Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  Ed, Michelle and Michelle’s wider family, including her siblings and their young children, made Christmas seem almost picture-perfect and easy, with everybody sitting in the sun on the new decking and Thea matching cigarettes one to one with Jack’s scotch. At such gatherings Astley was at her most immediately present but still, as always, not completely. She still had the world of words in her head, the words in the world. What would her world have been like without them? What would the world be like without them? Here was the kernel of an idea for that last book, a book for the world’s last reader.

  Astley was not fond of last words of the kind spoken at funerals; a writer might scatter her own ashes better in a final book. Time might be running out. If Astley was headed for ‘dry lands’, why not have Drylands as a title?

  From the end of 1996 until 1998 Astley was writing this novel, about a small Queensland town where little had changed in fifty years, where ‘loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business’.22 It was the same subject as Girl with a Monkey but this time the writing was more savage. She was finely calibrating all the fifty years of her anger for one last expression – about men and women, small minds, the violence and hedonism of a philistine culture that liked to pretend it was ‘knockabout’ while in fact being driven by consumerism and corruption. It was an anger Astley found herself defending after the book came out in 1999: ‘You haven’t got to be angry – you can be amused – but it needs to be strong enough as an impulse.’23 If hers was an ill-tempered view then that was how Astley was feeling. The book was bleak: ‘I might have to agree – maybe I was feeling bleak.’24 This last instalment was a strong indictment of the world, but in interviews Astley kept talking about ‘magic’, the magic of words.

  The same low mood prevailed all year. Cairns City Library was using quotes from her work for their Literary Trail – but misspelling them. There was to be a series of plaques dedicated to writers, created by local artists, with quotations from the chosen works of the writer. Astley wrote a stinging letter:

  I might have felt differently, perhaps, had I been consulted on the actual choice of extracts; but what incensed me was the inability of the typist to transcribe accurately. The first quotation contains two spelling mistakes in four lines; the second has one mistake in three lines; the fourth extract has the page wrong. This does not inspire confidence.25

  The library had meant to celebrate her. People were still getting her wrong and no amount of apology would persuade her not to point this out. Astley knew that such acerbic reactions seemed extreme to others but she was unable to respond any other way when the mood took hold of her. She wrote this flaw into some of her characters, unveiling alter egos spanning fifty years of writing – the ‘90% ME’ she had declared her books were.

  In the new novel – the one she intended to be her last – many of Astley’s lifelong preoccupations and attitudes had their final expression. The character of Franzi Massig is a man with a ‘flippancy’ he can’t control. The character Janet loves reading; she is the child who ‘learned about the warfare of married couples’ and found corners in which to hide. Paddy Locke is a collector and protector of the underdog, particularly the Aboriginal underdog, and nurturer of the screwball outsider. Evie is a creative writing tutor who deplores the wrongs inflicted on her own sex. Lannie Cunneen, after twenty years of marriage, hardly knows what sex she is. All were logical sorties in an argument whose premise was Thea. Astley was travelling backwards fast: author, mother, wife, woman, girl.

  Penguin’s team was bowled over by the novel from the outset.26 By October of 1998 the usual tussle over the title had begun. Astley was toying with ‘Almost There’ or ‘Almost Home’ (the title of the last-but-one section of the novel) or ‘Dry Lands’.27 Her original title stuck, though as one word, and Meredith Rose, now in Broome working as editor for Magabala Books, agreed to take on the editing, sending pages of minor edits from there for Astley to consider. Astley was surprised that Rose had said little about the book itself – just the edits coming through. She was still unusually sensitive and easily undermined, and Rose knew this, sending a note praising the book’s ‘undeniable feeling of the emptiness of everything. And the fullness of it’.28 Only an editor who knew Astley well and understood her work could have made such an observation, close to something Astley would have thought of herself. The matter of title settled, Astley prepared to enjoy this last beginning that was also an end.

  Ambient sadness gentle as death’s dust had settled on her despite the shimmer of activity caused by the move in 1999 to Sussex Inlet. The flatness of the land and its proximity to the sea were attractive to both her and Jack, especially as Jack now needed more care. Michelle had been right about the McHughs a couple of doors down; Thea had introduced herself as ‘Mrs Gregson’ and Pat McHugh soon learned how suspicious and touchy Thea was about being identified as Thea Astley the writer. Soon afterwards she had said hello only to find Thea forgetting they knew each other: ‘How do you know me?’ They had a shared Catholic upbringing and both enjoyed heated discussions. Marital spats raised no eyebrows in this company. ‘Thea would come around the block smoking furiously muttering, “I’m gettin’ away from ’im in there.”’29

  The McHughs had been married as long as Thea and Jack and the two couples enjoyed an easy camaraderie. This was not literary friendship but, importantly now, personal. Astley warmed to her new audience, one that understood her gibes about Catholicism. To the McHughs these seemed to hinge on very particular rules that Thea had grown up with and they led to absurd stand-up arguments, monologues and inquisitions. Astley was determined to subject the rituals of faith to pure logic. 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.

  In this mood she refused to let go of the topic, her attitude ranging from mock-seriousness to genuine anger.30

  Behind it all was worry: Jack. Thea joked that his eyesight wasn’t as bad as he made out and they played games along that line. Astley would move the pepper or salt, just to see whether Jack knew where it was. On her own Thea would confess she felt she must have caused the macular degeneration from which Jack was suffering by forcing him to live in the Queensland sun during the 1980s. Astley had a way of convincing herself of these things: it was almost as if she needed guilt to justify her concern for his wellbeing.31

  Pat McHugh was the kind of woman Astley had always liked: unfussed by status and preoccupied within her own private sphere and family. She might visit the mobile library and go for coffee wearing a man’s blue-checked pyjama top. Somehow Pat understood that Thea could not be talked into or out of anything; anyone who tried was likely to strike a sore point. Driving was a good example. Thea had always hated driving and dealing with gears, but the suggestion that she should get an automatic car would provoke a tirade about the way men tried to restrict women from driving. The typewriter could never be replaced with a computer. If she went shopping – ‘Let’s have a bit of a perve,’ she would say – she always looked for caftans. Loose-fitting garments were not in fashion, and the search would be another version of the hunt for the brown corduroy suit with Louise Adler in Melbourne.

  Sport was another touchy topic. The McHughs happened to be friends with Tom Keneally, who had been at school with Pat’s husband, Kevin. They met him skiing and mentioned it to Thea: ‘What’s he doing skiing!’ she answered, as if writers were letting the side down by taking part in such pursuits. For someone whose main outing was to Nowra to buy cigarettes in large cartons, perhaps that reaction was to be expected. It was a relief to Thea not to have to talk about her writing, but she was probably enjoying the chance to express her views one more time.

  Astley’s life now centred o
n caring for Jack. In May 1999, she herself had been ill with stomach pain; she had had to cancel the launch of Drylands at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Astley had not given much attention to her own health until now – only Jack’s – and she knew she was facing a couple of years of doctors and hospitals, disruptions to the life they were used to leading. At the back of her mind was always how these things would affect Ed.

  It was time to walk away from certain things. Her agent Jill Hickson had decided to sell her business to agents Curtis Brown. In May of 2000 Astley wrote to them: ‘I feel it is rather pointless continuing to have an agent at this stage of my life. I don’t intend writing any more novels.’32 ‘This stage of my life’ was not an Astley phrase; the shadow of cliché had just crept across her life.

  The only thing that broke the literary silence of this time was news that Drylands was a joint winner of the 2000 Miles Franklin Award for fiction – Astley’s fourth. The other winner was Kim Scott, an Indigenous writer, for Benang, a novel about Aboriginal disinheritance, an epic subject Astley would have endorsed. To be sharing the award was another one of those synchronous happenings: she had shared her first Miles Franklin nearly forty years before.

  In 2002, at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, she was given a special award for her lifetime achievement. This did cheer her up and the McHughs had sparkling wine ready for a celebration. However, Thea was now so concerned for Jack he wasn’t allowed any of it – she had to get him up the few stairs to their house afterwards. Jack, who used to be able to leap up stairs, was now extremely ill. Astley decided not to attend the award ceremony in Sydney and to use the award money to fly Ed up to see Jack.

  By the end of 2002 Jack was clearly failing. He was admitted to hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness. Astley sat with him on New Year’s Day 2003 and was told to go home: the hospital rang soon after with the news she had been dreading.

  No foreknowledge of death protects from its impact. Ed suddenly realised how little either of his parents had ever talked of it. Jack had not wanted a formal funeral and Thea was of like mind. The decision was made to scatter his ashes near the house at Sussex Inlet. On the appointed day, Thea, Ed and Michelle braved a fierce wind in the wrong direction – with some welcome laughs – before heading for a calm spot near the park at the edge of Swan Lake. Thea read a poem from Bruce Dawe’s 1971 Condolences of the Season, ‘Any Shorter and I’d Have Missed It Altogether’, a final tribute to irony and the lives lived, and shared, in its presence.

  Astley had been independent in her early twenties but this was the first time she had been alone. Of course, she had travelled to writers’ festivals and carried out residencies, but not alone, not like this. In the last ten years she’d been writing passionately about women striking out on their own, which she admired, yet she had not lived like that herself. Even when Astley had a short residency in Denmark, Jack and Ed had tried to convince her to extend her trip, to travel freely on her own, but she had come straight home. Ed had long understood this anxiety; things needed to be, and stay, in place. Plans were not for altering. ‘You could never say to Thea, “Look, there’s been a change and we might have to do it differently.” It would cause real angst.’33

  Like most people suddenly bereaved after a long relationship, Astley was left to wonder what there had been before Jack. What could she go back to? In her mind there was only that lonely young schoolteacher in a small Queensland town. With Jack gone, everything was gone: argument, music, jokes. They had fought each other fiercely and often but never over the future, because they knew each of them was the other’s future. Being so bound together had actually liberated them.

  They were people of their time. Technology, in most of its guises, had never much appealed to Astley, and both she and Jack took pride in being technically intolerant. Ed would recall, ‘If you tried to explain email Thea would just close down.’34 She remained attracted to the spiritual calm of their special kind of merging of consciousness, because it foretold of death; in Drylands she had written of Chardin’s Omega Point and ‘the ultimate integration of all individual consciousness’, anticipating her own such moment.35

  In the days after Jack’s death there was much to face and at such times all the writing in the world is useless. Astley, in great distress, took to calling friends repeating endlessly what she saw as her failure to support Jack in his time of need. ‘I’ve been a terrible wife, I’ve been shocking,’ she told Michael McGirr. Her reaction did not fit the facts but somehow she needed to say such things. People became seriously worried about her. Mark Macleod, still a close friend, knew that her feeling this way was also partly the consequence of all those years when Thea and Jack removed themselves to such remote places, making life more difficult for them.36

  Within weeks of Jack’s death, Ed and Michelle organised for Thea to move to a rented holiday apartment near the town of Brunswick Heads in northern New South Wales, close to them and not too far from Byron Bay. She was to be there temporarily while the house that had been purchased at Suffolk Park, with its little strip of shops and bush nearby, was settled formally. Thea said little about the arrangements.

  Staying at the same holiday apartments were former Epping neighbours Margaret and Allan Smith. During dinner they spotted their old friend looking rather lost. When they visited her in her room the next morning, there she was, sitting on the bed in the familiar cross-legged pose, smoking furiously under the ‘Smoking Prohibited’ sign. This was reassuring, a sign that the old Thea was still there. But she was desperately unhappy, a little spiteful with it, and not inclined to pretend to please. There was a litany of complaints: There was no square bread in Byron Bay; the new house was ‘a good investment for when I’m gone’.

  The velocity of the changes seemed too much for her. The Smiths wondered whether Thea should have stayed in the Sussex Inlet house temporarily, to grieve quietly. But when Astley rang them a year later, at Christmas, they could hardly believe the difference in her. This time they got a typical ‘Thea account of the new house, its absurd design’; the steps she had to negotiate just to ‘get to the loo’ and the lush bush surrounding the lovely decking that she might just set on fire with her early morning fag.37 If anyone had happened to move to Suffolk Park for the tranquillity of fresh air and bush, Astley was clearly not the ideal neighbour.

  Astley knew she was, as she said to the writer Marele Day, in ‘the end zone’.38 However, she discovered that she really enjoyed Byron Bay. The place might have been pretentious in its trendiness in ways she had satirised all her life in novels, but it was also home to a strong community writing culture, with its own literary festival and a writers’ centre. Its director, Jill Eddington, remembers the day a woman whose face she was sure she recognised walked in, and said, ‘G’day. I’m Thea Astley. You probably don’t know me. Listen, I don’t drink, but I do smoke.’39 They went up to the balcony to talk books.

  Astley had already started to enjoy the frisson of surprise in meetings like this. It had been fun to see the look on the librarian’s face at Brunswick Heads when Astley presented her library card. She made an instant friend in Lisa Morrison, who was happy to show off the neighbouring libraries, such as the newer one down the road at Ballina.

  This tip-off led to a vintage Astley cameo. Her visit coincided with the ‘Loud in the Library’ week, an initiative encouraging young people back into the spaces of reading. The noise did not go down well with the novelist-visitor, who could be seen in a corner writing a rather long passage in the library’s suggestion book: ‘Once the library was a place of silent reading. Is there nowhere youth can be taught that some things deserve respect. And rock music? A moronic noise. I’m shocked a librarian would permit it. P.S. Pity to mar a beautiful library. Thea Astley’.40

  Astley sought comfort in taking out works of Australian literature she knew well, often novels by writers she knew personally or remembered from her Literature Board days. She
re-read some Rodney Hall. Books about Brisbane were on her top shelf, including The Motorcycle Café by the young writer Matthew Condon.

  They had met. Her Pineapple stories in the 1980s had spoken to him, making him realise that this was the kind of voice he could have in writing about a place many would have considered unsuitable for literary purposes. Twenty years later Condon reviewed Drylands and thanked Astley for her work, telling her how important she had been to him as a writer, that she was a ‘writer’s writer’. A return letter didn’t arrive but Condon heard via a publisher that Astley was desperate for him to phone. They spent time together at the last two Byron Bay Writers Festivals Astley would attend, smoking and talking and drinking coffee under a tree.

  Condon could see Astley was ailing, which made her running commentary on the passers-by, complete with comic idle speculation, all the more astounding. They smoked ‘like trains’ and ‘laughed and laughed’. Condon learned that every year she re-read The Motorcycle Café about a bygone Brisbane. They shared the link of being Queenslanders, could chat about the strangeness of the place, the details of Brisbane such as the brothels in Albert Street; they were ‘like two children in the same clubhouse’.41

  In Byron Bay Astley settled into a sort of routine. She visited the writers’ centre and held court at the regular Friday café lunches. Writers and interested readers passing by would join in. Astley expressed her long-held views, but sometimes she risked alienating the very crowd that held her in such high esteem. Arguments broke out around the table about creative writing. ‘You can’t teach it,’ Thea would declare, although she had done so, as most people there knew.