by Karen Lamb
Photographs of Phil in his teens show a slightly built boy, standing at the end of the line where the shorter boys were placed; his bony, angular face was better suited than most to the thick-rimmed round spectacles he wore. He attended St Joseph’s College, Gregory Terrace, a highly regarded fee-paying Catholic college for boys. Phil was softly spoken and by the mid-1930s, when he began the four years that would take him to senior, he had already acquired a shy, some would say effeminate, manner. Perhaps at this early stage Thea developed a protective attitude towards her brother. More than seventy years later, when the writer Michael McGirr began writing about his experiences of depressive illness during his own years as a priest, when he knew Phil well, Thea insisted that he not use Phil’s name in the book.24
Phil thrived at Gregory Terrace. He avoided sport and soon became known as one who ‘worships at the altars of Bach and Haydn’. He became a school prefect and debater but his personal intensity belonged to religious matters always. By the end of his school years, in 1938, he was the President of the St Vincent de Paul society and active in the Holy Name Society. The school’s motto ‘Servire Deo Sapere’ (‘To serve God is to be wise’) suited Phil, who would forever link intellect with belief; when in the school newsletters he promoted the Catholic Truth Society pamphlets it was because he believed they were instructive for ‘an educated laity’ which he saw as ‘essential in this twentieth century’.25
Despite seeming success, Phil struggled with self-esteem. The God he believed in dictated that either he be devout or be unworthy. Thea watched this painful process, unable to offer much support. A gap of temperament made their four-year age difference seem larger, a kind of affectionate and benign estrangement that left both children having to negotiate separately their respective roles within the family. Despite all, they were and remained close for life.
In families, emotional and sexual identity is secreted in a hidden world of childhood. Often there is a kind of cross-modelling of child to the parent of the opposite sex. David Malouf expressed this, writing of his older sister in a poem dedicated to her: ‘You were like father/ I like mother/ a happy compromise/ … I wrote you out of my childhood.’26 The Astley family was like this: the effeminate and increasingly devout Phil and the acute-minded, robust Thea were in their way intensely close but very, very different. It was a difference that at least one of their parents, the devout Eileen, had a vested interest in. Thea couldn’t help becoming a younger sibling who was curious and observing.
If Phil struggled with his own sexuality, it was in private: such things were not openly discussed at the time and certainly not in a conservative Catholic household. In the years to come it was that kind of forced silence that left its mark on Astley, though she gave voice to such dilemmas in her novels when she wrote sympathetically, as she often did, about gay priests. In their internal dialogue, she could comment indirectly on the plight of those who, like Phil, took this path in life. In many of the novels, such characters tend to escape to remote places – a comment in itself – and it is Father Lingard in A Boat Load of Home Folk who reflects: ‘I never had to think, to worry, to examine. I accepted the lot.’27
Curiously, Astley never expected anyone to connect these perceptions with Phil. More than fifty years later, when Astley’s daughter-in-law had only just met Phil, she commented to her husband, ‘Ed, you didn’t tell me Phil was gay!’ Astley snapped the topic shut with quiet phrases about Phil’s delicate mental and emotional states, while Thea’s husband, Jack, would often speak of Phil affectionately as a ‘funny thing’.28 Nobody spoke of sexual orientation.
The attitude of the Catholic Church towards homosexuality precluded open discussion: it was considered a sin against the unitive and procreative sexual activity approved by the Church and regarded as an act of depravity, therefore a moral evil to be fought with the vigour of faith. As a teenager growing up in the early 1930s, Phil would have seen little in Australian public life to encourage any different view. In another decade or so, after World War II in Europe at least, some homophile – as they were called – advocacy groups would emerge but in Australia throughout the 1940s and the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s there was little acceptance of – indeed there was open hostility towards – homosexuality.
Like all children, Phil and Thea were immersed in the climate of their own small family world. Eileen was ambitious for them, her attentions shaped somewhat by her own insecurities and lack of formal education. Yet Eileen’s hopes for Phil and Thea were not so much aspirational as religious, attended by an intense concern for their moral future. This would prove a fearsome combination for her children.
Phil crept quietly into his middle teens while his younger sister watched what she would one day call his ‘vagaries of personal weather’ and sought out those many corners where she might escape the ‘warfare of married couples’.29 Thea did what was expected of her in terms of religious observance but unlike Phil she did not especially seek to understand her God, nor at the age of nine or ten to question the rituals of Catholicism by which the family lived. At home devout families might recite the Rosary every night, others perhaps weekly, and nobody was supposed to eat meat on Fridays. The strictest rules, as Astley would one day remark, were saved for sexual matters: chastity before marriage and sex for procreation as well as a complex set of rules governing marriage, annulment and divorce. Marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics were for a long time called ‘mixed marriages’ – between a believer and a so-called heretic.
James Scullin, the Australian Labor prime minister elected in 1929, was of Catholic background and so as a religious group Catholics were perhaps less set apart from the rest of the population than at other times in Australian history. The Depression of the 1930s also brought a credible voice via the Catholic Worker newspaper to those who saw their mission as defending the needy and the poor.
In one of the ‘many corners’ Thea found reading. If it can be said that Patrick White fell into a puddle and found God, then it could be said that Thea Astley fell into fiction to see whether God even existed.30 Some people try to discover the existence of God in the physical world; she read fiction as a way of determining such a presence in the human moral and imaginative world. In books, Astley hoped to find God in a form she could accept.
Reading was her escape, a salve, and proof positive that a world existed beyond her own. Books were also a form of consolation. When she was eight, she went to Melbourne with her mother for six months during a temporary parental separation. Whether because of Cecil’s overtures or because Eileen remembered her own lonely life in a single-parent female household, she returned to the marriage. However, in those unfamiliar surroundings, young Astley grabbed whatever books were around. What she chose to read might be partly responsible for what came next. At eight years of age Astley read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.
Some individuals seem uniquely primed to have certain impressions made upon them from the start in a way that others do not. Thea Astley seems to have been such a child. The reading of Hugo was not simply a literary feat: the corners of Astley’s psyche were squared by that novel. Its story of convict Jean Valjean is a nineteenth-century crisscross pattern of injustice compounded by misunderstanding, lit up by acts of desperation and depravity, but there is also love, kindness and a kind of ‘life justice’ in the fortunes of the main characters.
Close to the end of her life, Astley still talked about the novel in detail:
I still remember that terrible scene where [policeman] Javert chased Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris, it made a fantastic impression on me – never wanted to work in sewers [laughs]. The bishop [Myriel] scene … Jean Valjean brought back with missing candles by police … funny how I can remember this, given I was eight … [He says] ‘Oh no, I gave them to this gentleman. He was here.’ One of the best lessons in charitable behaviour I’ve ever had in my life.31
The experience of reading such a tale allow
ed Astley at a very young age to intuit aspects of human experience of which she was already aware. Her reading might have been of that intuitive kind young people sometimes do, where the emotional and psychological reality of the work brushes against the edges of a developing sensibility, long before the child can hope for complete understanding of what is being read. Such reading is not so much precocious as prescient, pointing the way to other truths that the child will come to recognise.
Hugo’s novel showed its young reader in another hemisphere that the universe had an order that could be subverted; that a human being could be misunderstood, misjudged and die in the process; that alienation was sometimes inescapable; and that if you hoped to win over the odds, the chances were you would die a slow spiritual death. The basics of all this somehow lay nascent in the eight-year-old girl, the first intimation of a conversation Thea Astley never stopped having with herself about universal human experiences, morality and belief, making her life as a writer seem inevitable from this very early point.
It does seem melodramatic to suggest that the harshness of Hugo’s world had its resonances with a young girl in Brisbane, Australia, in the 1930s. But Astley was growing into and experiencing troubling aspects of her own self, and a lot of difficult things were visible too, even to children. Cecil’s presence – even if he did not speak of the news of the day – had an impact because the daily news throughout the 1930s and much of the 1940s was harrowing. He was sorely tested by much of what he saw and read in his working life and the emotional weight of bearing those events in a civilised silence must have taken its toll on him and been obvious to members of his family.
Cecil and Eileen’s conservative approach to the upbringing of their children did not conceal differences of insistence and emphasis, especially in matters of religion. Eileen’s brand of Catholicism was rather severe and unforgiving. It was ‘a peculiarly obsessive, categorical and intolerant brand of Irish–Australian Catholicism’, full of confusing ideas – at least from a child’s perspective – about sin, forgiveness, judgement and punishment.32 At a very young age, Thea and Phil were learning to focus on intention and action, and to reflect on the effects of their own choices.
Brisbane, like the rest of Catholic Australia, was in the grip of the charisma of that fierce defender of his faith, Melbourne-based Cardinal Mannix. A controversial figure for decades, by the 1940s he was a recognised leader of the Irish community in Australia and highly regarded by the members of his faith. He made public statements about his attitudes towards work, unions (which he supported though he disagreed with strikes), loyalty and the Catholic–Protestant divide, much of which would have been either the subject of discussion at the Astley home, or integral to Eileen’s approved way of worship.
Thea enjoyed her local school, the Sisters of Charity convent of St Michael’s, which was close to Ashgrove in the nearby suburb of Rosalie. The sisters who taught there stayed at the senior Catholic convent school All Hallows’ in the city and caught the tram to Rosalie. For Thea, St Michael’s provided a ready-made connection to a quality Catholic post-primary education. She stayed there until the equivalent of today’s Year 8, in what was then an extended primary system.
In this year Thea, like other academically able students, was coached for a scholarship to gain entry into the private Catholic senior school system; other students would go on to state high schools. But to achieve the best results, all was not left to the final year of primary school: one teacher would often take one class for all subjects, and for many years in succession. This way, the teacher developed knowledge of individual students and their families, could take a special interest in the personality or ability of a particular child. Thea had much to be grateful for here: for four important years she received exactly this special attention, and from a very young and enthusiastic nun.
From the start Sister Mary noticed that the physically diminutive Thea was a special student, not just a bright child but one with unusual ideas and abilities.33 She could see that Thea was outstanding academically across the curriculum but she also noticed that she seemed able to pursue and to articulate individual ways of thinking. It so happened – against the odds – that Sister Mary valued independence of thought. It would not be the first time that Astley would benefit from the forthrightness and intellectual independence of the nuns who taught her.
Unfortunately, Astley’s young peers were not so forgiving, either of their perspicacious classmate or the approving young teacher. They looked askance at what to them seemed quirky ways. Resentment hovered at the edge of tentative friendships: already Thea looked unlikely to be one of the group. She was making the first of her choices about the price of belonging – a lifelong obsession with outcasts and misfits lay ahead. Catholicism had shown her community and comfort in ritual but when it came to ‘group’ versus ‘true self’, it seemed to her that a different bargain was being struck.
She set herself apart.34 It’s hard to imagine those students seeing the reader of Les Misérables as ‘just an ordinary reading kid’, as Astley always described herself when asked to look back at her childhood.35 The other children felt that either she was superior, or she held herself to be superior. In Australia that meant much the same thing, translated to being ‘full of yourself’, or ‘up yourself’.
Even a bold-thinking child is vulnerable and Astley was not at this age even really bold; she did tend to be the first to speak up, but this was part ebullience and part anxiety. To her young peers it might have seemed like attention-seeking. As an adult, the same tendencies led her to awkwardly twisting her hands in unfamiliar social situations, the ever-ready witticism fired like a distracting cannon shot. It was a way of using attention as camouflage.
Sister Mary saw before her eyes this peculiar child’s stubbornness turn into bold-faced courage. She watched as her young pupil read loudly and with confidence to her peers, stoically enduring their whispered derision. Sister Mary believed that here was a child whose personality was going to need ‘space’ and recognition.36
Teacher and student remained close; Thea even became known as a ‘teacher’s pet’. Their relationship was important emotionally, all the more so for being outside the home, with Thea away from her own mother. The nuns had begun to suspect that Eileen was demanding of the mother–daughter relationship, that she was perhaps expecting too much from such a young child. Sister Mary was therefore all the more inclined to give young Thea the freedom she needed to express herself. This comfort and support even attracted Astley to the idea of becoming a nun.37 There seemed nothing to fear in self-sacrifice, but then she was the beneficiary. The problem, Astley would grow to realise, was on the giving side. This balance of giving and receiving was the equation that the novelist she became tried to solve.
The nature of love – selfless love – became her obsession for life. Picasso once identified this kind of anxious intensity in Cezanne’s work, which fascinated him less for its formal artistic aspects than for the anxiety that drove Cezanne to paint so many similar things. Astley’s response to her childhood experiences had the same quality, and it never left her. The emotional core of her work was always this ‘hinterland of childhood’ – a phrase that meant a lot to Astley – a subtle geography of hurts. When it was pointed out to her that her early story ‘Cubby’, published in the 1961 edition of the short story anthology Coast to Coast, had been the impetus for her novel The Well Dressed Explorer, about an unlikeable philandering journalist, she challenged the assumption. The one note of sympathy in the novel is the link to the lost world of innocence described in ‘Cubby’, and there for anyone who really understood the book.38
Astley regarded childhood as not just a ‘hinterland’ but also as a ‘sovereign state’. Like a favourite poet Charles Baudelaire, she, too, felt that true genius was recaptured childhood but she gave it another name: ‘primary magic’. In The Well Dressed Explorer, the character George Brewster tries to repeat one of those breathless b
eing-in-the-present moments, which, by their very nature, can never be repeated: ‘Never would he have a moment quite like that again – but he did not know it. All his life George was silly enough to believe primary magic could be held and repeated at will; and like so many people benignly silly, he was often lucky.’39
Elements in this archaeology of self can be found in Astley’s subsequent versions of vulnerability, delusion and disillusion, her collection of characters in childlike states: Peter Pan philanderers, idealists, benign zealots, naïve intellectuals, misfits and oddballs.40 They reminded her of the outsider status that children on the verge of puberty often experience, turning them into observers and witnesses. It is the children in her novels who often give voice to the ‘tacit war between men and women’ she came to know growing up with Cecil and Eileen.41
As Astley entered the next phase of her life she became transfixed by self-doubt, her own vulnerability and anxiety. She did not in any realistic sense grow up an outsider, nor was she an ‘oddball’, but she felt like a ‘bit of a misfit’.42
She would always look to wider social and political matters to explain these strong personal reactions, observing: ‘I believe ours is the age of the misfit. Because I grew up in a period when conservatism was rampant and one had to fit a pattern, I allow my feelings to take over when I write about misfits. I always develop an enormous sympathy with them.’43
