Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  Astley was enjoying this new world of successful women; for the first time in her life her agent and publisher were both women. There was also genuine rapport between Astley and Adler. Astley had never seen herself as part of the sisterhood and though Louise was young enough to be her daughter and part of that generation who talked about feminism, their relationship was never political in that way. Together they went ‘skipping arm in arm down Melbourne’s Toorak Road dress shops’ looking for a brown corduroy suit that Astley insisted she must have. Hours of pursuit failed to produce such a thing and Adler had to step in: ‘Look Thea, it’s not really the year of the corduroy suit!’10

  Having arrived at Heinemann as such an experienced writer, Astley also appreciated Adler’s light editorial touch.11 Like Beatrice Davis before her, Adler had the knack of urging Astley towards the next book, and the next: Vanishing Points (1992) and Coda (1994) over the next four years. The settings were still Queensland, the natural site for Astley’s creative vision.

  For Reaching Tin River, she drew upon her years of living in the lush tropics, a landscape she knew intimately. Astley had once said that ‘writing is bit like painting – putting a dab of colour down to get a whole effect’ and she knew those little dabs needed to be made in intricate detail.12 Some years after Reaching Tin River was published Astley explained the novel’s origins: ‘News clippings – yes, yes – especially old photos of early settlers. Old photos of bank clerks standing outside a building – there’s a shed, a dog disappearing ’round the corner, somewhere near Charters Towers – three men in ties – marvellous – gave me the whole novel – Reaching Tin River.’13 Ever since she had coined the metaphor ‘the hinterland of childhood’ Astley had wanted the landscape to be emotional as well as physical geography for her characters.

  This novel was about obsessions, but Astley was attempting to do more than just parody people who were trying to ‘find themselves’. She continued to be preoccupied with relationships. Sometimes this must have been wearing for her: in writing so much about relationships in her novels Astley was forced to live through more intense versions of her own thoughts and fears. She was risking – almost recklessly – proximity to her own guilt. ‘Writing out the things that bothered her’ put her at risk of harm all over again.

  At the same time, Astley was having fun. Women could do things apart from marrying, and she was enjoying writing about them. In Mango Nadine and Chloe of the Dancing Bears whorehouse treat their business with weary disdain. In the Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Mrs Curthoys regards marriage as ‘legalised prostitution’.14 If you chose to marry, as Boobs McAvoy had in Tin River, you were in for the ‘the despair of lushness’.15 In each of her later books Astley was building bridges between ideas about love, sex and responsibility that she had spent a lifetime in her writing trying to understand.

  In Reaching Tin River Belle is caught between admiration of her mother’s eccentricity and independence, and resentment for its effect on her own childhood. Astley was now into her mid-sixties, with her son in his thirties, and was facing such things. What had been the effect of her choices on Ed? Whenever she got the chance, especially with someone of roughly Ed’s age, she would express these thoughts. At a café meal in Melbourne during a book tour, Astley overheard a young woman confess rather sheepishly that her mother had been a ‘stay-at-home’ mum. Astley cut in, rather too abruptly, ‘Perhaps if she’d done anything else, you might have resented her?’16 It was not really a question.

  Tellingly, in Tin River, young Belle affirms her mother’s unorthodox womanhood: ‘Bonnie is right, I tell myself, in her committed obsessions, attached emotionally only to the abstract problems of life-style and drums, or even me in a tangential way.’17 ‘Tangential’ is not a word Astley would ever have used to describe her attachment to her son but she obviously wondered about such things still. She remained convinced that parental love was the only love that lasted.

  Being older meant that she was often reminded of this by other parents. Jill Hickson sent her a note saying that she hoped to have the ‘wonderful relationship’ with her children later in life that Astley clearly had with Ed.18 Astley knew that her views on love and marriage spawned books that appealed to women on both sides of the age divide. She relished her opportunity to reverse the status quo, creating the character Julie Truscott in ‘Inventing the Weather’ (one of the novellas in Vanishing Points), who is so calm and formidably logical about the needs of her children that she leaves them in the full care of her unfaithful husband and his mistress.

  Astley wanted to give voice to women’s great unheard moments in marriage, silent from years of disengagement. This was a new arc of representation of women for her: from victims to passive resisters to those energised by self-interested protest. Increasingly the animus became not just anger but revenge, of ‘disaffected and drifting protagonists’ who fight back.19

  Astley’s tart comedic style attracted new readers. Her portrayal of women had bothered critics in the past: the language describing them could be harsh and judgemental. One critic described this aspect of her work as ‘linguistically unstable’.20 Was this part of Astley’s ‘feminist evasion tactics’?

  A letter from the feminist author Dale Spender gave Astley vindication. In 1992 Spender wrote to say how much she liked Vanishing Points. Astley wrote back ‘delighted to get a tribute from someone of your caliber … it was private, unsolicited and it made my day!’ Even so, Astley couldn’t help herself: ‘It’s funny, you know, but all the nice things critics have said about V.P. rather stun me. I guess after years of critical mauling of books that I feel are somewhat better, I’m confused. Maybe someone thinks I deserve a break after all these years!’21

  It was thirty years since Astley had stated that ‘women are sad things’; now she saw a ‘vanishing point’ for women when they aged that didn’t seem to exist for men. She was still expressing old anger, really: anger for her years of teaching on half the male salary; for having to retire upon marriage; for the anti-female hierarchy of the Catholic Church she had grown up with; with the idea that sexual women are somehow selfish. There were no easy answers. Even the character Julie Truscott, who escapes to ‘invent her own weather’, does so to a low-paying job, all the while fighting off the unwelcome sexual attentions of a former boss.22

  Sexuality and women’s choices were still on Astley’s mind when she talked with Martinelli next door, when she thought about her brother and the Church, but at other times, too, reflected in nervous phrases and throwaway lines.

  Astley was tightening the circle of her personal history around herself, enabling her to shift female experience from the edge to the centre of her work. In Vanishing Points and Coda she telescoped past, present and ageing. In Reaching Tin River, her eccentric, self-willed female characters made the men seem tame and tiresome. Astley was now scattering details of her own past playfully: Villa Marina is the name of a boarding house like the one in Shorncliffe where she had boarded as a young student teacher; Julie Truscott speaks of her maternal forebears who ‘lived in a world of women’, as Astley’s own mother had.23

  The year 1990 was one of travel for Astley. She was to visit the US but there was another journey close to Astley’s heart. After years of planning and as part of the International Year of Literacy, the Writers’ Train she had continually discussed with Laurie Muller at UQP was about to depart from Central railway station in Brisbane for remote parts of Queensland, with Astley aboard. The Queensland government, as part of their decade of reviving arts funding, supported the innovative travelling writers’ show.

  Phil (now living in Rome and loving it) had been reminding her of their Queensland childhood, writing about their early years and the Latin Mass. Astley could not help but be reminded of teaching the ‘kiddois’, as she would pronounce it, as she had all those years ago.

  The train would go to Toowoomba, Dalby, Chinchilla, Roma, and even more remote towns such as Charlevil
le. These were places where she had given literary talks back in the early 1960s as a Commonwealth Literary Fellow. She was to travel with other writers, some of whom she knew and liked: Tom Keneally, Janette Turner Hospital, Rodney Hall, Tim Winton, Hugh Lunn, Victor Kelleher and poets Bruce Dawe and Komninos Zervos.24 Not since the days of Barjai in the 1940s had Astley enjoyed this kind of writerly camaraderie. It was a perfect Astley expedition: locomotives, distance, travel, and country hotels in remote places.

  The train pulled out after a convivial breakfast provided by UQP. Rodney Hall recalls that the whole trip was a ‘rather strange full-on experience. All of us in the one carriage’. He sat next to Astley most of each day and the two found themselves very much the ‘senior people’. It suited him, especially since he found that Astley could ‘talk all day, never dry up, ranging over so many things’. She could start a conversation with a fixed view but end up unsure, and vice versa.

  But it was the way Astley behaved towards children that told Hall a great deal about her. She never tried to be one of them or talk down to them. One scene stayed clearly in his memory. They were heading west out of Roma, and they passed a platform, not even a real station. On it stood about a dozen children holding up open books. Astley rushed up to the driver, desperately trying to get him to return: ‘Quick, get on the radio, tell them there’s kids here, you’ve gotta stop!’

  The train returned, with those on board cheering and waving, but the children had left the platform and nobody was there. The driver blew the whistle and the writers saw the children almost a kilometre away, running towards them from a small schoolhouse and still clutching the books, with the teacher behind them. Astley insisted they all sign the children’s books, whatever they were – even picture books.25

  Astley couldn’t wait to introduce Tim Winton to her friend Jeff McMullen, who was making a short film of the trip for television. ‘You’ve got to meet this young bloke with the ponytail,’ she told McMullen. Winton was by no means a household name at that time and Astley wanted to show off this new Australian writer who explored the themes of country, coast and character and who wasn’t pushing himself forward. She herself did not want to be in the film, and McMullen couldn’t help thinking of how strangely shy she could be. He knew the Writers’ Train had been her idea. It struck him that she might have been more comfortable about the whole project in a foreign setting, presenting an ‘authentic take on who we are’, but from afar.26

  But his camera did manage to catch Astley once. She was in high spirits: ‘I’m taking over. We’re going to Warwick first. This is a hijack, everyone!’ When asked about the trip, she was ready: ‘I think people inland have been neglected. As if we’ve forgotten about them. I come out here with the utmost respect. I hope they get some fun out of us. I hope they get something.’27 She had been moved by knowing what books meant to the people in the outback, particularly the children. Theirs was an isolation she understood.

  Eventually Astley even agreed to a photograph, but only because it was taken in front of an outback dunny door lavishly covered by ivy. Typical Thea, thought McMullen. When Astley returned to the city, a letter in a child’s handwriting said it all: ‘I hope when I get older that I can buy a book of yours and read it. I really enjoyed meeting you and hope to see you again someday. Yours sincerely … (the girl in the pink jacket)’.28

  Life was getting busier all the time, and Thea and Jack were often apart, though he had come on the earlier US trip. This was the year of further investigation of his eye problems by the specialist. The situation worried Phil – he wondered how Thea would cope – but he had his own problems. Back at Campion House in Melbourne he was nervous about having to say a less familiar but ‘beautiful, reverent form of the Mass’.29

  Astley, who had to look after Jack, was not what friends would call a natural nurse, and some actually felt sorry for her. As one commented, ‘She had to do it and she did, but she had to learn it.’ It was the same with the driving, ‘she got into the car like a little old lady’.30 Jack still wanted Thea to go on working. He was not just tolerant of her eccentricities, he was fiercely proud of her.

  Astley continued to embrace literary activity other than writing. She had been asked to talk at the Australian Booksellers and Publishers Association in March; she had agreed to launch a monograph on Beatrice Davis by Anthony Barker later in 1991, and she was still in demand at writers’ festivals. At the ABPA dinner, she was in a good mood about the business of writing, saying, ‘Writers must admit that without publishers and distributors they (the writers) would exist under what Maxwell Smart called the Dome [actually Cone] of Silence.’31

  But she really wanted to talk about writers and how increasing age didn’t matter. The speech brought together all the old irritations as well as new fears: that question of style and her status as a ‘senior’ writer. Quoting from an article advising writers not to write in a ‘style of and for a readership 30 or 50 years ago’, Astley launched into a list of all the ‘Greats’ that this advice would ‘cut out’, as well as herself. It begins as a list as close to Astley’s literary preferences and influences as one might get: Flaubert, Balzac, McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, Borges, Calvino, Lowry, Joyce, Sterne, Austen, Eliot, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Twain. By this stage of course, as she acknowledged to the audience, the list would have no end. Astley was still sensitive: maybe she herself would fall under that Cone of Silence.

  But shortly afterwards in 1991 came the news that Tin River had won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, one of the major New South Wales literary awards. The book had also been received favourably by the US literary press. Astley was enjoying a very strong relationship with her editor at Putnam’s, who had already contracted for US rights to several of her previous works. Within a couple of years these older titles, spanning thirty years of Astley’s writing career, were also being reviewed in the US, and favourably. Here was the extended assessment she longed for. ‘The prolific Australian novelist,’ wrote one New York Times reviewer, ‘could be an antipodean cousin to Muriel Spark or Iris Murdoch.’32

  At home in Australia, her profile continued to grow. Astley was being rediscovered. Interviewers easily related the concerns of Tin River to her earlier works, especially to music. The ‘Rustle of Spring’ parody had amused music buffs. Helen Garner – who was writing to Thea quite often – even joked that she might learn the piece.33

  Louise Adler was playful, wondering ‘how fecund’ Astley was feeling with all her ‘gallivanting around’.34 She knew her author well: Astley would want to capitalise on the success of Tin River. She had two novellas that could be published in one volume. Early in 1992 the ‘twinned’ novellas of Vanishing Points were settled for publication later in the year and Astley turned her thoughts to a last book with the significant title Coda.

  Endings are a feature of late life. Vida Horn from Barjai days had written and invited her and Jack for a last visit to see an ailing Barrett Reid in Melbourne in January of 1992.35 A letter arrived from Sister Mary Claver, now infirm and in Charitis Christi, where Phil gave the Friday Benediction of the Sacrament. Sister Mary was a reminder to Astley of the special relationship they had shared; the young nun had always taken a special interest in her. ‘It wasn’t difficult to learn,’ wrote the sister in what would be her last letter, ‘that you’d been blessed with special talents, especially in the literary line.’36 She sounded almost like Beatrice Davis, who was also fading.

  Astley knew Beatrice was not religious in her thinking about death. She had instructed those planning her memorial, ‘Don’t put too much God into it, darling.’37 Astley and Beatrice had always enjoyed the same bleak humour: they joked how Beatrice’s fall and emphysema from years of chain-smoking hadn’t quite killed her off. Astley knew Davis simply wanted to die peacefully, ever the background figure, like the judicious and self-effacing editor Astley had known for over thirty years.38 The announcement
when it came was not unexpected. Davis had died in her sleep on 24 May 1992, aged eighty-two. It was an important loss.

  Astley did not care for funerals and did not attend Beatrice’s. All her life she had avoided these ritual occasions of grief, save for her close family. The mixture of formality and possible outward displays of emotion was clearly unsettling for Astley. She did not fear witnessing other people’s vulnerabilities; she feared exposing her own.

  But she had Phil’s letters for consolation. In a couple of years his health would start failing, but he had a better way of dealing with death and loss. His letters about their earliest loves in music and poetry were a delight.39 Astley herself was not ready to give up writing, and she resisted any honours that suggested she might be – such as The Courier-Mail’s mid-year ‘Top 100’ Queensland Day celebration of writers.40 She was healthy, she was writing, that was all anyone needed to know.

  These ruminations always put Astley in a bad mood, which influenced her behaviour in ways that troubled others. Louise Adler wanted to make her happy, and found herself trying. She arrived at Cambewarra. The house was clean-lined and functional yet somehow ‘felt unloved, plain’. She unpacked her carefully selected Melbourne gourmet delicacies, looking at Astley’s face: she accepted the goods but with little more than polite interest. Didn’t she want a taste? Astley found indulgence impossible: she was like eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson who said that ‘music is the only sensual pleasure without vice’.41 This apparent determination not to take pleasure in such things was foreign to Adler.