by Karen Lamb
Astley told Penguin’s Brian Johns that she was getting tired of living in north Queensland, which she said was ‘full of Real Estate Agents and hookers’. She had tentatively offered her next novel to UQP on the proviso that they would sell and promote her work into the US. ‘I hate breaking my word,’ wrote Astley to Johns, ‘but I think their chances of getting me US pizzazz are remote.’ Since her father had bought ninepenny Penguins when Astley was a child, she had been a fan, and the thought of having her work published as Penguin originals, not paperback reprints, was immensely attractive. She was delighted when Penguin decided to publish Beachmasters in Australia and sold the American rights to Viking.42 In fact, a new era of Australian–American publishing was just beginning. With more Australian authors employing literary agents to represent them, many soon found themselves splitting and selling the rights to their work in separate territories.43
The Penguin publishing coup accelerated Astley’s growing dissatisfaction with Queensland, the conservative politics of which she hated with a passion. She wrote to Ed, ‘This is a banana republic and if Joh doesn’t go I feel myself like shifting to northern NSW. Didn’t know I was such a political cat!?’44 Large areas around Kuranda were being developed. A few years later Astley explained to an audience at a literary event: ‘I was having a love affair with the scenery in that area. Every departure from the place hurt … [but] the developer rot had set in and the hi-rise had started and the bulldozers were out along the Cape Trib track and real estate agents were selling two-acre lots at Cow Bay.’45
This despoliation seemed to Astley peculiarly Queenslandish. Life at Kuranda was also becoming much more difficult. The heat made doing the everyday tasks – especially keeping the grass under control – exhausting. Jack’s eyesight was seriously deteriorating and he would soon need to be near specialists. They were a long way from Ed. The remoteness, once so attractive, was turning into a liability. ‘It’s hell at this distance,’ she wrote to her Penguin editor, Jackie Yowell, as she struggled with editing and proofs.46 ‘Typists in Cairns are rare on the ground and from reports I’ve had, the spelling errors they include are amazing.’ She asked Penguin to copy her manuscript for her, not believing there was a Xerox machine ‘in cooee up here’.47
In 1984 computers and printers existed, not that Astley owned them. The Green Hermes typewriter had given up the ghost and in Cairns she had purchased its modern cousin, the Cream Hermes Baby typewriter. She was ‘bashing out’ drafts – except for The Acolyte, she always put manuscripts through at least three. Somehow feeling geographically removed from the place of publication increased the emotional isolation of writing books. This was particularly true of Beachmasters, caught up as she was with the complexities of dialogue in English as well as French-influenced pidgin.
Astley was still capable of taking offence, nearly always about finances, offers and contracts. If there was a price to be paid for being a Penguin author, she wasn’t having any of it. Anticipating her ‘American moment’ for Beachmasters later in1984, she was making suggestions for covers.48 Within ten years Astley would secure contracts with a right of refusal for the cover.
Astley could give off contradictory impressions about her life at this time. When a US interviewer asked her during her Beachmasters tour whether she talked and visited with writers much, she said that she didn’t. ‘I don’t feel it’s important for writers to mix with other writers. It’s a very lonely occupation. I don’t think you need other writers. Jane Austen proved she didn’t need anyone except her own community. God, how well she did that!’49 But despite this self-consciousness about reputation, most people discovered that to meet in person Astley was vivacious, warm, vital, and interested.
Her life was a contradiction because her needs were contradictory: insider-outsider-solitude. If she didn’t ‘need’ other writers, she certainly enjoyed the camaraderie she felt in their presence. By now Astley was a regular guest at nearly all major writers’ festivals around Australia and was frequently asked to launch the books of other writers.
Astley’s very active literary life provided further incentives for her to move south. It was time for another escape. The previous three years had been busy ones: Astley had been in Santo, Vanuatu’s largest island, for research for Beachmasters; at the University of Queensland in 1983; in Darwin in May 1984; at the Harbourfront Writers’ Festival readings in Toronto, Canada, in October 1984; and at Biloxi, Mississippi, USA, for a residency and readings as part of a special session on Australian writers, a promotion supported by the Literature Board. Travel would be easier from virtually anywhere in New South Wales, though neither she nor Jack considered a return to Sydney. Anticipating the restlessness that was so much part of her character, Phil’s Christmas card for 1984 hoped her life would remain ‘calm and tranquil’.50 It was a hope against hope that only proved how well he knew his sister, for her life was not standing still. She had sustained an important loss with the death of Hal Porter in September 1984; he had been in a coma for months after being knocked down by a car.
Thea and Jack decided to move to New South Wales by the end of 1984. They had found nearly six acres of sloping bushland on a hilltop property in Cambewarra, two and a half hours’ drive south of Sydney. Within a few months of settling into their new home, Astley would see their decision vindicated by a small incident she felt justified her antipathy to Queensland. She had been asked by the Queensland Arts Council to conduct a writers’ weekend workshop, but her name was given as ‘Thea Ashley’. The name had been queried by the Arts Council, who said that a writer by that name didn’t exist.51 It was a simple misspelling but it was enough to recharge Astley’s anger towards what she saw as the wretched, shoddy attitudes of Queensland, the disrespect for writers or for achievement in anything that didn’t involve sport or money. She tossed off a furious letter of refusal. Damn Queensland!
Astley hoped to see her American star rise with the US publication of Beachmasters, her ninth novel. However, just as she faced the move to Cambewarra she read a review of her Toronto public reading in The Strand magazine: ‘Thea Astley, narrating passages from her latest book Beachmasters, was engaging, but her lengthy reading became self-indulgent. The romantic form of the novel was tiresome and strained.’52
A furious Astley wrote immediately to Penguin, ‘I do think that this published review is damaging to future sales and reviews of Beachmasters and I would like Penguin to take appropriate action.’53 A year of positives was turned around in a moment: it seemed that she would begin her new life in New South Wales once more feeling that she had been misunderstood. The Australian launch of Beachmasters was a few months away. Would they get it right?
PART 4
PERSONAL WEATHER
15
Pictures from a family album
But no one seems to hear her and she isn’t altogether sure if she has said what she intended saying. All her life has glittered with moments when the words uttered were not those meant, the phrase angled for caught up and wriggling on the hook of her tongue as something quite other.
She goes back to the start of things.
It’s Raining in Mango by Thea Astley, 19871
Newly arrived in Cambewarra, Astley got busy with a rush of tree planting, perhaps trying to turn southern New South Wales into Queensland rainforest. The effect was to virtually obscure the very view that she and Jack had purchased. People who knew their ways decided not to comment. The move had been the subject of years of hints and exclamations but, like many Thea-driven property purchases, was beguilingly rash. After a Canberra Wordfest in 1984 Astley had caught a long-distance train north, got a taxi from nearby Berry and looked at some properties in the Cambewarra area. She chose the third one ‘because she couldn’t be bothered looking anymore’. Astley’s near neighbour at Cambewarra, Marin Martinelli, could easily relate to this story. This was the Thea he would meet in cafés, umming and ahhing over menus. ‘Her eyes would close, a f
inger would go up, then slam – it could drop on just about anything in the menu. “I’ll have that!” she’d say to puzzled waiters.’2
Lot 9 Emerys Road, Cambewarra, was not as isolated as Kuranda had been, and that was the main thing. It was Thea who was more concerned about the need to be near amenities and health services, especially for Jack. His deteriorating eyesight due to macular degeneration would take its course and they needed to be ready. Thea was writing more or less constantly and Jack, as always, knowing how important this was to her, also agreed that being near other people might be good for both of them. Public commitments were now taking Thea away often and she knew that Jack found his solitude a little oppressive. The partnership had been – still was – generous to her.
The new property, more than six acres, brought with it a level of upkeep that they hadn’t anticipated. The land boasted not just a view but a spread of Paterson’s curse and blackberry brambles. There were also large areas of grass. They would have to purchase a ride-on mower. Thea mentioned in letters that this was intended for Jack, ‘saving his seventy-year-old bod’, but shortly after they moved south, his eyes became so bad that he was no longer able to drive at all.3 Thea as master-mower was something to behold if you happened to arrive at the right moment. Her small frame would be perched atop what was really an open-air tractor, giving the impression of control that was not necessarily evident in the expression of intense concentration on the driver’s face. The whole business was described as an adventure; Astley enjoyed the fact that it would shock people who thought a woman nearing sixty years of age was ‘past it’. But her bravado hid some bitter realities: Astley knew her role as a carer for Jack was beginning in earnest.
These pressures, and awareness of her own ageing, were taking their toll. Astley had been agitated about women as second-class citizens for decades, on the record, off the record, in her novels, but was now seeing for herself the double discrimination that came with ageing and being female. If you were older, female and a writer, you could make that three. In 1985 a review of Beachmasters entitled ‘Writers Contrast in Age and Style’ by well-known Sydney academic and writer Don Anderson appeared in The National Times. The novel, Anderson remarked rather pithily, was like a ‘sort of Absalom, Absalom! in the South Pacific, without Faulkner’s intellectual complexity’.4 This touched a hot wire of fury, so Astley wrote to him:
Dear Don Anderson,
Well, that was a nasty little review – but I’m glad to have broken the cycle. Mark Macleod once indicated to me that most of my unpleasant notices come from women … (Incidentally, I’m old enough to be your grandmother, too. Time out here for horrified denials of such genetic antecedents being possible on either side.) I don’t mind a bit being fifty-nine, nearly sixty … But I do get the impression from your review that you resent my age. Do you feel I should have hung up my typer the moment I hit fifty? Is there to be nothing left for the tottering senior citizen?5
Thoughts of the ‘sick state’ of Queensland politics were already giving way to nostalgia for the tropics Astley had just left. The story she had on her mind now was based on her own family history, but she wanted to write about a matriarchal family in the early days of such remote places. It would be about the pioneers of the tropic north, slogging it out through floods in crazy outback towns full of rotting mangoes. How many novels had mango in the title? It had to happen.
Since her US trip in 1984 Astley had been more alert to her publishing future: the last thing she wanted was premature memorialising. She was looking forward to reminiscing with Robert Ross, an academic who was researching and writing about her work, from Dallas, Texas, who was coming to Australia mid-year.
The smallness and intimacy of the University of Queensland Press seemed all the more obvious to Astley after her overseas experiences. It was a poorly resourced operation that had purchased its first office computers less than three years before; typed carbon copies of letters and handwritten production cards were the norm.6 Astley was looking carefully at the state of the copyright of her works and had convinced herself that The Acolyte was out of print, which it wasn’t, but she was keen to know what she could offer new publishers. She had also been seriously put offside by the UQP-attached university bookshop’s alleged ‘neglect of her presence’ two years ago when she had been a writer-in-residence. After being told The Acolyte was not out of print, she followed up with another letter complaining about the absence of any display of her works, which she described as ‘offensive’.7 At the same time, Astley was now actively looking for a US literary agent and probably already knew that a small publisher such as UQP would not be her future, despite its reputation for originating and promoting Australian fiction.
‘Bluster and bully[ing]’, wrote the UQP publishing editor Craig Munro, was part of ‘Thea’s usual style/charm!’8 In fact, the press had worked hard to appease Astley. They had tried not to mind having lost publication of Beachmasters to Penguin while they themselves were dealing with reprints of Item and versions of the paperbacks of Descant and The Acolyte. Publishing director Laurie Muller wrote a long letter answering a list of Astley’s complaints – the lack of a launch for Item, no books at the Guggenheim and Toronto readings the previous year, and so forth – concluding with his plan to pulp and reissue the paperback of The Acolyte, replacing what he regarded as ‘one of the most appalling jackets of all time’.9
The publication of Beachmasters kept Astley firmly planted in the moment. It was a novel she had worked particularly hard on, but so had Penguin. The use of dialogue in pidgin languages had been problematic and taken many extra hours of specialised editing by Penguin’s Carla Taines. After the launch in early 1985, even Astley was feeling a bit sheepish about her frequent despairing letters to Penguin. There had been, she wrote while still packing up Kuranda, ‘a wonderful launching party’ in Melbourne but it was the ‘decent review in The Australian’ that really restored her spirits, a way to repay Penguin for ‘taking a punt’ on her, she said, deflecting in her usual way.10 This time, Astley had to admit, they had got it right.
With the nasty National Times review behind her, Astley was agitating for extra copies of Beachmasters to submit for national awards, having given them out ‘like lollies’ at the recent Canberra Wordfest, and she asked Penguin to organise this.11 Astley was meticulous in these matters, more like her own mother than she might have been prepared to admit; Eileen had never wanted to take liberties, nor to feel obliged. Thea did not want to appear profligate or presumptuous in having ‘wasted’ copies. Would they deduct the cost of copies from her own royalties? asked Astley. She also enclosed unused Cabcharge vouchers – just in case someone ‘got hold of them and decided to travel by cab to Broome’.12
With the US publication of Beachmasters Astley had achieved an ambition dear to her heart, seeing her work emerge as part of the global book market. Five years earlier, in 1981, she and Fay Zwicky had had their doubts about the Australia Council’s new era of sponsorship.13 However, as recipients of financial assistance from the board, they both knew personally the value of the help.
Astley had been a board-sponsored writer-in-residence at the University of Queensland for 1982–83 and An Item from the Late News published by UQP had also attracted a publishing subsidy.14 The push to promote Australian literature overseas was a huge affirmation of her standing in the literary community and her 1984 trip to America had been generously sponsored by the Literature Board.15 It was not only about Australian literature either: the planned readings at the Guggenheim Museum (where Astley was joined by David Malouf) coincided with a major Australian art exhibition. For Astley, the trip was a moment in her writing life that would prove crucial.
In the US, she had been mixing with writers from a very different publishing context. Astley heard their talk of agents, the necessity, even, of having an agent; how you had to push your own commercial interests and publicity. Only a year before, Astley knew, the Literature Board had
engaged New York book publicist Selma Shapiro to assist in the promotion of books through more extensive reviewing in the US press.16 The amounts of money being paid to writers were much greater too – not something Astley would ever miss.
It was during and after this trip that many thoughts long buried began to surface and influence her sense of the novels she would yet write. For interviews, Astley had probably intended to run off the old lines – ‘I was always led to believe that books by women had no credibility’ – but hearing them in this new context – the fact that she was now a US-published author – changed everything. Astley’s sense of herself as an author permanently shifted; simultaneously, so did her perspective on that past self she was describing.
It seems likely that this was the moment when Astley realised she could do it – no, that she would do it: she would write the stories of women. The new novel with ‘mango’ in its title would be a beginning. For most of her life she had identified with her journalist father. It was noticeable to many how she never mentioned her mother. Now she thought: what about that other journalist, the runaway Con (Cornelius), her mother’s father? What about the life of the women he left behind? For a novelist who was one of those women, it was an irresistible line of descent for her new work.
Astley had already lived through a great deal of change in the world of Australian writing, but now it was changing again before her eyes. Her work was a bridge between generations of writers. Her new novel, which she titled It’s Raining in Mango, was a way of celebrating her own family’s past while looking to a new writing future.