The Australian author Thea Astley used small towns as a microcosm of the wider world to examine themes such as isolation and repression, as well as unresolved aspects of her nation’s psyche such as its troubled relations with its indigenous people.
The author of 16 novels and three collections of short stories, Astley was one of Australia’s most respected and well-loved writers. She won the Miles Franklin award, Australia’s leading literary prize (previous winners have included Patrick White and Peter Carey), a record four times, for her books The Well-Dressed Explorer (1962), The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) and her final novel Drylands (2000).
Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her father, Cecil, was a journalist, and his influence, combined with her Catholic upbringing, would be key factors in her writing. After her education at All Hallows Convent she graduated in 1947 with an arts degree from the University of Queensland, which would later award her an honorary doctorate in 1988.
She married Edmund John Gregson (Jack) in 1948, and after her training at teachers’ college was to spend many years teaching in rural towns, a rich source of material for her work. “It’s easier to see conflict taking place within a small group of people,” she once said. “In a small town where the population is a few hundred and everybody knows everybody, people can be assembled like characters on a stage.”
Astley had a particular eye for outsiders and misfits, and a constant theme was self-delusion. “Whether the delusion is that of being conformist or nonconformist, the end result is that such delusion does create an outsider,” she said.
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She may have mined small towns for her material, but she was not necessarily happy living in them, feeling deprived of cultural life, and her fiction frequently depicted people who were isolated in some way. She was also keenly aware of what she saw as the hypocrisy and pretension of middle-class, small-town Australia.
Satire was often her weapon, but she wielded it with liberal doses of compassion and humour, and with technical accomplishment. As one reviewer said: “Beyond all the satire, the wit, the occasional cruelty, and the constant compassion, the unfailing attribute of Astley’s work is panache.” Despite this, some readers found her style difficult, and although this reflected in smaller book sales, she said that, in the end, she wrote for herself.
Astley published her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, in 1958 and continued to write while she raised her son Edward (Ed), and worked as a schoolteacher and then a Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University (from which she retired in 1980 to write full time).
She returned to her native state of Queensland, whose lush climate, scenery and people were a vital influence on her writing: “Queensland isn’t the place where the tall yarn begins; it’s the place where the tall yarn happens, where it is lived out by people who are the dramatis personae of the tall yarns,” she said.
She wrote sympathetically about the dispossession of the Aboriginal people in novels such as a A Kindness Cup (1974) and It’s Raining in Mango (1989), and in her short story Heart is Where the Home Is (1987) her intentions are clear: “We need to acknowledge and accept these awful aspects of our history . . . it’s not ancient history we’re talking about, these are lived experiences of people. It’s not something in the distant past that we can conveniently dismiss . . . this is the ongoing effects of these practices which are felt every day.”
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Although she said in 1994 that her novel Coda would be her last, Paul Keating, who was then Prime Minister, awarded her a creative fellowship and she went on to write The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1997) and Drylands.
Her agent Fiona Inglis said she had been “being terrified of sending any letter which might have contained an error. She would soon have let me know about it — she had a wicked sense of humour and extremely high standards.”
She is survived by her son.
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Thea Astley, author, was born on August 25, 1925. She died on August 17, 2004, aged 78.