Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  About the Book

  Tin River is a townlet of terminal attractiveness.

  Tin River is a state of mind.

  Researching in the archives Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle’s quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the past—with her mother, ‘a drummer in her own all-women’s group’; her absent American father; and her ineffectual husband, Seb.

  In Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley’s satire is at its sharpest and most entertaining.

  ‘Intelligent, fresh, and new.’ Kirkus Reviews

  Text Classics

  THEA BEATRICE MAY ASTLEY was born in Brisbane in 1925. She attended All Hallows, a Catholic school in Fortitude Valley, before studying arts at the University of Queensland.

  Astley trained to be a teacher and, on marrying Jack Gregson in 1948, moved to Sydney and worked in a number of schools. The pair had a son, Ed.

  In 1958 Astley’s first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published. Over the next four decades she published a work of fiction every few years. Her novels and short stories are distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice.

  Astley won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), her third novel. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987).

  In the late 1960s Astley took up a position at Macquarie University, where she worked until 1980, when she began to write full-time. She and her husband moved to North Queensland, returning to New South Wales later that decade.

  Astley won the 1989 Patrick White Award and became an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1992. Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner and first since 1972.

  Famed for her lifelong sharp wit, Thea Astley died in 2004, the year after her husband died. She is considered to be one of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century.

  JENNIFER DOWN’s debut novel, Our Magic Hour, was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and shortlisted in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She was a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year in 2017. Her short-story collection, Pulse Points, was published the same year.

  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 and Other Related Stories

  An Item from the Late News

  Beachmasters

  It’s Raining in Mango

  Vanishing Points

  Coda

  The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

  Drylands

  Collected Stories

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © estate of Thea Astley, 1990

  Introduction copyright © Jennifer Down, 2018

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall 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 permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  First published by William Heinemann Australia, 1990

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2018

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland

  ISBN: 9781925603552 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925626599 (ebook)

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  About Thea Astley

  About Jennifer Down

  Also by Thea Astley

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Unsentimental Journey

  by Jennifer Down

  Reaching Tin River

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  Text Classics

  Unsentimental Journey

  by Jennifer Down

  AND ANOTHER START.

  For all the richness of its world, the warmth of its characters and the joyfulness of its writing, Reaching Tin River—Thea Astley’s eleventh novel, first published in 1990—opens tentatively. In fact, the narrator, thirty-something Belle, begins six times.

  Either her story begins with a snappy precis of her pursuit of a long-dead colonial pioneer; or with a one-line snapshot of her mother, ‘a drummer in her own all-women’s group, a throbber of a lady with midlife zest and an off-centre smile’; or with a touch of facetiousness as she describes subverting boredom by tallying all the convent girls who plinked away at ‘The Rustle of Spring’ on the piano.

  Or with the misery of being wrenched, aged seven, from the family sheep property on Perjury Plains to boarding school. Or with the moment during an unhappy trip to New Caledonia when she discovers her husband ‘trying to hump the house girl’. (Importantly, she adds, ‘I say trying.’)

  Or perhaps it begins where it ends—with Tin River, the eponymous fictive coastal town which, like a horizon line obscured by fog and foreshore and stucco motels, seems impossibly distant until the precise moment at which it is abruptly revealed. Indeed, ‘Tin River is a state of mind.’

  This hesitant beginning, however, is no uncertainty on Astley’s part. It is a careful introduction to our heroine, Belle: inward-focused, often questionably reliable, occasionally scattered, but always a delight to witness. And that’s what it is, to read this novel. A little witnessing. We are less a part of the narrative than we are captive bystanders to it. And Astley—as you’d expect from a writer who in the course of her career published fifteen novels and received four Miles Franklin Literary Awards—makes it work.

  Until recently, I had not read Reaching Tin River, though I had admired several other novels by Thea Astley. If I had investigated its premise beforehand—a woman becomes obsessed with a long-dead man she glimpses in an archival photograph of early settlers—I am not certain I would have chosen to read it. Frankly, I’ve had my fill of novels about dead white men, of novels that romanticise our colonial past. And yet I should have known that I would be safe in Astley’s hands. Gaden Lockyer, the subject of Belle’s fixation, takes on a metonymic quality. He could, arguably, be anyone. Belle longs to tear a hole in her world, and even attempts to do so literally, in a fantastically weird moment in which she leaps through a life-sized poster of Lockyer and his family, ‘making sure it is Mrs Lockyer I obliterate’.

  Early in the novel, Belle recalls herself aged nine, struck by a sudden melancholy in the middle of a lonely game of shopgirl under her grandparents’ veranda. ‘“I want love,” I heard myself whispering. I’m not sure what I meant.’ The reader, on the other hand, is only too aware of
her meaning. As far as love goes, Belle is chronically undernourished, a woman unsatisfied. She is achingly adrift, in search of her ‘centre’.

  Her mother, Bonnie, is rarely particularly maternal and her presence is spasmodic. Her American father is a mere spectre for much of the novel. Belle meets him only once, as an adult, in a Manhattan jazz bar. Growing up, she rebuffs sex and intimacy until, in a scene both comic and grim, over dinner one night she is propositioned by Seb, her bombastic librarian co-worker:

  ‘My dear…given the fact that I am thirty-seven and assuming I have forty years ahead of me, would you be prepared on a permanent basis to cook me fourteen thousand six hundred dinners, the same number of breakfasts, give or take a few? I’ll see to my own lunch,’ the generous fellow added. ‘And do approximately two thousand loads of washing and ironing, house cleans and shopping?’

  ‘You are suggesting marriage?’ I asked demurely.

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Seb said…

  The cunning dog has turned it into a joke that barely conceals the real, the serious intent of his request.

  ‘You make it sound irresistible,’ I said. ‘How could I refuse?’

  It is unsurprising that their marriage is flat and resentful. While our sympathies lie with Belle, she is not a martyr-wife, passive and pious. You might well argue she is capable of the same self-centredness and thoughtlessness as Seb.

  As a narrator, she is offhand and witty, with an apparent tally-ho attitude to everything from attempted sexual assault to her husband’s infidelity. But her irreverence belies a sense of something irrevocably lost. Even her physicality is ghostly. Her husband tells her she’s so pale ‘it’s as if you’re not all there’. Her aunt likens her to a photographic negative, an image Belle circles back to time and again. Perhaps ‘image’ is not the right word, after all: how do we describe a psychic hollow so profound that it manifests in an absence?

  And yet this is, for the most part, a very funny book, and such is the complexity (or perhaps duplicity?) Astley invests in her protagonist that we never perceive her as a negative. The narrative evinces warmth. The satire is shrewd. The prose sings.

  I felt my palms grow clammy for Belle, cringed for her, longed to shake her by the shoulders. All of the novel’s characters are flawed and deeply human. Bonnie, for instance, looms large in Belle’s childhood, despite her frequent absences. Her presence is not dimmed with the passage of time: she remains a fearless, eccentric and, at times, pitiful character, a woman ahead of her time. She refuses to subscribe to the stifling societal conventions of the era; but, in the rural Australia of the 1950s and ’60s, there is little else. Astley spares no one her sharp eye, nor her empathy. As an author she is acerbic but never cynical, tender but never sentimental, ironic but never cruel.

  And how she can conjure a character, an image! Entire marriages, personalities, cities are evoked, masterfully, in a sentence or two. Lockyer’s wife, Betsy, is pretty ‘in a wretched kind of way as if she already knows the workload of the country wife’. Belle’s mother’s stately older boyfriend has striking blue eyes that have ‘the wondering look of eyes seen peering over the edges of prams and strollers’. Her librarian colleagues ‘have a hair-shirt quality of endurance and a gentleness the public service has never been able to damp out’. Yes, I think. I am reading a book set in parts of Australia I have visited only fleetingly, a book set decades before I was born. But I know these people, these places.

  Thea Astley is not considered to be a minimalist; and yet, on rereading Reaching Tin River, I was floored by the economy she accords certain events and descriptions. This brevity never feels like a shortcut or a summary. It is calculated. It is frank. It is precise. And it makes her phrasing elsewhere—replete with symbols, subtle repetition, tangential asides—seem all the more deliberate.

  In her typically flippant manner, Belle invokes Joachim du Bellay’s sonnet ‘Heureux Qui Comme Ulysse’, in which du Bellay extols the happiness of returning home after an absence, as she recounts arriving back at her hotel room to find her husband with the maid. For Belle, it is not returning to Perjury Plains, or Deep Creek, or Brisbane that offers self-fulfilment. Her home-going is to a place at once strange and familiar. It is a journey oddly linear for someone who speaks so doggedly of circles and circumferences. When at last we reach Tin River, there is no sense of elation, or absolution, or epiphany. But there is a sense of closure as Belle faces down her obsession.

  It is a journey worth taking, and one that will, I hope, bring you much joy.

  Reaching Tin River

  If this morning and this meeting are dreams, each of us has to believe that he is the dreamer. Perhaps we have stopped dreaming, perhaps not. Our obvious duty, meanwhile, is to accept the dream just as we accept the world and being born and seeing and breathing.

  from “The Other” (The Book of Sand)

  by Jorge Luis Borges

  (translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni)

  I

  I am looking for a one-storey town

  with trees

  river

  hills

  and a population of under two thousand

  one of whom must be called Gaden Lockyer.

  Or

  Mother was a drummer in her own all-women’s group, a throbber of a lady with midlife zest and an off-center smile.

  Or

  I have decided to make a list of all the convent girls who learnt to play “The Rustle of Spring” by Christian Sinding between 1945 and 1960.

  I cannot invent reality. Time invents it for me. When I was at school I was always enraptured by the simple music of Euclidean geometry whose theorems and propositions disentangled themselves into solutions of total beauty. I argued with none of them except the definition on which theorems 27 and 28 of Euclid’s Book I were based which stated that parallel lines on the same plane do not meet however far they are produced in either direction. Juxtaposing this statement alongside what my eyes perceived as I gazed down the railway track at Drenchings to a mystic coastal vanishing point I seem to have extracted an ultimate refutation. They met. Is the evidence of the eye always in opposition to that of the mind? I don’t know the answer to this. I can write down only what I see—or what I think I see.

  Or

  Oh mummy, mummy, I’ll die, I’ll simply die, if I have to leave Perjury Plains.

  I must explain that Perjury Plains was the name of the family sheep property from which I was to be, age seven, untimely ripped (there’s nothing like a little dalliance with Shakespeare to come chin up with the facts of life) and thrust into a coastal boarding school.

  Or how about

  When I come back to the bure on the beach at Poindimié, I find Seb trying to hump the house girl. I say trying.

  Or

  Tin River is a townlet of terminal attractiveness. Tin River is a state of mind.

  Any of these might do for starters. Or even enders.

  Each is true.

  Each makes me what I am—the words, the eyescapes becoming fact not fiction. I can see that, peering through the streaked windscreen of three plus decades and knowing what I had missed most in life during my tender formation, for God’s sake, was the after-school glass of milk and the cookie set out on a flowered plate on the kitchen table. I heard about it from the day girls at my school and when I stood in line with other boarders for the four-o’clock wedge of madeira cake or the thick slab of bread and butter, I dreamed of kitchens and mums and radios blaring behind that secure rattle of pots as dinner was prepared and the smells of roast lamb scented the air.

  Where was mother?

  Mother, I hesitated to tell my classmates (although I had confessed in cross-your-heart secrecy to Sheridan McAvoy, my plump best friend later to be known as Boobs), was unabashedly pounding drums in some school of arts or church hall while bush couples, their dedicated numbers shrinking, their bodies stiffening, plowed round the boraxed floor skidding through two-steps and foxtrots, jazz waltzes and barn dances. Old-time dancing
had reached that point in its history where it was ready to be filmed and shoved in a time capsule for Martians to goggle at. But there they were, mother drumming, hands and breasts thudding, and Aunt Marie chopping away at a yellow-fanged upright, one foot pumping up and down, up and down on the sustaining pedal while she banged out “Jealousy” and “Deep Purple” and “Stardust.” Hi there, Hoagy! Duke! Hi! Big beam from Aunt Marie to Bonnie on drums, Wilma on sax and then slip in a couple of tricky glissandos, the back of her right forefinger protected with a strip of sticking plaster.

  There were always holidays, but not always mother.

  Mother had grown up at Perjury Plains outside a lost townlet called Drenchings. She had a father, a mother and a sister, Marie, and although the sex of the children had been almost a terminal disappointment to grandfather who was looking forward to two cheap boundary riders, he resolved to make the best of it and bring them up tough. Small refinements, he assured grandmother, would be added at appropriate times. Bonnie and Marie could ride like stockmen before they were ten and take their turn at penning off and dagging by eleven.

  “Is that really you, mum?” I would beg, pointing to the snapshot of a pretty fair thing seated on a walloper of a stockhorse with a wild white eye. And it was. “Gee, you were pretty.”

  “Was I?” Even Mother looked baffled. “I never knew it, love. Pretty, eh? Then take a look at Marie.”

  Turning the pages of the old photograph albums, the family Debrett as it were, was the one thing that gave substance to my wavering, unsure center. I can relate my mother’s past simply by the serial quality of those hundreds of fading snapshots.

  “Look, there’s Marie all togged up for the picnic races. She must have been sixteen then. How about her now? Yes, I can see what you mean, Belle darling. We were quite glamorous. Look at me, will you, all bows and frills. Quite ironic when your grandpa wanted boys. He didn’t talk much, grandpa. As you know. Not to us. Except to give orders.”