Introduction: the Work of Thea Astley

Introduction: The work of Thea Astley

Susan Sheridan sue.sheridan@ﬂinders.edu.au

I am honoured and delighted to have been invited, along with Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, to edit this special issue of Queensland Review on the work of Thea Astley. I owe Jessica heartfelt thanks for her hard work and easy collegiality. Fifteen years since Astley’s death, the appearance of this collection of essays marks the development of a growing body of biographical and critical studies of her work. The essays complement Karen Lamb’s 2015 biography, Inventing Her Own Weather, and my critical monograph, The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016), as well as the collection of essays edited by myself and Paul Genoni, Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006). Most recently, Thea Astley: Selected Poems appeared in 2017, edited by Cheryl Taylor (who has an essay in this issue) and published by the University of Queensland Press (Astley’s publisher for many years). Most of Astley’s novels and story collections are in print, and they are being read in new ways, with new eyes and in new contexts. Text Publishing has brought out reprints of four of the novels in its Classics series, with introductions by novelists of today. Kate Grenville on AKindnessCup(1974) emphasises Astley’s pioneering role as a historical novelist, particularly her capacity for ‘saying the unsayable’ about the violence of colonialism. Chloe Hooper, intro- ducing The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), draws attention to the parallels between the account of the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2005, which she covered in her book The Tall Man (2008), and Astley’s novel based on a massacre on the island in 1930 and its long-term after-effects. Emily Maguire writes of Astley’slastnovel,Drylands (1999), that we are now living in the ‘bleak’ future world that it envisaged, where ‘so little that is punishable in any ethical society is punished in this one’–but that Astley writes with ‘the skill of a novelist with both immense compassion and knife-thrower levels of nerve’.1 Emerging novelist Jennifer Down had not previously read Reaching Tin River (1990), and her introduction to the novel conveys her surprised pleasure at the economy of the writing and its qualities: ‘acerbic but never cynical, tender but never sentimental, ironic but never cruel’.2 Other recent readers, who offer comments on It’s Raining in Mango (1987) on the Goodreads website (where all Astley’s novels are listed), express surprise that an Australian novelist in the 1980s should have taken such a powerfully critical stance on racist and sexist violence, or presented a gay man as a major character. In an age

Queensland Review 199 Volume 26 | Issue 2 | 2019 | pp. 199–202 | © The Author(s) 2019 | Downloaded fromdoi 10.1017/qre.2019.25https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 27 Sep 2021 at 23:45:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.25 Susan Sheridan

of expansive novels, some readers marvel at Astley’s ability to cover such expanses of time and space in so few pages (although some feel this required them to do too much work). Some admit they were required to read Astley at university, but were pleasantly surprised by her capacity to be both tragic and funny. There is enthusi- asm for her depiction of North Queensland weather and landscapes, and a number of comments on the Australianness of her stories and her place in the national literature. Literary reputation is an uncertain thing, especially for Australian writers, as some of these comments might suggest. In the first essay of this special issue, Leigh Dale points out that an author like Astley might ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ at the same time in different ways within what she calls a complex ‘topography of literary reception’. Taking into account such factors as contemporary reviews, prizes and scholarly studies, Dale also sought out evidence of newspaper stories on Astley and her books, of library holdings and frequency of borrowing, and of texts listed on school and university syllabi. In examining the questions of where and how Astley was read in the past, and projecting the need to nurture a readership for the future, her essay exemplifies an innovative approach to using quantitative data in literary studies. Kate Cantrell’s poem, ‘Girl with a Monkey’, which follows, alludes to some of those ups and downs of Astley’s reputation from her very first novel of that title, published in 1958. Cantrell’s own essay, coauthored with Lesley Hawkes, considers the effects on Astley’s writing and her career of her two roles as teacher and as satirist. ‘Double Trouble’ examines several of her critical essays that deal with questions of literature and education, arguing that these interrelated self-representations allowed Astley to position herself simultaneously as a creative writer who was also an educator and a social critic, one who challenged propriety and convention through her remarkable empathy for misfits and her fierce social criticism. Astley’s best-known essay, as Cantrell and Hawkes point out, is ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit’,whichwasfirst published in Southerly in 1976. Here she memorably speaks up for Queensland, and especially its ‘Deep North’, against the tendency of southerners to dismiss that state as a joke. Conceding that ‘I don’t think my love affair with Queensland ripened into its mature madness until I came south to live’, she celebrates its extremes of climate and the collection of ‘oddballs and misfits’ who find their way there and stay.3 That love affair fed into all her novels and stories, into both their satirical and their lyrical modes, and it was tested by her developing fascination with the colonial histories of these tropical places. Over the span of her career, as I have argued, she effectively uses Queensland stories to undermine the claims of national mythologies.4 Alison Bartlett reads Astley’s 1972 novel The Acolyte in the context of this sideways relationship to debates about a distinctive national culture. This novel (which Astley said was her favourite) features a blind composer, Holberg, and his followers, including the narrator, Vesper, who acts as his acolyte. Bartlett reads it in relation to mid-twentieth century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music, arguing that Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Sym- phony’ imaginatively ‘writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music’. Her essay effects a significant shift in Astley

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scholarship by paying extended attentiontothewayAstleydepictsmusicasa social practice capable of the same combination of satire and lyricism as her own writing. Jessica Gildersleeve takes Astley’s imaginative engagement with Queensland’s ‘Deep North’ and turns it outwards, suggesting parallels with Gothic elements of American writing of the South, with its focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider, and also with the modernism of the American writers she admired. Gildersleeve links these two transnational literary modes as a way to understand Astley’s conceptualisation of kindness and community in her first novel, Girl with a Monkey. She shows how, through the failures of the young protagonist, Elsie, the novelist is engaged in both criticising the expectations placed on women and upholding the values of kindness and charity with which they are especially charged. Meg Brayshaw’s essay, ‘The Death of Australian Literature in Thea Astley’s Drylands’, reads this final novel as the product of two related yet conflicting literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing, and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Brayshaw argues that, in its seven related stories, Drylands ‘performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state’, and that Janet’s decision to leave the town is inevitably both a victory and a defeat because, in terms of the novel in modernity and writing in the settler colonial state, no story can successfully conclude without becoming complicit in that systemic violence. Finally, in her essay, ‘“To My Brother”: Gay Love and Sex in Thea Astley’s Novels and Stories’, Cheryl Taylor offers an important supplement to Astley’s biography. Demonstrating how figures of gay – or possibly gay – men emerge in some of the earliest stories and culminate in the intensely sympathetic portrait of Will Laffey in It’s Raining in Mango, Taylor argues that Astley’s interest in them was driven by her love for her older brother, Philip, who was a Jesuit priest and a gay man. Her essay draws on Lamb’s biography and on archival and published writings by Astley’s family and Philip Astley’s fellow Jesuits to argue that the novelist’s nuanced renditions of gay love and sex ultimately resist containment, and expand the masculine paradigm so as to accommodate homosexuality as an equal and valued component. Astley’s consistent message in relation to this, as to other topics, is the obligation of humans to treat each other with kindness. The issue also includes brief reviews of three recent books on Astley, and a review article on two books about Pauline Hanson, populist politics and the question of Queensland exceptionalism, to which Astley made such memorable contributions in her stories and essays. It is especially fitting that Queensland Review should sponsor such a collection as this, with new readings from the rich oeuvre of one of Queensland’s, and Australia’s, great writers. Astley’s lyrical and satirical writing expresses an ambiva- lent love for those Queensland people and landscapes, which provide vehicles for her exploration of the human condition – both its fallen spiritual state and its haunted post-colonial condition.

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 27 Sep 2021 at 23:45:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.25 Susan Sheridan Notes 1 Emily Maguire, ‘No endings,’ in Thea Astley, Drylands: A book for the world’s last reader (Melbourne: Text, 2018 [1999]), p. xii. 2 Jennifer Down, ‘Unsentimental journey’, in Thea Astley, Reaching Tin River [1990] (Melbourne: Text, 2018 [1990]), p. x. 3 Thea Astley, ‘Being a Queenslander: A form of literary and geographical conceit’, in Susan Sheridan and Paul Genoni (eds), Thea Astley’s ﬁctional worlds (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), p. 9. 4 Susan Sheridan, The ﬁction of Thea Astley (New York: Cambria, 2016), p. 2.

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