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W/rites of passion: Thea Astley's Sunshine Coast transition from poetry to fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2017
Abstract
During 1947 and 1948, Thea Astley's life changed in ways that permanently affected her writing. In August 1947, she obtained a transfer to Imbil State School, west of Noosa. In November she re-sat failed University of Queensland exams in economics and history, and graduated with a BA in the following April. In January 1948, Astley took up a secondary teaching post at Pomona Rural High. On 27 August, she married Jack Gregson at the Gympie Registry Office. She transferred to Brisbane for the remainder of 1948, and early in the New Year moved with her husband to Sydney. This article contrasts poetry about love and place that Astley wrote during these transition years with the themes and tone of her novel, A Descant for Gossips, published in 1960 and set in Pomona (‘Gungee’) and its environs. Dedicated ‘To John’, Astley's love poems display a passionate lyricism and a commitment that, though usually nervous and conditional, encompasses moments of settled happiness and clarity. In Descant, by contrast, moments of fulfilment in the love affair of teachers Helen Striebel and Robert Moller are suffused with guilt. Similarly, Astley's youthful response in her poetry to the beauty of the ranges and the coast collapses a decade later in Descant into a dystopic rendition of Gungee as a town that punishes defiance and crucifies difference. The article concludes by speculating about causes for the transformation.
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Endnotes
1 Lamb, Karen, Thea Astley: Inventing her own weather (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2015), p. 87.Google Scholar
2 ‘The name Sunshine Coast was launched in December 1958 at the inaugural dinner of the Sunshine Coast Branch of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland, held at the Hotel Caloundra’ (https://library.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au/sitePage.cfm?code=place-name-origins). Brisbane residents continued to call the region the ‘North Coast’ for at least a decade after the REIQ meeting.
3 UQ, Fryer Library 48, items 11–12: Astley refers in the March letter to her recent transfer from Hermit Park to Townsville Central State School: ‘The school is smaller than Hermit Park — about 300 kiddies in all. I much prefer it.’ The letter, dated 27 June, confirms her visit to Brisbane in August 1947: ‘Today six weeks I'll be home. Flying, straight after school on the Friday. Will there be any writers’ meetings on? I'll want to go.’
4 ‘A “pity” book not filmed in Pomona’, Gympie Times, 20 September 1983; Astley refers to the ABC's filming at Romsey in Victoria of its three-part serial version of A Descant for Gossips. She denies that any of the book's characters are from Pomona — ‘Certainly not my Pomona headmaster who was Mr Bunny Horne, a delightful man as was his family. My headmaster in A Descant for Gossips was a combination of loathsome headmasters I had experienced during my years of teaching but these did not include Mr Horne . . . Nor did they include my headmaster at Imbil the year before . . . I really thought Pomona — all around there — was a beautiful place and I used the layout extensively in my book.’
5 Elsie revisits Townsville, the city of her first teaching appointment, in ‘this last week of August’. Astley, Thea, Girl with a Monkey, new ed. (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1977), p. 2.Google Scholar The narration oscillates between the day of Elsie's return on her twenty-second birthday (p. 1), and her life in Townsville from February to early August (p. 23). Astley's own twenty-second birthday fell on 25 August 1947.
6 Thea Astley, interviewed by Suzanne Lunney (Walker), 16 April 1974, NLA Transcript TRC275, 1974; http://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1269005.
7 Lamb states that Astley ‘was now a graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a teaching diploma’ when the Education Department appointed her to Townsville for the 1947 teaching year (Thea Astley, pp. 73–4, 77); but Sheridan refers to Astley's interview with Lunney, in which she mentions that she had to re-sit failed exams in economics and history at the end of 1947, ‘and so her Bachelor of Arts was not conferred until April 1948’. Sheridan, Susan, Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011), pp. 59, 75Google Scholar. That Astley was still working externally towards her degree while teaching in Townsville is confirmed by her letter to Haley dated 27 June 1947: ‘Your papers have been arriving almost as regularly as my lecture notes, this afternoon's post unfolding a Bulletin.’
8 In a letter to Haley from ‘Rural School, Pomona, Tuesday’, dated in a different hand ‘Aug. 1948’, Astley writes, ‘Truly I don't think it would be much use sending me books on dogma or doctrine, though I am grateful for your kindness in offering to do so. I feel I don't want to be perplexed.’ Lamb, Thea Astley, p. 77, reads Astley's refusal of books as evidence that Haley ‘did not ply her with books of dogma and doctrine’, and that ‘she valued his friendship all the more’ because of this, but surely her refusal implies that Astley had grown wary of Haley's mentoring of young Catholic intellectuals on matters of faith.
9 Taylor, Cheryl (ed.), Thea Astley: Selected Poems. Introduction Wyndham, Susan (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
10 Inserted in this exercise book is an incomplete photocopy of Astley's short story, ‘Seeing Mrs Landers’. Buckley, Brian and Hamilton, Jim (eds.), Festival and other stories (Melbourne: Wren Publishing, 1974, pp. 35–9)Google Scholar; and handwritten drafts of poems that Astley noted in red biro as ‘written while at Correspondence School 67 or 66 [sic]’. In A Boat load of home folk (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1968), pp. 74–7, Astley attributes versions of these poems to the island agent Jim Stevenson, who escapes from a stultifying marriage by way of an affair.
11 Astley attributes her typed sonnet, ‘Magnetic’, alternatively titled ‘The Island’, to the Sydney Morning Herald; ‘Sulpicia ill’ appeared in the Herald on 19 October 1957, p. 12.
12 Astley attributes the sonnet that she dates ‘1947’ to the ABC Weekly. She notes the publication of ‘Droving Man’ in Australian Poetry 1956 and the Bulletin. (‘Droving Man’ was Astley's most frequently republished poem.) As Astley also notes, ‘A Last Year's Hero’ appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald [16 July 1957, p. 18] and in Porter, Hal (ed.), Australian Poetry [Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957, p. 15]Google Scholar.
13 Thea Astley interviewed in Ellison, Jennifer, Rooms of Their Own (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986), p. 58.Google Scholar
14 Thea Astley: Selected Poems, p. 97.
15 Brian, Matthews, ‘Life in the eye of the hurricane: The novels of Thea Astley’, in Sheridan, Susan and Genoni, Paul (eds), Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 43 Google Scholar (first published Southern Review 6.2 (1973), 148–73).
16 Selected Poems, p. 111.
17 Lamb, Thea Astley, p. 14.
18 Quoted by Lamb, Thea Astley, pp. 80–1.
19 Selected Poems, p. 98.
20 Selected Poems, p. 99.
21 Selected Poems p. 111.
22 Selected Poems, p. 114.
23 Selected Poems, p. 110.
24 Selected Poems, p. 124.
25 Selected Poems, p. 84.
26 The Queensland settings of ‘Echo Point’ and ‘John’ owe more to Romantic poetry than to Astley's social world.
28 Astley, Thea, A Descant for Gossips (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1968 [1960]), pp. 22, 95–6.Google Scholar
29 A Descant, pp. 128–9.
30 A Descant, pp. 129–32.
31 During their drive to Brisbane, Robert sings Brahms’ setting of Daumer's lyrics, ‘Wie bist du meine Königin’ as part of a coded courtship of Helen in Vinny's presence (A Descant, p. 59). Before their beach lovemaking, he evokes ‘Bist du bei mir’ (p. 131), an aria incorrectly attributed to Bach that survives from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's lost opera Diomedes, oder die triumphierende Unschuld, performed 1718. The words are as follows:
Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden
Zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh
Ach, wie vergnügt wär so mein Ende
Es drückten deine schönen Hände
Mir die getreuen Augen zu.
32 A Descant, p. 46.
33 A Descant, p. 79.
34 A Descant, pp. 128–30.
35 A Descant, p. 173.
36 A Descant, p. 43.
37 A Descant, p. 45.
38 Selected Poems, p. 111.
39 Astley, interviewed by Ellison, Rooms of Their Own, p. 56.
40 Lamb, Thea Astley, p. 126.
41 The marriages of the Leversons in The Slow Natives, the Seabrooks in A Boatload of Home Folk (1968), and the Cordingleys in Beachmasters (1985) are eroded by boredom and suppressed antagonism. In The Slow Natives, Iris betrays Bernard, but more often in Astley's fiction the husband betrays the wife: Stevenson in Boatload; Holberg in The Acolyte (1972); Truscott in Inventing the Weather (1992). As well as being unfaithful, some of Astley's husbands exploit doting wives, such as Lissie in The Well Dressed Explorer and Hilda in The Acolyte. Yet other husbands, such as Buckmaster Snr in A Kindness Cup (1974) and Wal in Drylands (1999), are violently abusive.
42 The marriage was validated in Epping, Sydney, on 1 March 1961; Cecil Astley died in Brisbane on 24 June in the same year (Lamb, Thea Astley, pp. 136–8).
43 ‘None of these early novels [of the 1950s and 1960s] could be described wholly as satire, but the critical modes of irony and satire were — and have remained — Thea Astley's preferred ones’ (Susan Sheridan, ‘Thea Astley: A Woman among the Satirists of Post-War Modernity’, Australian Feminist Studies 18.42 (2003), 263.
44 ‘Descant’, Sydney Morning Herald 1 September 1956, 14. ‘Philip Cressy’ references the given name of Astley's much loved brother (Lamb, Thea Astley, pp. 103–4).
45 Selected Poems, p. 132.
46 My argument elaborates Bruce Clunies Ross's statement in his persuasive defence of Astley's ‘musical style’: ‘A Descant for Gossips (1960) is a musical descant transposed to the universe of language, where it becomes the perfect medium for gossip, which is a contrapuntal elaboration of the truth’ (‘“Words Wrenched out of Amusement and Pain”: Thea Astley's Musical Style’, in Sheridan and Genoni (eds.), Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds, p. 119).
47 An Item from the Late News (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1982), p. 6.