by Thea Astley
PENGUIN BOOKS
DRYLANDS
One of Australia’s most celebrated writers, Thea Astley won the Miles Franklin Award four times – in 1962 for The Well Dressed Explorer, in 1965 for The Slow Natives, in 1972 for The Acolyte and in 2000 for Drylands. Her other awards include the 1975 Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup; the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters; the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It’s Raining in Mango; the 1989 Patrick White Award; the 1990 NSW Premier’s Prize for Reaching Tin River; the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Australian Unity Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow; and the 2001 Tasmanian State Library’s People’s Choice Award for Drylands.
Thea Astley held a position as Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University until 1980, when she retired to write full time. She died in 2004.
ALSO BY THEA ASTLEY
Girl With a Monkey
A Descant for Gossips
The Well Dressed Explorer
The Slow Natives
A Boat Load of Home Folk
The Acolyte
A Kindness Cup
Hunting the Wild Pineapple
An Item From the Late News
Beachmasters
It’s Raining in Mango
Reaching Tin River
Vanishing Points
Coda
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
THEA
ASTLEY
DRYLANDS
a book for the world’s last reader
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1999
This edition published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2000
Copyright © Thea Astley 1999
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both
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www.penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74228-092-9
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank the Literature Fund of the Australia Council for the Creative Arts Fellowship which helped in the writing of this book.
The quotes from D. H. Lawrence on page 15 are taken from A Selection from Phoenix, edited by A. A. Inglis, published by Penguin, 1971, reproduced by permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
MEANWHILE…
‘I’ve never sailed the Amazon. I’ve never reached Brazil,’ she quoted, and I’ve never been to a literary festival or a poetry reading, she thought, and listened to poets read, awed by their own genius.
A lot of things she hadn’t done. Sitting now, useless maybe, in her upstairs flat with a view of the town’s pub, grocery store, unused picture show, council building and primary school skulking by the wattles near where the creek used to flow. But I might write a book – something – she decided, having the wherewithal: table, typewriter, a new ream of paper, and angry ideas.
And alone-time in the hot evenings.
Past fifty, she admitted. And had really done nothing except move from one day to the next, accepting the vagaries of personal weather. These were written on her anxious face, blinked behind her glasses; they turned up the corners of her mouth that tried to conceal its amusement in a town that went for the most explicit of laughs.
All she had to do was insert a page in the typer, adjust her kitchen chair, flex her fingers as if she were about to crash into the Rach II and begin.
Thinks: I could begin onceupona or manyyearsago or inadistantcountry. It’s been done. I don’t like it.
Or a spot of Calvino clutter – no matter how meticulously brilliant – as if some gabmouth has found a defenceless alienist and vacant couch and is determined, the nerd, to fill the poor bastard in on every nuance of landscape, movement, his reactions thereto, oh God, those endless reactions and possibilities of reactions, and of possibilities of possibilities like some never-ending sorites.
He’s lost control!
How about ‘Johannes Brahms had a tongue like an adder’ or ‘John Ruskin loved little girls’ or ‘Madame Blavatsky’s face was deeply pitted with smallpox’? (You looked harder, did you? You liked that? I got your interest?)
This technological world was putting in a bite. No pun there. It was starting to worry the very pith of her. Perhaps it was because of the business she ran, a small newsagency in a God-forgotten tree-stump of a town halfway to nowhere whose population (two hundred and seventy-four) was tucked for leisure either in the bar of the Legless Lizard or in front of television screens, videos, Internet adult movies or PlayStation games for the kiddies.
You want adult movies? she thought. I’ll give you adult movies!
No one was reading any more. Or if they were it was the racing form or the sports section of the day-late Brisbane papers. That was the men. She wasn’t too sure about the women. A few regulars still bought their weekly dose of women’s magazines but she suspected they bought them for the pictures of royals in peril, fornicating actresses and Hollywood studs.
See, despite her age she knew the terms.
Thinks again: La distance n’y fait rien; il n’y a que le premier pas qui coÛte. So said Madame (marquise, forsooth!) du Deffand in the mid-seventeenth century on hearing Cardinal Polignac describe St Denys’ two-mile walk after being beheaded. Let’s paraphrase the marquise’s words: the length of a book is nothing; it’s only the first step that counts. Or the first sentence. Or the first word.
It’s that first word.
One must be careful. One must remember what Tennyson said of Patmore: ‘Some of his lines seemed hammered out of old nails.’
There are no nails new under the sun. Therefore…
It hadn’t taken much for her to make a decision.
Once upon a… day… month… year… mountain top… coral beach…
Settle for claypan, arid plain, perhaps, a flattish hinterland with gauzy distances where the low Divide moves ever backwards as you chase the paddock grasses, wire fences, switching from verdure to an ochreous sheep-munch.
This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. An easy, accessible script with notions formed from those twenty-six black symbols that induce tears or laughter. The miracle of it! Flyspecks on white that can ch
ange ideologies or governments, induce wars, starvation, or rare blessings. The very notion brought a rush of excitement and she found herself writing slowly and beautifully ‘This will be a book for…’ and stopped because her own emotion was too pretentious for words.
What had decided her? Was it the failure of the tempting stock she had displayed in those first business years, an innocent retired from managing a bookstore in a southern city, translated to late marriage with a farmer who died within four years and left her to sell the farm and work out some life pattern? She could have moved away, but the sale of the farm dragged on for a year and she was interested in exploring the notion of work in a small community rather than the anonymous quality of town. More, she was fifty-plus, relict of a union that had surprised her and her few city friends as a step into the dark. What either of them had wanted was a question that still puzzled: a chance meeting on a Manly ferry, a few laughs, a fish dinner and a what-the-hell feeling about the whole business.
She took over the agency lease on impulse and following old habits stocked the shelves with titles recommended by the TLS, the New York Times Review of Books and ‘little’ magazines. (Some crazy dame!) No one had been tempted. There were complaints when she ran out of ‘men’s’ magazines, the bosom-thigh buskers, the car and gun monthlies. She submitted with ill grace – she had to live – and kept her folly purchases for herself in the flat upstairs where already after five years of high-minded failure they choked the ranks of her personal library. Glutted!
In any case, she thought, replacing pen with cigarette and blowing her soul towards the ceiling, who the hell could read these days? Not the kids. Only old codgers like herself.
Last week one of the town lads, handsome son of a town elder, home for the weekend from his boarding-school on the coast, had come in to browse. She watched him shuffle the magazines for ten minutes then went over and offered help. His surprised fourteen-year-old face stared as she suggested a title. She wrote it down for him. He’d examined the piece of paper as if it were Sanskrit.
‘Geez, Mrs D, what’s that funny stuff you got there?’
‘Writing.’ She should have been amused. ‘I think I write a pretty fair hand.’
‘Can’t read running writing.’
‘What can you read, Toff?’
He gave her a crooked smile. ‘I guess things have changed since your day.’
‘You still haven’t answered me.’
‘Printing, man. Like type. Got my own PC and we use them all the time at school.’
‘I see. And will you be able to answer exam questions with them come November? Are you all wired up in the examination room, son, so you can type out your essays?’
‘No exams for a while. Not public. Anyway, we don’t have essays or stuff like that. Just tick boxes.’
‘Oh! So you discuss the beauty of the Bard or Mr Eliot by ticking boxes?’ (She couldn’t help herself.)
Toff was becoming resentful. After all, his daddy was shire president and the wealthiest man in town. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I bet you don’t!’ she snapped, not caring what his old man thought. She was on the council as well and the pair of them bickered at every meeting. ‘I take it you can sign your name in that funny stuff you can’t read. Or do you print it or simply put an X?’
The kid raised his eyes to hers in a languidly calculating way and let his glance run down and up the tubby figure in front of him with a terrible calm.
‘Oh piss off!’ he said.
Everything dominated by smart-arse technology, a blurred world of technobuzz. Smack a button for the Library of Congress and home in on your favourite litterer littérateur. Any time, any how. But so hard to read in bed with a weighty computer on your chest. None of that lounging propped on one elbow in the lamplight with moths or rain drumming while you sniffed the delicious scent of paper and binder’s glue and the whiff, the very ghost, of printer’s ink, the words you wanted to reread coming back as you lazily flicked a page with your finger. Late at night. And the rain. But of course here there was little rain. Perhaps this was a reason for a lost joy. A world full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.
‘Oh God,’ she said aloud at the horror of it, lighting another cigarette soother. The smoke curled up and scrawled grey serifs across the air of her upstairs flat, drifting through bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and out to the backstairs landing.
It was an unpretentious place, for she had never been harried by the glamour of any possessions but books. They were everywhere within the few rooms, had taken on colonising attitudes of their own and squatted on chairs, tables, dressers, slumped in ranks along the skirting boards. Many had been purchased in what she now regarded as her personal dreamtime, the student days when she wanted to share with others the joy the books gave her. There were dozens bought cheap from remainder lists, bargains from the slow sellers at the store she had run for nearly twenty years in a side lane off William Street. Ted, she remembered with a blink and a smile, had been aghast at the number of boxes the carrier had brought up from Brisbane, and even more aghast at the contents. ‘Where will we put ’em all, love?’ Had he expected trousseau sheets? And then there was the residue of mistaken marketing in this townlet, a pile of one hundred or so non-sellers that had made no journeys into outlying farms but had been lugged upstairs to cheer her evenings.
Yes. She guessed he had expected sheets.
At a not quite doddering age but with the irony still running through her veins she would write a book that embraced the themes a lifetime of reading had informed her readers might expect: a narrative line that trolled the waters of sex, suspense, history, tears, laughter. Could she do this? Could she achieve the voice of the times when all her emotional experience was rooted in a convention-riddled past?
No one read. Everyone watched: farragos of smut and violence, sexual thumpings, thumpings of hate and domination, the sanctified brutality of war, the turn-a-blind-eye indifference towards the weak; the fat-bellied, narrow-arsed arrogance of political freaks who made rules for everyone except themselves.
She put down her pen and ran both hands through her greying hair. She thought of thumbs, fingers, that might trace gently, lasciviously, enviously, cynically, the outlines of bodies, contoured clothes, the coiffures of starlets, princesses, rock singers. All in this sapless weather, the January sun hard above the chattering iron roofs under a leaden-blue sky – ‘All in the blue unclouded weather…’
Well, she had her poetic memory-snippets to keep her warm. Yet there was nothing about her that could make a chapter in her book. Not even a paragraph. Her unoriginality was staggering.
She could barely recall the libidinous years when she had given knockbacks to ginger salesmen armed with all the in-your-face impudence of the seventies, men who became, when she thought of them, another species altogether, alien to the feminine worth she had been reared to believe in. Even to recall maddened.
Life had given no warning that she would end up in a dead town flogging day-late tabloids, boxed games, toys, stationery, greeting cards. The toys grew old. The kids played Nintendo from the moment they discovered the magic of pressing a button. The greeting cards yellowed. She had dumped most of the stock the previous owner displayed and bought French impressionist prints merely to escape the juvenile scatology of the nudge-wink birthday wishes. Now the French impressionists were faded and she had succumbed to the unuttered demands of local taste. Maybe, she thought, walking over to the window and peering into the darkening main street with the Legless Lizard’s drunken blaze, the vulgarities should be part of the scheme. Why had she stayed? Was it the memory of Ted?
She turned away and busied herself in the kitchenette, making a sandwich and a pot of tea. The words, she knew, as she sat there with her supper, would be as heavy as bricks when what she wanted to build was some peopled landscape of mist and air. Which could be sharp and heavy as brick. Was that what she wanted? ‘Words are mo
re malleable than that,’ she said aloud, sipping her tea and staring at the dead night in Drylands. Their definitions were fragile and subject to tides, to misconceptions that insist on clinging.
Take ‘clinging’, for example.
She pulled a scrap of paper across and wrote down instant suggestions: ‘job, town, sick, silk, skin, hands, caring, apathy, belief ’. A pretty porridge.
Distressingly, unexpectedly, she recalled the two occasions she had been in love. Once she had been taken to a musical in Brisbane, a stage show called Lilac Time. Schubert. She was twelve. She remained in love for the rest of her life while his music, so agonisingly poised between grief and joy, coloured her mind. That is how I would like to write, she decided. So poised, walking the tightrope between the wet eye, the upcurled mouth. ‘You are the rain on my face,’ she had thought at twelve, and then written. Then said, ‘The clear water over pebbles, the curtain wind-curve of ivy on a wall, a first taste of snow.’ Ephemera. She was too young to apply the possibilities of metaphor.
And the second time, ten years older now.
‘Whores later,’ he had said, smugly urbane. He failed her physically. She persisted. ‘Charted your coast without once touching land,’ she wrote. ‘Land would have me drowned.’ ‘… found sea to be safer, sea between the islands.’ She wrote and wrote. ‘… guessed at, rather, the inland gentleness beyond the peaks scaled at a first assault.’ She wrote. ‘… the tender miles, grass-warm with summer.’ And she wrote. ‘… my thin white feet exploratory and tentative as… as… smiles.’
The pretentiousness of it!
‘Ah piss off!’ she too had said after a year’s frustration with the abstraction of words.
Enclosed.
That was rather that.
The easy way out was reading. She believed it was the easy way out. New places, new people, none of the effort. She became an armchair socialiser and traveller. Her workmates regarded her as eccentric. She retained, still, a sturdy handsomeness, and the blaze of her blue eyes regarded the world with what seemed a casual indifference but in reality computed the tiniest details. She became a watcher rather than participant, so it was almost admission of defeat when she decided to accept Ted’s suggestion of marriage. I needed a change, she told herself later. It was time.