Thea Astley’s glorious paradox laid bare in Karen Lamb’s biography

A new biography of Thea Astley should renew our fascination with a writer who encapsulated the contradictions of her time.

Thea Astley ‘burned off great paddocks of private fantasy’ over a 50-year writing career.

All creative writers draw sustenance from their lived experience, but Thea Astley (1925-2004) made a career out of hurling her biography through the looking glass.

The Brisbane girl whose Catholicism was bound up with the roots of the self grew into a novelist whose portraits of the church and its earthly representatives were often wicked. The faithful wife and dutiful mother explored infidelity with insight and fascination, observing modern marriage as an anthropologist would the alien customs of an unknown tribe. From the cultural desert of Sydney’s suburbs she visited, again and again, what she called her ‘‘dream country’’: the verdant, emerald green North of the imagination.

And as Karen Lamb points out in her welcome all-rounder of a biography, exploiting paradox became a lifelong habit of Astley’s, a means of evading the mundane even as she inhabited it. Over a 50-year writing career consisting of a dozen novels and short-story collections, the author burned off great paddocks of private fantasy. In their pages she jail-broke the narrow confines of domestic servitude and stuck it to the same folk she kowtowed to in everyday life.

The wonder of Inventing Her Own Weather is that Lamb manages to corral these contradictions into some kind of individual coherence. And the generosity of her project lies in the biographer’s effort to locate and explain the forces that made Astley so tricky, so difficult a customer. To be a woman and a writer under the conditions Lamb describes required either the tact and diplomacy of a Talleyrand, or else the bloody-minded determination of a pioneer.

The initial surprise of the biography is the Edwardian conservatism of Astley’s upbringing. The flat-vowelled chain-smoker of literary legend began life as the child of congenitally correct parents. Thea’s mother was a devout Catholic and a figure of surpassing primness. When the young adult Thea eloped with a man 10 years her senior and a divorcee to boot, Eileen Astley did not talk to the couple for years. She returned a gifted copy of A Descant for Gossips, Astley’s second novel and breakthrough work, with offending passages and unpleasant words blacked out.

Cecil Astley was not as godly but he was even more of a stickler. An old-school copy editor for Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail, Cecil possessed a vermouth-free wit which his daughter inherited. The unhappiness of her parents’ marriage was also a boon of sorts: the biddable child became curious about the institution’s flaws at an early age. Astley also gained from Cecil a love of and respect for Australian literature which, as Lamb points out, was unusual for the day.

The family was all spit and polish, but not wealthy. Astley won a scholarship to Brisbane’s grand All Hallows Convent, where she combined a bluestocking’s earnest swotting with a growing resistance to the habits of empty obedience inculcated by the school. She ended her time there as an internal emigre from religion and caste, though it was only during her undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland, in the closing years of the war, that she met and made friends with other literary and artistic figures of the moment, that she discovered in writing a potential means of escape.

Yet, as is so often the case with Australian women writers of Astley’s era, that freedom would be years in the gaining. Lamb passes quickly over the time when Astley toiled as a schoolteacher in far north Queensland and elsewhere, lonely and repelled by the pinched mores of small-town Australia, even though it was these formative experiences that provided Astley with the material for her early fiction.

But Lamb is solid on the subject of Thea’s relationship with husband Jack Gregson. Theirs was an epic bout of a marriage, characterised by spats and periods of estrangement, healed by humour and a shared love of music. If Thea had not met Jack, she would have had to invent him. It was the fissiparous dynamic of their relationship that furnished the writer with much of her best material, as Lamb suggests:

Astley’s novels were always drawing their intensity from the conditions of her own life — they always had. ... She had an endless internal debate about the place and value of marriage and family, the genealogy of character and human patterning, the drive to social conformity versus the will to break away from it. She wanted to write about the possibilities for human companionship in the search for love beyond the ‘‘hinterland of childhood’’.

The house in Dorset Street, Cheltenham, which Thea and Jack built to their own design and lived in for decades while Thea taught English at the nearby high school and raised her son Ed — all the while writing many of the novels that would bring her critical admiration and a popular readership — might stand as an image of Astley herself. A hard-edged modernist box, planted incongruously amid the settled uniformity of the Sydney suburbs.

Lamb alerts us more than once to the mixed feelings the author inspired in her neighbours: women either admired her bluntness and pluck or else they avoided her out of worry that she would cannibalise their privacy for her fictions. Their husbands regarded Astley with naked fear.

But not male writers. Lamb is helpful in tracing the associations and affinities with other authors or publishers that formed Astley’s alternative social circuit. She adored Hal Porter and, with characteristic effrontery, stalked Patrick White early on in her career. As usual, White liked her until he didn’t — yet his initial friendship and advice were invaluable to the tyro author.

It was Astley’s connection to the literary worthies of the day that confirmed her right to be considered a writer. Indeed, for all the forcefulness and vigour of her fiction, Lamb identifies a deep lack of confidence in her subject. It was this uncertain sense of merit that could lead the author to turn on even those closest to her:

Compared with Astley’s day-to-day life, her persona as an author was odd. Wasn’t she still just a teacher who had written a book, a mother with a toddler who would need her regular job back? Was she a teacher or a writer? These questions brought self-doubt, which shadowed her success.

‘‘Astley,’’ Lamb concludes, ‘‘was not comfortable with the concept of being a writer.’’ Which is something of a mystery, since the broad community of readers was ever-ready to lay plaudits at her door. She was the first to win four Miles Franklin Awards, even during the most sausage-y years of that notorious sausage-fest, and she managed to eke out modest commercial success from fictions that tested the bounds of realism and the kind of cosy, spoonfed narratives that have often characterised the mainstream of Australian fiction.

Lamb’s biography is light when it comes to critical appraisals of Astley’s writing much beyond general critical and commercial responses to various titles. This reticence seems partly tied to the ambivalent views of her work held by many others in the Ozlit community.

Bea Davis, doyen of mid-century Australian publishing, may have rated Astley’s style but White and many others thought it overdone: at once too mannered and too frivolous. ‘‘You must wrestle with yourself,’’ wrote the grand old grump of Australian letters, ‘‘and stop being that bright girl who has escaped from the stuffed lounge suites to a rackety career in novel writing.’’

It is true that Astley’s prose lacked the nervy grace of someone like her friend and fellow teacher Joan Levick (aka Amy Witting), or the formal elegance of her Queensland coeval Jessica Anderson. But what Astley had which they lacked was quality of attack. Among all the leading women writers of her generation, Astley was the one who spoke most directly about the contradictions that emerged from being a female and a writer in a time when both were suspect categories to the wider population.

Her tragedy came from the fact that she was a writer who railed against the restrictions and iniquities of her historical moment, but who was too tied up with the old order to embrace the new when it came. Her glory as a writer — that natural eccentricity of idea and approach — emerged from that same inability to fit in with either dispensation.

Despite these literary-critical omissions, Lamb’s biography does exactly what it should do: present its subject in the round without overt fawning or disguised rancour. Astley climbs from its pages a flawed human with a gift that has been discounted in recent years. Until the recent republication by UQP of A Descant for Gossips, a few dusty warehoused copies of her wonderful final novel Drylands were all that remained in print. We can only hope that Inventing Her Own Weather will renew our fascination with a writer who was marvellous because she was difficult, groundbreaking because she was conservative, and deserving of celebration because of the author’s own uncertainty regarding her worth.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather

By Karen Lamb

UQP, 384pp, $34.95