by Karen Lamb
Many younger Australian women writers admired, even hero-worshipped Astley. She was now meeting many of these but also female publishers, editors and academics who understood her work. She was hearing their personal stories too. Astley, the self-described ‘people freak’, was always a talker – she would engage people in conversation at bus stops, cafés, anywhere – but more often now she spoke to women about themselves. In her early days of marriage, she had been close to some of the women of Dorset Street and Cheltenham Girls’. In literary circles of the 1950s and 1960s, Beatrice Davis had been her chief woman literary confidant and there had been women friends from the Barjai days. However, she had tended to form closer bonds with male writers such as Hal Porter and Tom Keneally.
Now there were many women who were not in the world of married couples, both independent and unmarried, such as Michelle’s mother, June, divorced and living a busy and productive life. Astley had always been fascinated by the romantic myth of love and marriage, but was newly intrigued by the ‘alternatives to the burden of marriage’ that these women had apparently found.17 Friendships with other women writers were becoming a key aspect of her life, and with her attendance at writers’ festivals, the list was growing: Fay Zwicky, Judith Rodriguez, Carmel Bird, Helen Garner, Patsy Adam-Smith, Glenda Adams, Janette Turner Hospital, Elizabeth Jolley, Kate Grenville, Gabrielle Carey. Suddenly, the world seemed full of Great Dames.
Astley’s way of writing about women was also changing. There were no more Gabby Jerrolds (the character from An Item from the Late News who had so dispirited Beatrice); no more nervy, inward-looking portraits of the artist-as-a-young girl. Astley’s novels featured women such as the suave and sexy Mrs Waterman (from the Hunting the Wild Pineapple story collection) who would be comfortable speaking their minds, a new version of femininity that appealed to the mature writer. The women in Astley’s novels were strong, with the kind of strength she had admired all her life, starting with the more forthright nuns in the Church.
Astley’s career could have ended here, with an estimable body of work resting respectfully on library shelves. But she had time to write and much to write about, and nothing to lose. But even she could not have predicted that her changes in subject and attitude would lead to half-a-dozen highly successful late-career novels, beginning with her ‘pictures from the family album’ (It’s Raining in Mango). Others followed from the mid-1990s onwards, including Reaching Tin River, Coda, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, and her last novel, Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader. From the writer who thought she might have ‘missed the bus’ in writing about women now came a second body of work to attract a new generation of readers.
Astley’s ideas about romance, love, sex, family, duty and self-sacrifice were all still in flux. She had not yet articulated male–female relationships in Euclidean theorems (parallel lines that never meet) as she would in Reaching Tin River. Astley was delving deeply into her maternal past, looking for that ‘female strength’ that would give new vitality to her work.18 This became her way of negotiating between the attitudes about women she had grown up with and those that now surrounded her.
Many of the Astley women in these late novels are in the process of a similar weighing up. Taken together Astley’s character types shaped the possibilities of womanhood as she saw them: strong and independent women, married women (resigned or disaffected) and whores (actual prostitutes or simply slaves to sexual desire). Positive examples of female sexuality would still be rare. Writing about sex itself remained a difficulty for Astley. She preferred to write about expert managers of Life such as the eccentric cowboy-attired Aunt Sadie in The Acolyte or Doss in An Item from the Late News, who is accused of being ‘unwomanly’ for shunning marriage and who succumbs to it ‘more from exhaustion than desire’.19 Jessica Olive in It’s Raining in Mango runs a pub. Astley was seeing women she now met compromise and negotiate (as she had in her own marriage), but continued to write of how ‘men can shrivel a woman in a marriage’.20 But leaving a marriage was not often an option for Astley’s characters, as she had felt it was not for herself.
No one should underestimate the energy that reciprocation brings to all relationships. Astley was now ideally placed to benefit from her new associations with younger women writers. She was the female mentor with the sage wit, the elder stateswoman who was ageless in her camaraderie and off-the-cuff encounters; she could even blow her own cool smoke-ring. Her early tendency to ‘burst in’ or demand friendship – as she had with Patrick White – was now in reverse; she waited for people to come to her.
Astley did at times resent the success of other writers, including the media response to them, but she could also be extremely solicitous of those still making a name for themselves. Carmel Bird remembers her phone ringing one morning during a writers’ festival, with the unmistakeable gravelly voice declaring: ‘This is Thea Astley,’ and confessing, ‘I’ve been awake for hours hanging on for a respectable hour to call.’ It was 7 am. Astley said she admired Bird’s writing and wanted to meet and support her.21
Other kindnesses followed (encouraging comments scribbled on book covers and suggesting Bird as the editor for an anthology), but Bird most clearly recalls the way Astley related to her as an equal; it was this that Bird felt was her real generosity.22 It was a quality Astley brought to group settings as well. When Helen Garner met Astley during a writers’ lunch, she couldn’t get over ‘how relaxed she was, in just hanging out with people she probably didn’t know all that well’. It was as though ‘she’d spent years practising in pubs’ – something Garner knew wasn’t the case. Garner noticed something else: ‘a bright face, looking from face to face as people spoke’. She realised that Astley had ‘the ability to sit in a group of people and see things’. She was moved by that; it was a quality she’d long noticed tended to disappear as people aged, with only the historian Manning Clark being the exception.23
This kind of writerly intimacy suited Astley, involving as it did lots of confidences and anecdotes for the keen listener but little else expected. It could be a powerful one-way connection for certain individuals who met Astley; a repertoire of ‘friends’ was building – at least people who felt they were friends – but without anyone actually getting close. Helen Garner wondered about this aspect of Astley. When she visited her in Cambewarra their shared love of music had been a welcome diversion from Jack still being ‘stroppy’ about a critical review Garner had written of An Item from the Late News years before. She and Astley danced to jazz. It was a sweet memory until ten years afterwards, when Garner read a feature about Astley. In the magazine article, the scene appeared almost exactly as it had happened to Garner, but the dancer was now Astley’s interviewer, the writer Mandy Sayer. ‘Maybe that’s the act Thea puts on,’ thought Garner.24 What was one to make of it?
Astley was not being insincere, but she was a performer. She was one of the first Australian writers who seemed to know instinctively that in this new public world of writing there could be no dissembling, except for the staged dramatic kind at which she was already expert. Where some writers bemoaned having to entertain, it suited Astley’s personality. She had never wanted to be seen to take herself too seriously and she developed a persona as a knockabout lady writer, full of stories. What her audiences saw was an entertainer; they were being primed for laughter. Whatever future nerves might take over, Astley had proved something to her own satisfaction: it was safest if you stuck with the laughs.
Perhaps her performances did look rather slick to others, as though Astley was just a savvy soul who had learned fast, but to her it must have seemed as if it were the world that was catching up. The fact that Astley could be extremely funny did not mean that she wasn’t deadly serious about life, especially about writing. Her performance, her projection of self, could harden at times; her one-liners could seemed forced and not particularly amusing. It was often social ineptness disguised as the desire to shock with humour. Ed was
not unlikely to find himself wincing in restaurants as his mother all but shouted, ‘He’s my son, not my toy boy’ to patiently smiling waiters.25 It is possible that with time we all become caricatures of ourselves but it was as if, once her public persona was perfected, Astley clung to it as emotional protection.
People thought Jack must be long-suffering but their relationship was not so simple, nor had it ever been. Many, like David Malouf, didn’t ‘get’ Jack, but Jack got Thea in a way that nobody else did.26 The confusion about Jack and Thea as a couple came out of the way Astley wrote about marriage in her fiction. Assumptions about Astley’s own marriage were not borne out of the reality. Her descriptions of marriage (‘they bore each other rancid’, ‘the silence of old marriage’) seemed so natural coming from Astley, yet they scarcely matched the real-life partnership that greeted neighbours or visitors to Lot 9 Emerys Road, Cambewarra.
The move to New South Wales had paid off in the way Astley had hoped. Not only was it closer to Sydney (and Ed) but it was near a largish town. Nowra was really a tatterdemalion clutch of centralised amenities in an otherwise pleasant coastal region, but it suited Astley’s needs. Within a couple of years Astley was nevertheless using her relative isolation to escape various offers to speak publicly – ‘14km from the nearest railway’, ‘I never drive to Sydney’ – evasion that was relatively new.27 More than ever, being available for Jack and his needs was priority. All sorts of people made efforts to visit – Ed and Michelle and her mother, June, of course – but also writers, editors, publishers and people from the Literature Board past and present. Young Jesuits, including Michael McGirr, who knew Phil from Campion House in Melbourne, would come up from their holiday house at nearby Gerroa for a ‘grand afternoon tea’ – and a fair dollop of Astley’s views on Catholicism.
To them her opinions were entertainingly familiar but also perverse: the nuns worked hard, the priests were lazy, why did they get rid of the Latin Mass? Guilt ghosted every conversation. But in their way these young Jesuits were paying court to Astley, and she loved it. She was flirting with exposing the absurdities of the Church as she had known it – or the Church as Astley’s parents had known it and had made it known to her. In this company she was protective and defensive about Phil: she knew he wasn’t an achiever in an order that ‘boasted a climate of achievement’.28
Close neighbours quickly became friends. Nowra was a place where one might find the kind of coffee shop Astley loved: all white plastic doilies and equally plastic bread, milk and sugar bowls. It was somewhere a writer could smoke and idle away time. Nothing in the fresh air of the new hilltop home had put Astley off smoking; she seemed immune to this anti-nature habit amid nature. This was how she appeared when she first met her neighbour Marin Martinelli. As he sat at the end of a pathway under a tree he saw Astley track her way down to him. ‘Ah, how terrific to find someone to share a cigarette with!’ she said. He sat there for their long first conversation, with Thea convinced he was smoking. He did not smoke, but he became a genuine confidant in a way that few did.
Marin’s life offered a rich set of circumstances and experiences that fascinated Astley. A gay man, he had been raised in an orphanage, travelled around the world for most of his life and most importantly was happy to talk about sex, any kind of sex. Even to him Astley never spoke about her brother as being gay, saying, ‘Phil was a nice quiet person’ – but Marin sensed her curiosity about homosexuality. She seemed unexpectedly naïve; her neighbour read her books and wondered how she could have written them. Marin got on with Jack, too, thinking he was ‘a pretty cluey bloke’. All this made for a free and easy four-way friendship when they met over meals with Marin’s more intellectual partner, Michael.
Thea and Jack were often at odds with each other over seemingly petty things, Marin could see, though Thea never really confided anything about the marriage. Thea could be very contrary. Marin asked Astley one day, ‘How on earth did you two get married?’ to which she answered simply that she didn’t know, a characteristic seriously-not-serious quip.
Jack was starting to look physically much older than their ten-year age difference would suggest, his eyesight all but gone, yet he still appeared to their neighbour to be the carer. This impression was adjusted one day when Marin heard a racket coming from inside their house. ‘I realised it was the two of them, chuckling away and shrieking with laughter.’29 He was sure at that moment what many might have surmised: Thea could never have survived with a different person.
As someone entirely outside the literary world, Marin was better placed than most to see Astley’s moods change. As they sat in the Nowra taxi rank, Thea’s preferred ‘smoko spot’, he watched her scribbling constantly, taking down all the activities and conversations she was overhearing while at the same time conducting a perfectly intelligible conversation with him. Hers was a full mind, a busy mind, hardly surprising in a novelist, he thought.
But there was a worrying edge to it too. When Thea told him – and kept telling him for weeks – that she had driven hundreds of miles and then retraced her route because she was convinced she had run over a hitchhiker, it was difficult not to be concerned for her level of anxiety.
It did seem as though some things ‘set her off’, domestic and family matters certainly, but perhaps the chemistry was just set. It was difficult to separate genuine distress from ‘Thea being Thea’, as Jack said. In the house, Jack was his own man, though he did not stand firm when Thea worked herself up to tears. Ed’s wife, Michelle, had no time for histrionics and could sense a ‘Thea-being-Thea’ moment coming on.
Michelle eventually came to understand that Thea was in fact being Thea out of compulsion, not especially from a desire for attention. Jack had always insisted that this was so. The blurting out, the one-liners – at any cost of offence – the complete inability to even carve a chicken or slice a cake were all of a piece. Of course, in the eyes of the public, Thea and Jack were now a celebrated Australian writer and her husband, but outside Astley’s literary engagements, she preferred to be considered as one equal partner in a marriage. Jack never complained, was happy to go along with Thea’s plans and was proud of her achievements. In return she was fiercely loyal to Jack, but also felt guilty about him.
It was a guilt that stretched back to all-but-forgotten days with Don Whitington and the years immediately following. How could Thea ever repay Jack for accepting the person who was ‘just being Thea’? Nothing would ever be enough. She seemed to grab any opportunity to even things out, to make things at least seem more equal. A few years after Thea and Jack moved to Cambewarra, Jennifer and Bryan Bruty moved in next door after long careers at the ABC. They never saw a power struggle, rather a marriage that had always been one of equals. Thea talked of ‘fitting the writing in’ around family. The Jack of her youth was reprised in romantic reimaginings of their first meeting at a classical music concert in ‘civilised’ wartime Brisbane.30
To these neighbours Thea seemed fun, with little talk of unhappy memories. They did, however, see some of that spirit dwindle as her life changed. Before too long Jack was unable to read at all, and material from the Blind Society piled up on the bench. Thea now seemed to be doing all the (hated) driving. To neighbours she seemed absurdly modest about writing, about her various talents, to the point of secrecy. In the lounge room stood a piano whose main function as far as the Brutys knew when they looked after the place, was to hide Thea’s cheque books in the bottom pedals. They never heard her play a single note.31
Cambewarra afforded Astley the ultimate in the twin modes of existence necessary to her writing. When Irene Stevens from the Literature Board visited, she was well aware that Thea ‘wanted to be in things – but away from them’. Thea was at her happiest sitting outside having a cup of tea in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. Irene knew Thea from Macquarie days in the 1970s when Astley had been her tutor; the two shared a Catholic background. Irene, who had dealt with writers for many yea
rs, was uniquely placed to understand Astley’s peculiar mixture of bombast and diffidence. She did not take seriously the litany of petty complaints that generally greeted her. Thea, she said, was always complaining about something – either starting on a high and getting to a low or vice versa, and what lay at the heart of this was the lot of the writer. Thea looked forward to seeing Irene; like so many writers, she badly needed someone who listened with real and undemanding awareness.32
By 1986 Astley was working very hard on It’s Raining in Mango, with her usual anxiety intensified by the feeling that she was indeed on a new writing journey, even if the setting for her work had not changed. Though tropical northern Australia had become Astley’s favoured locus, she could still be hypersensitive about it. When the publisher Bob Sessions dealt with later editions of the novel he made the mistake of casually asking her, ‘Isn’t it about time you moved locale?’ Astley bit back sharply, saying, ‘I don’t have any control over what I write … you can either publish it or not.’33 Sessions had seen Astley’s letters to Penguin on file and probably wondered whether a grudge was in the making. Fortunately for him, it was not.
In her old love-hate habit, Astley was missing the north despite being immersed in it through her writing. She was always susceptible in this way; a trip up north was likely to be followed by her conviction that she could live there again, and she might even put an improvident deposit on a beach shack that appealed to her. Irene Stevens recalled an over-friendly greeting from a real estate agent when she and Astley were in Townsville, and felt she should have a quiet word to Jack to make sure that sense prevailed.34 Ed and Michelle dined out on stories like these: Thea’s new ‘beach shack’, usually absurdly ill-placed or a poor buy; Thea’s insistence on travelling in the most uncomfortable way, arriving exhausted, dumping her old-style solid card suitcases and desperate for a cigarette.