Thea Astley – Iconic Australian Writer and Reluctant Feminist

Dr Karen Lamb is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian Catholic University and the author of Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather for which she was a co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award  for Non-fiction. Thea Astley (1925–2004) stands tall among the icons of Australian literature. Over a 50-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, Drylands, and The Slow Natives, and was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin Awards. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity, and compassion. To speak on her subject of this prize winning biography, Karen Lamb addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 16 November 2016.

THEA ASTLEY – ICONIC AUSTRALIAN WRITER AND RELUCTANT FEMINIST

 KAREN LAMB

I can’t think of anyone better than Australian novelist Thea Astley as a subject of study in the very complex relationship authors sometimes have with the public world of authorship. She struggled all her life to accommodate personally her very obvious success – four Miles Franklin Awards for fiction – with what she felt about that success. It may be that today publicity and media follow a well-known author’s every move, but the question of how one sees oneself, how one is seen by others, and how one reacts to those others is surely a very old question.

It certainly was for Thea Astley.

Before the public greeted her first novel Girl with a Monkey (A & R) in 1958, Astley had published poetry in journals and the Sydney Morning Herald but, behind the scenes, she had also recently become a mother. This event, in her thirties – relatively late for those times – had really rocked Astley; provoked in her some intense insecurities and anxieties which she later described:

When Edmund was born I had no sisters around me, I’d never had the experience of looking after children. I found motherhood a terrible moral burden. I had no idea babies stayed awake twenty-six hours a day. I used to boil everything he ate and drank, even his orange juice, until a nurse told me I was boiling all the vitamins out of it.[1]

Astley was vulnerable, and giving birth to that equally longed for creation, her first novel, only made her more so. Having been a professional teacher for over a decade, Astley suddenly found herself at home in a northern suburb of Sydney, all day. How would she ever escape? How would she continue writing? She did, of course, but admirers of Astley’s work may well wonder how on earth this school-teaching suburban young mother projected herself onto our national cultural stage.

Paul Genoni makes the same quizzical assertion in a recent journal review of Inventing Her Own Weather, writing about Astley, this Australian “icon” of our literary world, but in terms of how she came to be perceived by a watching public:

No amount of prize-winning, positive reviews, or occasionally good sales, could however, secure for Astley a fixed reliable place in Australian cultural life. For whereas other authors of her generation or thereabouts established early-on a foothold in the national imagination by marrying their authorial identity to a strong biographical presence (Randolph Stow as the grazier’s scion-turned-tormented seer of the wheat belt and inland; Thomas Keneally as the ex-seminarian running his copiously critical eye over church morals; Christopher Koch as the austere Tasmanian grappling with the deep-rooted sense of being an outsider), for most of her long career Astley struggled to be recognised as anything other than a copiously disgruntled suburban house-wife.[2]

And so it was. At any given opportunity the novelist-housewife would remind us of her lowly status. In the seventies, when Australian publishing flourished, Astley’s concern about being overlooked, she would suggest years later, was because she was busy cooking lamb chops and broccoli, and therefore could never have been part of what she termed the “ghetto de Balmain”.[3]

But being seen as a “cultural icon” would also have drawn a typical deflating Astley wisecrack – “maybe they should put me in plaster” – she might have drawled. Yet throughout her writing life Thea Astley did worry about her place in Australian letters. Quite a lot, in fact, though that concern took different forms at different times. When it wasn’t about resisting the “feminist writer” tag in 1970s, it moved to being about ageism in the 1980s.

An example of this later resistance can be seen even in an exchange with writer and academic Don Anderson, who reviewed Astley’s mid-career novel Beachmasters (1985). Astley at this time had changed to the multinational Penguin group, and the novel being published first in the United States had fed Astley’s ambitions to become a novelist writing for a wide, preferably international, readership.

This cause was somewhat deflated by Anderson’s review, titled “Writers Contrast in Age and Style” which appeared in The National Times. He wrote, rather pithily, that Beachmasters was like a “sort of Absalom, Absalom! in the South Pacific, without Faulkner‘s intellectual complexity”.[4]  This touched a hot wire of fury in Astley, who wrote to him:

Dear Don Anderson,

 

Well, that was a nasty little review – but I’m glad to have broken the cycle. Mark Macleod once indicated to me that most of my unpleasant notices come from women. …. (Incidentally, I’m old enough to be your grandmother, too. Time out here for horrified denials of such genetic antecedents being possible on either side.) I don’t mind a bit being fifty-nine, nearly sixty … But I do get the impression from your review that you resent my age. Do you feel I should have hung up my typer the moment I hit fifty? Is there to be nothing left for the tottering senior citizen?[5]

In fact, this response had little to do with ageing. Astley had always been hypersensitive to criticism. The origins of this, and the tartness it sometimes generated, began early in Astley’s writing life. As far back as the early 1960s, as she had begun to mix in Sydney literary circles – albeit in a limited way (Astley didn’t drink alcohol, so it had to be on a small scale) Astley was never quite sure how she was coming across – or how she should be coming across.

This is what I call in Inventing Her Own Weather her odd mixture of anxiety and bombast, a nervous defence mechanism since childhood, which affected a great many of her relationships in life, sometimes causing offence. Jack, Astley’s husband of 50 years, was to be the perfect “after-the-event fixer” for those occasions when “Thea was just being Thea”, as he liked to say.

That weird combination of bedrock self-belief combined with chronic self-doubt led to a diffidence in Astley that was hard for others to understand, let alone reconcile with her mounting literary achievements and public success. Again, it was there from the start. Astley couldn’t even answer the standard Angus & Robertson author questionnaire without nervy self-deflection (“Apart from a few poems in Australian Poetry and some in The Herald and other lesser places, I’ve made no impact on Australia’s literary life. I assumed you wouldn’t just want a list of my friends. It wouldn’t be very long either.”). [6]

Astley’s first editor, the renowned Beatrice Davis, mentioned casually to her protégé author that she felt Astley could be rather confronting upon first meeting. Astley shot back an uncomprehending reply: Really, “Do I terrify people?”[7] Yet, Astley really was the innocent here: she had no other way of being whatever it was she was. Astley admired what she called “the gift of being truthfully yourself”, but did not herself possess this in the way she would have liked: she did not lack guile, despite being compulsive in her utterances.

She knew she had a flippancy she just couldn’t control, just like the character Franzie Missig in her final novel Drylands. In this Astley resembled her journalist-father, Cecil Astley, who could never resist the smart-arse remark. Inevitably, how others saw her became a vexed question for the author Thea Astley, a puzzle too, not helped one bit by her self-deprecating humour. She once wrote an entire national literary award acceptance speech about her experience of being a writer, pencilling on the typescript “It’s lonely at the bottom!”. The audience was left to ponder how the recipient of this, and so many awards, could possibly see herself “at the bottom”.

Astley had little freedom, either, in choosing what she wrote about because she was it, and it was she. Her life and Queensland were the perennial setting. Penguin publisher Bob Sessions, who knew Astley very well for most of her writing life, once made the mistake of commenting offhandedly to her: “Isn’t it about time you moved locale?” Astley bit back, “I don’t have any control over what I write … you can either publish it or not.”[8]

Queensland, more particularly Astley’s idiosyncratic identification with that place – is really what lies behind the biography’s title Inventing Her Own Weather, adapted from Astley’s novella “Inventing the Weather” (published with “The Genteel Poverty Bus Company” in the 1992 Vanishing Points) Astley, was also a bit inclined to think that the weather was made up, especially when she was living in the tropical North – and she was only half joking!

Weather – not necessarily the weather – was always on Astley’s mind; the word became a talisman for a great many things that bothered her and which she wanted to write about. It perfectly described for her the world of humankind: buffeted. The kind of “climate” a person might create around themselves was their mark on life, their ‘personal weather’, a small triumph for individuality.

So “inventing the weather” was the perfect foil for this perpetual professional Queenslander with a love-hate relationship with the extremes of the weather, and who could run a healthy line in scorn too when it came to reactionary attitudes she didn’t like in her home state, especially those of the Joh era.

She always played it both ways where Queensland was concerned.

When a reviewer complained about Astley’s high-blown metaphors – she had written in a novel that “the blinds were sweating” – Astley wrote to the reviewer (just as would years later to Don Anderson) tersely pointing out that in Queensland, blinds do, in fact, sweat.

Likewise, when a reviewer of her first novel Girl with a Monkey, set in Townsville, queried the accuracy of her description of the very slow Queensland “rail-motors” (as they were called in Astley’s youth), pulling out at walking speed, Astley’s simply told the reviewer to try it! She would have the last word.

It was Astley’s love of the geography of Queensland, particularly the North, that stayed in-tact – her Dream Country as she called it – recalling always her time as a young woman teaching in the small towns of the Mary Valley. This was despite having lived in Sydney (and other parts of NSW) most of her life.

It was from her reimagined Queensland towns that this satirical novelist covered pretty much every human foible, and it was the state of play between men and women in that important social contract “marriage” which, in her view, represented so much else about the limited lot of women in the world – a world divided, as she often said, into “feet, boots, and mats”.

While others in Australian letters were debating what was or wasn’t “The Great Australian Novel”, it was an irony entirely to Astley’s taste that her 1965 novel The Slow Natives would be about the “The Great Australian Suburbia”. The savagery and pathos Astley injected into her satire in that novel reflected her increasingly disarmed psychic and emotional self. As a novelist Astley was obsessed with marriage

In her fiction the married state is always represented as an ordeal of unrelieved tedium – “the silence of old marriage”, as she described it.[9] The Astley marriage was not so silent, such that, as a biographer I struggled with how to represent such an enduring partnership, particularly as the one remaining witness, Astley’s son Ed, regarded his parents as a warring duo better suited to divorce. Jack and Thea specialised in the kind of bickering that has its own intimacy, but you can’t expect a child to think that.

I might have cast the Astley marriage in this light but for the fact that I discovered letters Astley’s husband Jack wrote to her at a time when they had then been married for over 40 years. I was affected by the discovery of these simple and heartfelt letters. If, as Lytton Strachey once said, “Uninterpreted truth is as useless as buried gold”, then I needed to think about what this meant. Had I been in been in danger of ruling love out? Love, that is, of a kind that I personally didn’t have experience of, a relationship of that duration.Aspects of the Astley marriage reassembled themselves, overlaid with new understanding.

I also think Astley’s relationship with her husband was always on her mind when she struggled in interviews to discuss more generally male-female relationships: she knew this bond between men and women would always be more complicated than social politics could represent it. Astley’s fatalism was about the lot of women per se and was too intense at any time in her life for her to agree with what Tanya Plibersek wrote in this journal some years back, that “The days when all women were – as a group – automatically disadvantaged are behind us … .”  [10]

Astley was also lover of men, but did not want to be disqualified from her observing role as a writer who understood the issues of male power and inequality. The marriage bond for Thea and Jack was greater than duty; they had formed their partnership antagonistically, but not – robust bickering aside – against each other.

It had begun with Astley having married Jack, a divorced non-Catholic, amid fierce opposition from her own family and the Church. She subsequently fixed in her mind, “as one” for life, Marriage, the Catholic Church, Control, Power, and Guilt in a way that dominated all of her relationships in life, and ultimately those she wrote about in all of her fiction. This could be heavy duty critique, but more often Astley delivered disdain in the form of rueful whimsy. In person, this sardonic style could be theatrically comic. Astley was determined to subject the rituals of faith to pure logic. Neighbours who befriended Astley and her husband when they lived in Sussex Inlet, New South Wales, described the scene:

In her childhood it had been a sin to eat meat on Friday: you went to Hell. Once it was allowed, “Thea got stuck into whether they were all going to Hell”. She laid the argument out as neatly as a tablecloth: How did it work, then? Maybe the others hadn’t gone to Hell. Ergo, it was a lie. Ergo, lying was a sin. Conclusion: there was no Hell.[11]

In this mood Astley refused to let go of the topic, her attitude ranging from mock-seriousness to genuine anger, roughly the same range in tone as her fifteen works of fiction. This was particularly so when she wrote about women. Astley wanted to give voice to women’s great unheard moments in marriage, silent from years of disengagement, but her tart comedic style and portrayal of women have bothered critics; the language describing them could be harsh and judgemental.

In late career Astley discovered that her views on love and marriage might appeal 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”, who (like Astley in mock-argument about God with her neighbours) 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!

These later Astley works, from It’s Raining in Mango (1987) onwards, do take her representation of women from victims to at least passive resisters, and even protestors against the status quo. This change did little to change Astley’s difficulty with the “f” word, feminism, and the phrase ‘reluctant feminist’ does capture at least her unease with the term. She was not sure what it meant for women, nor for her.

But it was even more complicated than that. Being female, being feminine, had meant very different things for Astley as a young woman coming of age in the mid-1940s. The writer Amy Witting, later a friend and a colleague of Astley’s, once recalled how women of their generation were “thrust into competition with men” but left somehow feeling “robbed of womanhood” by the very teachers who had been ambitious for them to achieve academically.

Witting was at the University of Sydney and a member of literary circles that included poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart but knew that an interest in literature did nothing to moderate an atmosphere drenched in sexism. As she remarked: “Women were a subject race. You were accepted only on the most humiliating terms: you had to be somebody’s girlfriend, or you were a dead failure … A logical mind as sexual bait was about level with facial hair.”[12]

This is why even by her late thirties Astley was still struggling with her own feminine identity, complicated in her case by her emerging social identity as a woman writer. Astley would describe the extraordinary power of this confusion: “[If women] did express any thoughts then either no attention was paid to them or they were considered brash and aggressive … women writers were ignored, or whatever women did was ignored. … I don’t even know how women think. I’ve been neutered by society so I write as a neuter.”[13]

Astley really believed this. What was confusing and disturbing to her as she became more successful was that there was so much developing interest in her ‘female’ point of view. Interviews thus became rather excruciating showdowns for her, struggling as she was with contradictory thoughts about her own life. “No”, she said, she didn’t “hate men”. She just thought they were ‘illogical and devious, and emotional exploiters of women”.

At the same time, Astley would remark “I would hate to see Australia become a matriarchy.”  Under pressure to justify her words, Astley would simply pick up speed, running with her argument to bag an entire collection of often unrelated ills. She railed against the new permissiveness of “arty” parents; about “women’s new approach to sex morality sponsored by the Pill”. She didn’t believe “sex equality” could really exist because she thought “most women still want their men dominant and virile”. Men, for their part, had to accept that women “had ideas” – were not just “wives or mistresses”.[14] It was a farrago of ambiguity and defensiveness, the effect of which was to make her seem more conservative than she actually was, for behind these postures of grievance was also vulnerability and self-doubt.

Of course, in reality, in her life, Astley had always been an ardent feminist – and a practical one – whether she aligned herself with the term or not: she shared all costs equally in her marriage; was in fact afforded great personal freedoms within it, and encouraged in her writing by her husband; Astley spent a lifetime complaining about the rights of women to equal pay in the workplace; and much of her fiction and other commentary too bemoaned what she saw as negative societal stereotypes of women, culminating in her own sardonic listing of the four ages of women “Bimbo, Breeder, Baby-sitter, Burden” in Coda (1994).[15]

If Astley was uncomfortable with the word “feminism” it was because it was an “ism”. Astley was unable to separate herself from the implications of any form of “bulk belief” which she associated with her Catholic upbringing. By disposition, too, she was no joiner – not of anything (at least not since the days of the group of writers and artists “Barjai”, to which she belonged at university).

Astley also feared the clubby separateness she suspected came with labels of any kind, let alone the label “woman writer”, and said as much: “I dislike the dichotomies – bringing out anthologies of women writers – nobody brings out anthologies of male writers”.[16] The only clubroom Astley would every have gladly entered would be one with the plaque “good sentences may be written in here” set above its door. But those good sentences, hers, she also suspected were circled by gendered judgments, as she commented in 1981:

Perhaps it is because I am a woman – and no reviewer, especially a male one, can believe for one split infinitive of a second that irony or a sense of comedy or the grotesque in a woman is activated by anything but the nutrients derived from “backyard malice”. Assuming these particular qualities – sense of irony, the eye for the comic or the grotesque – are indications of intelligence and believing a priori that no women is intelligent, critics assign the evidence of humour, irony or comedy to darker forces at work; the Salem judgement comes into play and the lady writer is most certainly for burning. It is hard to understand why else a writer of Stead’s calibre could for so long be ignored in her own country.”[17]

Astley was nervous about a biography when I first approached her about the project, partly because I think she knew herself how contradictory all of this might seem in print; how the coherence demanded by biography might even further misrepresent her. Astley would always say “it all 90 per cent me Astley used to say”.[18] Many authors do, like Henry James, who said “he had written himself so far into his books that a shrewd critic could reconstruct him from them”.[19]

But authors can be tricky about these matters. Most are in some sense hiding in their works. Sometimes in plain sight, sometimes not. The story of the life remains to be told. Not that writers necessarily like that. And that is where the trouble starts, or the joy, depending on your point of view. Biography can appear disarmingly simple; biographers look like the most dutiful assemblers of materials, dutifully gathered. You ask yourself: what order and plausibility can I bring to a crafted world involving fact, interpolation, speculation and the demands of narrative? Most biographers, if they are honest, will admit to struggling with the ‘I’ of the work – their subject’s and their own.

Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather is as a series of narratives over time, interwoven with my own life. “Voice”, as much as time, in biography is an intriguing question; it is as if a silent set of set of personal pronouns were ever ready to step up on stage, but must remain understudies.  The art of biography is really like simple animation: versions of a figure carefully sketched but slightly altered, and moved with a velocity that makes that figure, for the moment, move. To do this, biographers have to find a way to close the gap between sentences. They have to find forms of words that “stand in” for a lot more than they appear to say, and just hope that the words they choose can be read that way by readers.

The truth is that in the writing of Inventing Her Own Weather I dealt with the question of “voice” with some abandon. “Readers” of the manuscript kindly queried how I came by my “interiority” about Thea Astley, and of course I had absolutely no reasonable answer. They quickly figured out that that I was writing as if I were inside the head of Thea Astley. An example of this in practice is the treatment of that notoriously difficult subject in biography: sex.

Astley grew up in times when “relations” between men and women were socially constricted in all sorts of ways. She tried her best to escape this at the earliest opportunity, joining the one mixed social “group” of Barjai for young writers. We had talked about this very early on. In the biography, I write:

Now twenty, good-looking in an angular way, Astley read her poetry to her fellow Barjai members in the crackling and acrid style that became so distinctive in the world of Australian writing, deepened twenty years later by her constant smoking. This younger version was slightly high-pitched with just a hint of the Queensland drawl. She changed her natural vocal rhythms with sudden pauses for effect which would one day turn into her trademark timing. It was almost sex.[20]

Who owns that last remark? It is interpolative work on the part of the biographer.

If it works it is because “It was almost sex” is something Astley could easily have said herself – it is “Astley parlance”. I was able to make this leap with confidence since Astley had said as much when we had spoken. Importantly, as a scene it ties together Astley as a young woman, the sound of her voice, to her speech patterns, her whimsy, and her emerging sense of her own sexuality. There are two voices here, and yes one is partly “imagined”.

Yet the important voice remains that of Thea Astley: Thea of the 1940s “Barjai set” of young Brisbane writers and artists who went on to write fifteen works of fiction; that voice bears a striking resemblance to the elderly much-decorated Australian writer who stood on a stage at her last writer’s festival in Bryon Bay two weeks before she died in 2004, and read to a large crowd. Thirty plus years of smoking certainly deepened the voice, but the cheering and stamping of feet on that occasion, was in appreciation for the literary gifts offered in a lifetime of writing by Thea Astley, Australian author.

Astley also delivered her own final instalment in the story of Thea in her last novel, Drylands. In this scattering of her own literary ashes she gives us characters who all possess some aspect of her personality or represent some part of her life, including the love of the “screwball” outsider – the kind Astley liked “up North” – North Queensland – or the 20 years married Lonnie Cunneen who has been married so long she hardly even knows what sex she is – typical Astley. It is a loosely assembled collage, but a knowing self-portrait.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] Thea Astley in Candida Baker, “Cooler, Calmer and More Collected”, The Age, 31 March 1990, p.

[2] Paul Genoni, Journal Association for Study of Australian Literature, Volume 16 Issue 1, 2016, p. 1.

[3] Thea Astley in Peter Craven, “Written in Her Genes”, Sunday Herald,

8 April 1990, p. 35.

[4] Don Anderson, “Writers Contrast in Age and Style”, review of Beachmasters, The National Times, 5–11 April 1985, p. 31.

[5] Thea Astley, letter to Don Anderson, 7 April 1985, Don Anderson papers,

State Library of New South Wales.

6. Thea Astley, letter to Beatrice Davis, c. 1958–59, Angus & Robertson. Archives, MLMSS3269, State Library of New South Wales.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bob Sessions to Karen Lamb, Melbourne, 13 March 2008.

[9] Thea Astley, A Boat Load of Home Folk, p. 194. ‘The silence of old marriage’ is a

typical “Astley-on-marriage” phrase.

[10] Tanya Plibersek, The Sydney papers, Spring, 2008, p. 115.

[11] Pat and Kevin McHugh to Karen Lamb, Sussex Inlet, 4 January 2011.

[12] Amy Witting in Jane Sullivan, “The Hard Slog and the Little Knack”,

Books Extra, The Age, 9 March 1996, p. 7.

[13] Thea Astley in Baker (ed.), Australian Writers Talk about Their Work, pp. 42–43.

[14] Thea Astley in “Soul for Sale: Just for Jazz”, 18 July 1966.

[15] Thea Astley, Coda, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1994, p. 114.

[16] Thea Astley, Books and Writing with Robert Dessaix, ABC Radio, 8 March

1990, 48609, ABC Radio Archives.

[17] Thea Astley, “Writing in North Queensland”, LINQ, 9(1), 1981, p. 4.

[18] Thea Astley, “Writing in North Queensland”, LINQ, 9(1), 1981, p. 3;

[19] Henry James in Dennis W. Petrie, Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modern American Biography, Purdue University Press,

Indiana, 1981, p. 2.

[20] Karen Lamb, “Barjai: A Meeting Place”, Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather, UQP, 2015, p. 56.