing to do in the circumstances: ‘I think they think that having exposed our pips of souls, our mini-talents, we’re fair game. I mean they don’t have to pay to hate us. They can borrow us from libraries. Maybe that’s why they have this marvellous contempt for writing activities.’8 She concluded that writers were resented.

  ‘It’s lonely at the bottom,’ Astley wrote in pencil on her typescript of this particular speech. Perhaps, but was she at the bottom? Was Australian writing even at the bottom? Hardly. She could be difficult to follow for audiences: celebration and deflation in one act.

  Astley could persist in this state of mind despite all manner of good omens. In the early 1980s there were plenty of these: she had been invited to visit Canada; the Pineapple collection had won an award from the James Cook Foundation for Australian Literary Studies; her friend Hal Porter had written to say he loved the collection; she had just been named as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM); and that grand dame of literary academe Professor Leonie Kramer had written congratulating her – something Astley would have valued enormously.9 Fay Zwicky was keen for her to come to a residency at the University of Western Australia the following year.

  Astley could choose to receive her Order of Australia in either Canberra or Cairns, but she chose to go nowhere. She was brooding about her battle with Richard Walsh earlier in the year, about his selling of her original manuscripts to the Mitchell Library without her knowledge or consent. That situation had epitomised for Astley the powerlessness of the writer in the publisher–author dynamic.

  In Astley’s view publishers were tyrants and cowards, ‘entrepreneurs of the book’, no more deserving of credit than the mobs of sweltering businessmen carving up the tropical north. (To add insult to injury, Richard Walsh had been near Kuranda and hadn’t called in to see her – his apologetic Christmas Eve letter did nothing to mitigate this.10) At the same time she was none too happy with Nelson’s handling of the story collection, writing fiercely to Davis about the review list and the poor distribution of Pineapple:

  … why oh why would the PR girl send copies to Woman’s Day and Women’s Weekly and OMIT the Bulletin and the National Times, reviews in both of which would please me far more than any amount of notice in those other ghastly mags – Knit Your Own Royal Family …11

  Astley was seriously beginning to think she needed a new publisher. She had kept secret from Davis and Nelson the approach of the American Frank Thompson, publisher with the University of Queensland Press. He had impressed her the previous year with his offer to reissue her personal favourite, The Acolyte, in paperback, and the fifteen per cent royalty he was offering was double her last royalty percentage. It was the kind of literary commerce Astley had been dreaming of for thirty years: she, a serious writer, was at last being taken seriously. Even she was beginning to feel that the battle lines were slow
ly shifting: literary writers were becoming valued, and this time she would be a front-runner. She decided to accept Frank Thompson’s offer, which had firmed up very quickly after their initial contact. It was satisfyingly appropriate to sign the contract in her own name, not her married one, as she had done before. But her distrust of publishers generally was not quite dead: she decided to hold off on signing her next work of fiction over to UQP. There might even be a chance to up the ante.

  Astley had just written about the literary scene in north Queensland for a literary magazine, published in 1981.12 Non-fiction writer Patsy Adam-Smith had been in west and central Queensland for work on her book The Shearers, and sent Astley a postcard describing the area as ‘an open-air asylum’.13 The two women had a lot in common, being of the same age. Adam-Smith was passionately interested in railways, having been adopted by railway workers, and this would have appealed to Astley’s love-hate relationship with ‘rail motors’.

  Astley certainly knew about open-air asylums. She saw landscape as Tom Keneally did, as a ‘pressure on character, as a foil, as a parallel big world to the little world of man’s soul’.14 Astley was writing about the Australian tropics within a European, almost Conradian tradition. Instead of the observer in Heart of Darkness, she has the most ordinary of folk, ‘oddballs’, somehow not-so-innocently implicated in the dark events she describes. When Hunting the Wild Pineapple was published in America by Putnam’s in 1990 – ten years later – reviewers noted her ‘dark assessment of the world’ and wondered why ‘women in general … [didn’t] fare very well’.15