Thea Astley was a pretty wicked woman. I remember staring at a photo when I started reading her work as an 18-year-old beginning a degree in Australian Literature. She had a face like one of her stories: unsentimental and mischievous, a face full of questions. With her signature cigarette in hand and commanding gaze she seemed to be saying: go on and criticise me I don’t care what you think.
I had just returned to Australia, a place where I hadn’t lived since I was seven. I didn’t really know anything about the country of my birth, so I turned to literature to find out. Novels like A Kindness Cup and It’s Raining in Mango taught me more about Australian colonial history than I’ve ever learned from history books. These novels also have left a lasting impact on me as a writer by showing how history can provide a powerful background for fiction, with novels more able to speak about the slippery truths of our darkest times than non-fiction ever could.
When I was younger I wrote because the world seemed like the most crazy and screwed-up place, and like so many inexperienced writers, I wanted to tell everyone what to think about it. Astley taught me that the point of writing is to provoke questions, not to tell people what the answers are.
At its best, literature should be like a Thea Astley novel — a mirror we hold up to the nation in order to challenge the way we see ourselves. Reading Astley reminds me why writing matters. Books aren’t just a part of our culture. They’re a way of producing culture by forcing readers to ask questions and see the world differently.
Maybe some found Astley a bit too challenging as a writer? Despite winning a plethora of awards, including the Miles Franklin four times, many critics argue that she has never received the critical or popular attention she deserves. But Astley wrote about Australian culture and history and the challenges of being a woman before ‘Australian Literature’ was taken seriously or feminist critiques of literature were part of university courses. She was a constant on the Australian literary landscape (and still is).
Her body of work shows she was a writer who didn’t take any ‘safe’ options. Astley followed her instincts. She constantly pushed herself to write in new ways and in new voices, and she tackled themes others weren’t willing to. Reading her work — from Girl With a Monkey to her last book Drylands — it becomes clear how, over time, that willingness to push yourself out of your comfort zone is what makes a good writer become an excellent writer.
Perhaps what makes Astley most challenging to readers is her use of language. More than one reviewer has written about being driven berserk by her experiments with text and sentence structure. She sometimes made up words or wrote dialogue in phonetic spelling. She often wrote in a stream- of-consciousness narrative in which her pages were filled with long prosaic sentences that went on and on and were crammed with an excess of adjectives. I have to admit that sometimes I too get lost (and go a little berserk) when I find myself wedged within a Thea Astley sentence.
But what Astley has to teach us as writers here is important: that writing involves going to war with language in an attempt to express a whole world for which you’ll probably never quite have the right sentence.
About the Writer
Felicity Castagna is the author of Small Indiscretions: Stories of Travel in Asia (Transit Lounge, 2011) and the YA novel The Incredible Here and Now (Giramondo, 2013), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards and the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award.