AustLit

'Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.' (Publication abstract)

'Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community.' (Publication abstract)

'This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.' (Publication abstract)

'Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.' (Publication abstract)

'Across her forty-year writing career, Thea Astley (1925–2004) produced seventeen books, including novels, novellas and short story collections. Early works such as A Descant for Gossips (1960) as well as later ones — It’s Raining in Mango (1987) and Drylands (1999) — have become much-loved Australian classics. Astley was the first writer to win multiple Miles Franklin awards and remains tied with Tim Winton as the only four-time recipients of the prize. As Karen Lamb’s biography — the first book-length treatment of Astley — makes clear, these achievements were no mean feat for a writer struggling to balance the demands of craft with the pressures of motherhood, marriage, work and gendered expectations in a period of shifting social norms.'  (Introduction)

'I had heard the name of Thea Astley long before I ever came to read her words. I knew she had set a significant number of her stories in the region in which I grew up and I was curious to see how she had depicted this place I thought I knew. My introduction to her writing was through her short story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elements of the north, and on the strange lives of failing and disappointed people. But the characters burrowed into my psyche, as did the themes and ideas Astley was exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past.' (Introduction)

'Astley’s Selected Poems — many of which are previously unpublished and span her life from childhood to adulthood — does not so much offer a collection of outstanding aesthetic merit, but rather suggests the ways in which the poems resonate with the stylistic qualities and themes of Astley’s later, more widely read and acclaimed fiction. Indeed, the whole collection invites a reading of poetry as the form through which Astley learnt to be a fiction writer.' (Introduction)