Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  Astley’s senior years at All Hallows’ brought many changes. The war forced school life into unwelcome union with the outside world, even as the nuns tried keep the routines stable. As physical culture squads exercised in groups and girls studied hard for their external examinations, the material realities of war were making themselves felt. It was announced that the school annual would now have to go without pictures for years because of the expense of photo processing.16 The school newsletter began reporting the progress of comfort funds for soldiers, marking the anniversaries of war breaking out and describing progress in ‘the still troubled Pacific conditions’.17

  From early in 1942, teenage schoolgirls could hardly ignore the presence of American servicemen in Brisbane during the Pacific War. Even All Hallows’ ran a friendly excursion to Brisbane’s Hamilton wharves to see the flagships and destroyers, and like her schoolmates Astley waved cheerfully while she autograph-hunted the American sailors.

  She was seventeen and beginning to develop all-important social confidence. Even within school she had begun making jokes, taking on Cecil’s habit of larrikin humour, experimenting with other ways of being true to herself. Some of the more extreme rituals of Catholic daily life were easy for Astley to poke fun at, and so was the sermonising. Astley paid close attention to the language used and later wrote of its ‘dogmatic assurance’ delivered in a sing-song of ‘poetry and fancy’.18 This scorn for overt religiosity remained with her. Even the recitation of the Rosary in Astley’s first novel was seen by the main character as ‘such mechanicalness and so little piety; it was like being present at a series of verbal gymnastics’.19

  Astley and her close friend Jean Baker had developed something of a reputation for pranks, but went too far on at least one occasion. All girls were forced to take Epsom salts daily, thought to prevent constipation. The remedy was very popular and the substance relatively cheap at about ten pounds per ton. The two girls were easily able to overdose, and it was practically the only way to be away sick from classes. Always it was ritual literalness that irritated Astley and somehow the daily dose of salts epitomised that. It amused her to ‘raise the stakes’ by taunting some of the more literal-minded nuns, leading to amusing little scenes:

  Sister: ‘Where is your Penny Catechism [a cheap and simplified summary of Church teachings]?’

  Astley: [Theatrical display of looking quizzical, pulling out – in slow motion – a Latin book, a French book, a mathematics text] ‘I’ve got a threepenny catechism. Will that do?’20

  Somehow she was managing to be cheeky without getting into serious trouble and had the confidence of knowing that she could afford these minor transgressions. Playing with semantics came under the heading of impudence, not rudeness, nor rebellion. The nuns regarded her as polite but with naughty-schoolgirl tendencies. Like Cecil’s wisecracking, it was a larrikinism without intent.

  Astley’s novels tell us a great deal about these early years of her schooling. A lot of time in school was spent on describing the trajectory of the soul but what she had taken for granted as a child now seemed odd: little was said of the reality of life or the actual feelings of the individual. Astley’s mocking style was used to deflect from incursions into her private world, and this double consciousness became part of her. She was perfecting ‘the art of self-containment’ that she wrote into the character of Elsie Ford, her first alter ego in Girl with a Monkey.21

  It was as if twin modes of existence now governed Astley’s behaviour: bursts of theatrical gregariousness and the flight to shelter. Only later in life did she talk about such defences in relation to Catholicism, of how she became aware of her own repetitive ‘examination of conscience, intention and purpose’.22 The nature of things, the effects of things, the incompleteness of things, all were intensely observed in minute detail; for a personality such as Astley’s this meant being aware, then being aware of being aware. She would spend a life battling nerves and ‘little phobias’.23

  At the time, at school, relief came in a surprising form: the sung Latin Tridentine Mass. It was another cherished bond between brother and sister. Throughout their lives, however much the form of Mass was modernised by the Church, both Phil and Thea revered this earlier incantatory form.24 During Mass Astley enjoyed a sense of community while secretly enjoying her private thoughts. She would be silent but she could observe. She would later write of the rituals of the Mass as slavish and manipulative in its symbolism, but she also knew how they calmed the mind.

  The Mass was, as others have observed, ‘a language few understood but one that communicated the power invested in it by tradition’.25 There was an undeniable sense of majesty about it too. All Hallows’ boasted an assembly hall with a vaulting ceiling, which made for even more spectacular gatherings. Late in life Astley missed the smell of incense and a kind of poetry in the early versions of the Bible.26

  But what marred the celebration of Mass for Astley was the behaviour of the various presiding priests. Astley was forced to watch the forthright, astute and hardworking nuns who taught her as they dissolved into obsequiousness in the presence of these visiting priests. Their subservience, she felt, was an example of the iniquitous clerical hierarchy. The views of the male clergy towards women of the Church – or women generally – seemed to undermine so much that was on offer educationally. These sentiments are summed up in many of Astley’s stories, but with particular savagery in ‘The Curate Breaker’: ‘Father Rassini was a suave man of God … who believed strongly in the superiority of the clergy, the philosophic inferiority of all laymen, and the non-existence of women except in some cloudily defined area known as auxiliary where he believed them to be tea-makers for God.’27

  At the time, as an obedient pupil, Astley would have been aware that she, too, was ‘performing’ obedience, whatever her thoughts. Her mind became her personal armoury in a fight that for the moment required no actual rebellion. She slipped cheekily past many official conduct rules, preferring ironic digs at the status quo. It was less risky and more fun. This serious academic student was a wit and known for it. Dinnertime was theatre time. In years to come the writer Helen Garner would marvel at Astley’s disarming social comfort when sitting at tables in pubs or the like, at how she seemed to know when and when not to perform.28 This understanding probably started here. Astley was now a senior, enjoying the approval of a young student audience. Day boarders took meals at the school and the posting of ‘table sittings’ was a daily excitement. One by one, the lists went up on the noticeboard.

  ‘Who’d you get?’ Girls swivelled around to friends. ‘Who did you get?’ Astley always heard, rather than read, her own name as she arrived to escalating squeals of delight: ‘Thea Astley!’

  It was a name that meant her table was in for some storytelling.29 These were delightful moments in what was a dour time.

  Big changes in the school arrangements were in place for the following year, 1942, a special year in the wartime history of All Hallows’ and a critical one for Astley herself. Brisbane was now the headquarters of the American General Douglas MacArthur, his base for the Pacific War. Even though the actual fighting was still remote, the possibility of air raids on Brisbane forced All Hallows’ to split campuses and evacuate students (including Astley) to Warwick, 160 kilometres southwest of Brisbane on the Darling Downs.

  Astley was now in her final all-important matriculation or university entrance year. The relative freedom from the control of parents at home, even for just one year, was a great boon and Astley felt more than ready for the change. She loved her parents and had never quarrelled with them but this was a sanctioned parting. She wasted no time making it as different from regular school as it could be. Already sporting a certain status as a crack storyteller, she increased her status as a rebel: she was spied by more timid students at break times playing poker in the dugout trenches with her friend Jean Baker.

  It was all very exotic compared with the quiet life o
f a prewar All Hallows’. Girls practised air-raid drills in make-do trenches ‘while the plaster saints managed to look the other way’.30 Moira Knudson, two classes below Astley, watched this well-known senior from afar, aware of the gossip that she was always jotting things down on the back of tram tickets. Moira had a madcap sense of humour, was rebellious and naturally drawn to Astley, who discovered that despite their age difference Moira was a kindred spirit. Perversely, Astley found her time at All Hallows’ was becoming strangely liberating; friendships were unusual and more intense. Astley could hardly have imagined that more than forty years later, while researching her 1982 novel An Item from the Late News, she would smoke her way through north Queensland with Moira.31

  Astley’s life in at Warwick was a pleasing balance. There was the academic work, the usual anxiety about achievement and nerves about the future, but Sister Claver, who had accompanied the girls, was a reassuring mentor. Astley’s academic ability was not confined to her expertise in English. She needed Maths to matriculate and actively enjoyed Maths and Logic as much as rhetoric and structural thought. Indeed, references of various kinds to mathematical theorems and algebra are scattered throughout Astley’s novels.

  Her results were English (A), Latin (B), Modern History (B), Maths 1 (B), Logic (A).32 This meant that she could enrol in Arts, Commerce or Surveying. Astley chose Arts and a career in teaching, not because it was ‘all that women could do’ as she was inclined to say throughout her life, but because it was the natural choice for someone whose instincts were already suited to engaging others. Her decision was influenced by many things, not least by her gratitude for the expert teaching she herself had enjoyed.

  Astley’s lively rationality made it hard for her not to criticise the more dictatorial aspects of the Catholic faith. She was unable to accept anything at face value, logically separating ideas and moral values from one another, a habit of mind encouraged by the nuns themselves. But she remained apprehensive about the Church’s moral governance of the lives of so many (and her own). Her approach to Catholicism became permanently split between nostalgia for the rituals of the sung Mass and virulent antagonism to religious moral policing. Sexual maturity would bring with it an even greater sense of the gap between what was preached and what was real.

  Astley wanted to understand the mise-en-scène of her experience of Catholicism; her brother Phil’s vocation and her mother’s religiosity made her own less than wholeheartedly approving responses difficult to deal with. Here was Phil, training to become one of those superior male figures of the Church she had come to detest. She began to wonder about the role that ego played in adherence to religious principles. Even if she couldn’t articulate this, it seemed that ego was a frequent visitor to the house of the Lord. Later in life Astley expressed this in the words of the character Sister Celestine from The Slow Natives: ‘Could it be, she wondered, that there was too much joy in her relationship with her Creator, that sanctity was more arid than she had supposed and all this abandonment of self was a sensual – dreadful word! – pleasure, a subjective one that should not be tolerated?’33

  The way Astley personally dealt with and shaped her experience of Catholicism was both very personal and idiosyncratic. All Hallows’ had become for her microcosmic in the same way that reading Victor Hugo had been in her youth. She saw beneath the codes and practices of religion with a singular sensibility and acuity of mind that made the small-world whole-world connections for her profound. It fed her imagination. The impact of Les Misérables stayed with Astley in her senior years to calibrate carefully her own set of faith values. She never re-read the novel because she never needed to.

  ‘I hope I’ve become more tolerant – kindly – being kind, to me, is a form of spiritual exercise,’ Astley once commented, relegating organised religion to performing a ‘cosmetic dab on the upper right cheek-bone’.34 She fashioned for herself a set of principles that were religious in an entirely personal moral way. This makes Astley’s use of religious terms (acolyte, vespers, wafer, martyr) or the mechanics of religious ritual in her work seem like accoutrements. She said as much herself: when asked about Catholicism’s influence she would always deflect that it was good for the ‘metaphor glands’.35 Of course, this avoids the extremely personal aspect of her response to what she regarded as mindless zealotry and which she would come to consider as her first experience of an ‘-ism’.

  A deep personal disillusionment underpins many of her characters’ utterances about religion. The elderly Miss Paradise in A Boat Load of Home Folk laments being expected to ‘kowtow and behave and fawn and debase [her] individualism’ (in the hope of having ‘God’s ear’), and in It’s Raining in Mango Connie is encouraged to believe that ‘God had [an] enormous interest in her. A direct line to the Lord’.36

  In religious terms Astley’s characters, like Astley herself, often felt set up for a fall. As a writer her ferocity attached itself to matters beyond religious ideals and forms (and Catholicism) but she remained profoundly interested in a human being’s desire to believe. No matter what had happened to her, she never stopped believing in God. She would joke about being ‘close to the Godhead’ or that a certain person ‘couldn’t get God on ISD [international calling]’ but belief in a controlling power was for her connected to so many things that could not be resisted: her past, music, hope. ‘How can chemicals explain the spirit of Mozart or Beethoven?’ she asked on ABC radio’s Search for Meaning program. And Astley never stopped engaging in the act of prayer.37

  In her thirties Astley became interested in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his idea of an Omega Point, some ultimate level of consciousness, a version of belief beyond the material that could be taken as a facsimile for Christian belief.38

  When Astley declared in 1976 at the age of fifty that she did not miss the Church, she meant that she did not miss organised religion. ‘One doesn’t miss a power function that supports disparity in wealth and conditions,’ she wrote. But she added about St Paul that ‘much as one dislikes the old chauvinist – his idea of charity is a good concept’.39 So while she would write of this ‘tragic face of the Christ figure, essentially human and sympathetic’, the real trauma lay in the dismal outcomes of faith for humanity.40 As Astley grew and matured, it seemed to her that the secular search for love and the religious love of God were worlds apart (a ‘spiritual rigidity that absolutely precluded warmth and love’, as she would write in The Well Dressed Explorer).41

  Astley never lost this deep suspicion of the ways in which symbols become agents of mass control. Almost any large group associated with the Mass was to her a mob, mindless, standing as a metaphor for society at its worst. Being ‘mollified by ritual’ was a poor exchange for individual will.42 If this was in favour of a greater good, Astley remained suspicious of the motives. What remained with her were the tenets of humility, personal modesty and discretion. This, too, made her uncomfortable with herself: she was struggling with her own ego and how the exercise of one’s gifts, the desire for self-expression, sat with such teachings. Catholicism would yet become a battleground of self-worth.

  Ruminating on such things can be immobilising; viewed in such a way the Church looks like a natural home for neuroses, ‘importuning God over and over … as if rote meant result …’ (as she would describe Mass in The Well Dressed Explorer).43 In years to come Astley would relive these sentiments in interviews, commenting how, for example, ‘Guilt, failure and unhappiness are a terrific impetus to writing.’44 As always, the intensity of her remembered feelings of this time were more explicitly expressed in her fiction, as in the words of Connie in It’s Raining in Mango: ‘All her life had glittered with moments when the words uttered were not those meant …’45

  Astley was also disconcerted about the social attitudes towards sexuality. At school it was ‘the only one of the ten Commandments that people went on and on about’ – the most dishonest face of the Church.46 Years later, she recalled her teenage confusi
on: ‘All of a sudden you’re fourteen and you think, “Heavens, I had a dirty thought. This sort of guilt doesn’t seem healthy to me.”’47

  Was she the only one who had these feelings? Or did this double-life of mind and body beset others? What about the priests and nuns? What about their sexual needs? Time and again she posed such questions in her fiction. Belle in Reaching Tin River says, ‘Christians have a terrible duality to deal with when confronted with the body – the spirit and the flesh at tugowar …’48 Then Jessica Olive rails against the Church in It’s Raining in Mango: ‘All my liturgical loyalties, those reverences for the simple dogmas the poor unfortunate sisters drummed into me at the behest of a male hierarchy, have been my undoing as a human … That terrified obedience you and your brothers in Christ exact is directed largely at women. Women. You’ve neutered us. Made us nonhuman.’49

  At seventeen, Astley was a young woman confronted by a set of beliefs that seemed to offer no place for sexual desire, none for longing – and she longed for and desired a great deal. On the verge of leaving All Hallows’, Thea Astley was interested in being as full a human being as she could be. She was highly numerate as well as literate, self-disciplined and academically successful. She was formally educated when that was not common for women. How well had these years at All Hallows’ equipped her for life? Astley had grown into a lean and lithe young woman – slim, long-limbed, with an easy athleticism. She had hair that could be brushed into abundance; her mouth was full, wide, and shapely. Eyes full of wit and mischief held their gaze under dream-heavy lids. Astley was excited by change and knew it had arrived. Catholicism, she no doubt suspected, would continue to make her life complicated. She left All Hallows’ respectful, grateful, and secretly seething.