by Karen Lamb
As Astley matured, her early experiences continued to make her angry; she continually explored the extremes of human behaviour. That tendency was her way of expressing the gap between how she was forced to behave and what she actually felt, making the resentment in her writing not always or even necessarily about the plight of ‘oddballs’ but, rather, about the displacement of individual will.44 As a girl of ten in the mid-1930s, Astley had every reason to be thinking about choice: she was already confronted with her religious brother Phil’s choices, his future in the Church, but she was also thinking about her own life and how different she could make it.
2
Suspected of reading
He was a beanpole of a man with a long amused face and rimless glasses. An unlikely planter, they said. He was suspected of reading.
Beachmasters by Thea Astley, 19851
Given the close relationship between Sister Mary and her bright and unusual young pupil at St Michael’s Primary, it is not surprising that the very best efforts were expected of young Thea in the all-important Year 8 primary scholarship exam. Everyone, including Astley herself, knew that the results would determine her chances of access to quality senior schooling, which Cecil and Eileen could not provide given what Astley came to call the family’s ‘shabby-genteel’ existence. There was no question of going to a school outside the Catholic system.
When the news came about their daughter’s scholarship as a day boarder at All Hallows’, relief would have mingled with pride. Thea could live in the family home even though her school day would be long. Not only was All Hallows’ considered a cut above the major state high school (Brisbane State High), it also had a superior reputation among Catholic schools. The Sisters of Mercy who founded the school were the most significant religious order of nuns before the expansion of Catholic education in the 1920s. Conditions at the school in the late 1930s were, however, hardly luxurious and the school’s appearance had changed little since the original 1861 bare quadrangle of tall buildings, daunting for a young teenager used to a local parish school. Physically, the school insisted on its place in the city of Brisbane, since the buildings were a prominent landmark on the hillside bank of the Brisbane River, as well as being adjacent to the proposed site of the Story Bridge overlooking Kangaroo Point. The teachers were religiously dedicated and believed in educational rigour, but the school motto ‘Dieu et Devoir’ (‘God and Duty’) revealed the overriding ethos of school life.
Astley entered this very formal environment, leaving behind the friendly chatter of her primary school classroom. The difference in scale would have been overwhelming. It all seemed so severe. The full boarders conducted much of the school day in silence, beginning with silent prayer, followed by study, Mass and breakfast, after which they were allowed to speak. Astley had been a teacher’s favourite and she missed the one-on-one attention; here she was being asked to fit into a large multi-staffed convent, a girl among many, albeit ‘a scholarship girl’. To win a scholarship to such a school was an admirable academic achievement, but Astley was only too aware that she was among many children of well-off families. She was adrift, uncertain, constrained. Awed by the enormity of the change, perhaps clinging to the world she had just left, she continued to keep in touch with Sister Mary: she needed an ally, and perhaps also someone to complain to about the new school.
Life at home had been conservative but this new school was all formality. Even the uniform announced restriction: a 1940 photograph of Astley in her second year shows her wearing a long-sleeved dark-coloured school dress with a high, wide collar. The uniform (retained until 1954) was both physically limiting and utterly impractical in the heat and humidity of Brisbane, an absurd transplantation of British couture. Astley felt that a great deal of importance was placed on outward show, and that the students were always being watched for ‘irregularities’ in conduct.
What made things worse for Astley was that formalities and restrictions were always presented in terms of care and protection, and privilege. This combination was morally disturbing to Astley, whose father rejected any expression of class privilege, and it affected her understanding of politics for the rest of her life. She had earned her privileged place: perhaps that was different? Nobody, it seemed, expected the girls of All Hallows’ to take on any responsibility beyond their academic studies. When waiting on tables or kitchen work were necessary, girls of Astley’s age from the Fortitude Valley public school were called in.
The sight of her contemporaries labouring on her behalf was an excruciating experience for Astley, all the more so as she realised that chance of a different kind from hers was playing itself out in the lives of these less fortunate girls. She had earned her place at the school, she knew that, but unusually for her age, she was mindful of the role that luck played in life. She had Cecil and Eileen and their support at home, she had Sister Mary and she had the much-needed scholarship. There was really no need to feel guilty, but the growing knowledge that the school’s prized quality of charity could be so selective left its mark.
But absolute charity was not always the order of the day. In the late 1930s ‘a ruler and a strap’ were used if school rules or practices were infringed in any way. As a former student recalls: ‘Convent girls were exhorted to be humble of heart, unselfish, patient and submissive … the religious practice was governed to a great degree by absolute obedience to the laws of the church. A deep sense of guilt was felt at any deviation from the straight and narrow … no meat on Friday; no hats in church … Latin Mass …’2
Within the school, other demarcations divided the social territory. Throughout the 1940s there was a distinct social separation between day students and full boarders. Often this was most obvious in school sports and other group activities, so that as a day student Astley never quite identified with belonging to the school in the same way that boarders did. It always seemed to be the full boarders who rehearsed and performed plays in the school’s concert hall, morality plays with melodramatic and pious names such as ‘Every Soul’ or ‘Magnificent Deception’. But she did not necessarily mind this observer role: it offered a rare privacy of thought among the throng.
The school newsletter Jottings was full of daily comings and goings, busy with jolly news of school excursions; the girls were not expected to venture into the wider world on their own. (In her first year Astley went to see the Marber Minstrels with the school – an excursion that her parents would hardly have considered, even if they could have afforded it.) All this jollity had the air of being forced, an attempt perhaps to distract from the grave talk of war. The convent, Astley came to understand, intended to remain cloistered. Occasionally Astley and her friends would stage a ‘breakout’, daring themselves to a milkshake after school in the city at the Pig ’n’ Whistle in Queen Street. To be seen drinking these concoctions with suggestive names like ‘Keep it Dark’ in the company of equally privileged non-Catholic schoolboys was forbidden and could mean expulsion from All Hallows’.3
If there was a balancing factor, a reason to toe the line, for Astley it was the spirit and dedication of the teaching nuns. She was grateful for their genuine interest in the abilities of their students.
Consistency and continuity mattered to her, particularly because the relationship between Cecil and Eileen could be bitter, and, as at primary school, one nun in particular became all-important. Astley did not encounter Sister Mary Claver until 1941 when she was in sub-senior year and travelling on a bare C in English: perhaps an indication of how difficult her transition to All Hallows’ had actually been. Sister Claver was a large, comforting, motherly woman, ‘an amazing enthusiast, a lover of books and language’.4 She was not a strict nun but the students hung on her every word. She did not reject strong-willed students, especially if they were intellectually gifted, as was the unusual young woman in her English class. Whenever any argument was up for challenge, Sister Claver – and increasingly the other students – began to look to Thea
Astley.5
After one year with this teacher Astley won the school’s McDermott Prize for Matriculation English. As if to herself, as much as for Sister Claver, she wrote a dedication in the novel she won as a prize: ‘Kindness is more important than cleverness.’6
The young teacher nurtured what she saw as a special talent and a student–teacher bond formed that would last a lifetime. The support was unwavering, one-on-one, and was of the reassuring kind Astley had always needed, especially now that she was beginning to realise it was not enough to be clever.
Astley was starting to find solace in the companionship of words. Unlike primary school, here was competition for the sisters’ approval and at least one classmate was a serious literary rival challenging Astley for top spot. Writing, wanting to write, was accepted as natural in a school that had a serious investment in literary and intellectual passions. Thea Astley was by no means considered an oddity and was made to feel that the world might welcome this interest of hers.
Students saw the sense of vocation in their teachers and were encouraged to consider the profession as a possible occupation. In the early 1940s seniors from previous years who were now teaching assistants returned to help in the school. To them Astley seemed a bright girl just a few years younger than they were. She was not outwardly confident but it was clear she was ‘self-possessed’ of her ‘internal world’.7
By the time Astley was fifteen some of this confidence had given way to introspection; her internal world interested her most, its remoteness from daily life. She began to express these feelings in the poetry she published in the school magazine. It was only her second year at All Hallows’ when she articulated this disquiet:
Unrest
I find no solace in the haunting days,
That creep so slowly by;
Nor in the cool black scarf of Night’s pathways,
Nor in the sky
So calm, serene …
It has no knowledge of my twisted soul
Seeking peace in vain.
Tortured by fears of my own making –
Fancies of a fevered brain.
I seek to fill my mind with other thoughts,
A tree, a limpid pool, an evening sky,
Striving to find comfort in their grace.
And all this misery unexpressed by sigh,
Will wreck my soul, will spoil, will mar, will break,
My heart is like a bird trapped in a cage,
With no escape.8
In years to come Astley would dismiss this as ‘teenage acne’, an adolescent expression of how she saw her emotional world, but the poem also shows formal mastery.9
The set of behavioural codes and practices that dominated her life seemed to debase the validity of what Astley was actually thinking and feeling. As each year passed she was more aware of how limiting this protected world could be: it was a stage-managed existence. Students had little to do but study and observe; they were not expected to converse with the priests who came to visit. Astley saw how obedience was all, that a whole parish society could be ‘totally controlled by sociological attitudes’ delivered by men – ill-educated ‘bog Irish priests’, as she later called them.10
Despite the fine education All Hallows’ offered, the conflict between her two modes of being was emphasised by the conservative and religious attitudes of her mother. It was now impossible for Astley to separate the two, something that would cause her enormous anxiety and hurt. The conflict was close to home rather than genuinely internal: Astley was relatively confident in herself of her own views. But the situation pressed in close; in 1940 Phil was preparing to join the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) at Loyola College in Watsonia, a suburb of Melbourne. Unlike his sister, he was seeking a life of stricture and conformity.
The innate differences between brother and sister were opening up. Of course Thea was to some extent in awe of Phil’s decision, sharing the family’s pride at having a priest in the family, and Phil seemed to survive on the strength of his commitment. At fifteen, Astley had no sense of what joining a religious order might mean, except for the comfort and protection such institutions offered their young devotees. Later in life, as her brother’s frailties surfaced, she became more and more nervous and fearful for Phil, though she only expressed the full extent of her feelings nearly sixty years later, and privately, after his funeral.11
One thing, above all else, became a bridge between these two who lived in such vastly different ways: music. It was a shared passion and a way of understanding each other. Phil loved sacred music and was a talented organist. Astley was studying piano privately. The fact that her favourite nun, Sister Claver, had a singing voice that was legendary in its way also helped forge the only possible link for Astley between the religious life, her school and her own passions. The school placed enormous emphasis on music, with several choirs, including a nuns’ choir, and school orchestras. Mass was in Latin and sung.
It was on these terms that family and Church could coexist in some kind of harmony. For Astley music was a language equal to and beyond words and would always be so. Her novels are full of musical references, and she chose musical terms for titles: A Descant for Gossips and Coda. However, she did not choose a musical career because she knew it was very likely to lead to teaching rather than playing or composing; besides, she was not really comfortable in formal musical performance. Music was emotional and exposing of self; what she wanted was camouflage. Poetry was perfect for self-expression because it required the same exactness of skill as music without the need for performance.12
Astley’s ideas about writing are understandable given the literary models she grew up with. The private world of the self belonged to the idealised Romantic aesthetic of a Wordsworthian solace in solitude and nature. She enjoyed consciously imitating these expressive poetic forms. As she entered her late teens, she wrote out her thoughts on such things:
To You – The Poet
You stood apart from others – weaver of dreams,
For your soul found joy in the light of a star;
You felt with pain the splendour of a hill, Or your spirit went flying afar,
Caught in a mad delight on the screaming wind,
That lashed white on the grey of the sea. You knew, too, the sorrows of men, All the care that can be.
I have seen you gaze on a stream, your eyes filled with delight
At the slow-moving ripples that weave
Their way through the reeds. There can be no sight
But it fills you with joy or with pain;
You breathe dreams and live them. Again,
As you watched the last ragged autumn-leaf falling,
Or the first fragrant bloom of spring,
You mourned with the tear-furrowed wrinkles of age,
You rejoiced with the laughter of youth –
Such emotions can these things bring.
And I saw, as you looked on a sun-dappled vale,
Your joy – and your sight dimmed with tears;
And I gazed in your eyes to see …
The dreams of a thousand years.13
Not only were the ideas important: competence and skill in creating emotion on the page, not just expressing it, were very important to her. They were part of the legacy about effort and discipline in art that her artist grandfather Charles had left and that Cecil and Eileen endorsed. That said, much of the poetry Astley wrote in her late teens is typically adolescent hand-on-heart, poems titled ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Fantasy’, with images familiar from English poetry of the Romantic period, which she clearly studied closely. Astley was discovering some of the less obvious pleasures of language; if the words were arranged delicately enough they could hint at an emotional hinterland.
As a discipline, writing was a very welcome substitute for the dictates of home or insistent religious practice. Here was hope that an ind
ividual might, privately at least, find expression in a life outside the Church’s control. With Phil established in a religious vocation, this conviction was more important than ever for Astley. In writing, confusion could be measured; the fissures of loyalty between faith and self-belief could be expressed, if not mended.
Catholicism was nevertheless an overwhelming presence in Astley’s day-to-day life. The faith had a strong national credibility in the years leading up to and during World War II, especially in Brisbane. Catholic Archbishop James Duhig (whose photograph was the only one to make it into the All Hallows’ journal one year) was a major public figure in the Catholic Church of wartime Australia. Duhig ‘spoke for the northern capital, but he spoke for Australia’.14 His public concerns were more social than theological, and his views about social responsibility and welfare influenced the growth of the Catholic Action groups of the period. His editorials were published in The Catholic Leader and were read widely by parishioners such as Cecil and Eileen. Duhig was a mixture of the quixotic and imperious, holding often lively but ambivalent attitudes towards many aspects of life. Though he approved of the American soldiers’ presence in Brisbane, for instance, he thought they were a bad influence on the moral behaviour of young Brisbane men and women. He was opposed to drunkenness, advocated quality wine instead of spirits, and was not himself a teetotaller.
In the Astley household Duhig was a hero for being a great supporter of culture, especially the visual arts, and a patron of many cultural organisations. Astley was at a critical age – sixteen – for finding a personal resonance in this endorsement that seemed to sanction free self-expression. Catholic cultural societies would become a very important link to the world beyond school, coming as they did with parental and Church approval. Astley was growing up to see that taking a position was important, though different from activism. Later in life she spoke out publicly on many issues – literacy, censorship, the funding of writing. For someone who later claimed to have got ‘through university on three sherries’, it was as overt as she was prepared to be.15
