Thea Astley wrote a series of novels dealing with the dark side of conformism. The non-conformists in her first two books are virtual prisoners isolated in provincial towns who spend their days at hard labour and their nights locked down in depressing accommodation cells; few break free and most are lonely.

The Queensland writer struck up a friendship with Patrick White while working on A Descant for Gossips. Like White, she fictionalises actual locations.

 

Girl with a Monkey

© 1958

Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2012

 

 

 

 

Booktopia Review

Townsville Trauma Transcended
Novice schoolteacher Thea Astley was posted to Townsville in 1947. This novel, her first, was born of that experience. It’s the story of twenty-two-year-old Elsie Ford’s having to overcome the legacy of a Catholic upbringing while coming to grips with being a single woman in a provincial Australian town located north of the 23rd parallel. Elsie’s ill-educated boyfriend, Harry, is a ‘cradle-snatcher’ but Elsie’s the grown-up in the relationship. Narrow-minded communities offer a simple solution to anyone who becomes the object of tittle-tattle: remove the cause – conform. A young woman carrying on with a man should marry and have his children, enter the convent or go directly to hell from a brothel. Elsie makes a break for freedom: she drops the bloke, endures the domestic violence that he takes to be his right at being spurned, and leaves the community. Prior to getting out though she has to survive and does so by engaging the intellect, seeking to become self-sufficient.

Ebook extract

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 the Americans stationed military forces in northern Australia for the conduct of the Pacific theatre of World War II. In 1942 Lyndon B Johnson flew into Townsville to oversee the official response to a racial abuse incident that had been exacerbated to the point where African American soldiers peppered their white officers’ tents with machine-gun fire.

Details of the mutiny were still being ground from Townsville’s rumour mill when novice schoolteacher Thea Astley was posted there in 1947. She was shocked by how rundown and overgrown the place was, even by comparison with other rural Australian towns.

Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was born of that experience. It’s the story of twenty-two-year-old Elsie Ford’s last day in postwar Townsville. The townsfolk would have described Elsie’s ill-educated boyfriend, Harry, as a ‘cradle-snatcher’ but Elsie’s the grown-up in the relationship.

Astley’s alter ego according to Karen Lamb, Elsie measures the extent to which she’s grown-up by the degree of self-containment achieved. She is hounded by the obsessive need to examine her conscience, to chart a course between the Scylla of intent – steering clear of sins of desire, for instance – and Charybdis of petty neuroses.

Elsie has to overcome the legacy, that is to say, of a Catholic upbringing while coming to grips with being a single woman in a provincial town located north of the 23^rd parallel.

Narrow-minded communities offered a simple solution to anyone who became the object of tittle-tattle: remove the cause – conform. A young woman carrying on with a bloke should marry and have his children, enter the convent or go directly to hell from a brothel. Elsie made a break for freedom: she dropped the bloke, endured the domestic violence that he took to be his right at being spurned, and left the community. Prior to getting out, though, she had to survive and did so by entering more fully into the life of the mind, steering a deliberate course toward self-containment.

Like Helen’s in Descant, Elsie’s hotel room gives us an insight into the lives of white-collar workers sent to provincial towns in the postwar era. The Girl spent only a few hours more in Buchanan’s Hotel, Sturt Street, than had LBJ in 1942 but gives us a glimpse of 1940s hotel accommodation that varied little from one small town to the next: waking up in a windowless upstairs room to the sound of some other guest’s (traveller, fellow teacher, bank teller) radio, Elsie deconstructed the barrier she’d erected to serve as a makeshift door lock and walked down the hallway to the bathroom where she washed in lukewarm water beneath a bare light-bulb.

Downstairs, empty kegs filled the hall while kitchen maids laid the breakfast table then served porridge and toast or tired salad to those who would eat it. Elsie would not. In the evenings, desperate for a life, she played a prelude on the decrepit piano in the swollen sofa sitting room that overlooked Flinders Street.

Helen Striebel spent months in her (Imbil) hotel and had little choice but to put up with the nauseating table manners of the other residents.

No fleeing without breakfast for her. Astley’s non-conformists are virtual prisoners isolated in provincial towns who spend their days at hard labour and their nights locked down in depressing accommodation cells; few break free and most are lonely.

The girl with a monkey on her back did break free. On the final bus trip to Pimlico High, she stared out the window and looked upon a scene that offered another way out: sex workers doing the brothel laundry. Elsie contemplated the costs and benefits of that alternative, marvelling at the calculated audacity of a Classics honours graduate and author of children’s books she’d met in Brisbane who’d been a wartime Townsville prostitute.

Melancholia, not loneliness. These women were Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy, not those who founded All Hallows where Thea Astley had completed her secondary schooling.

Elsie didn’t judge sex-workers but neither did she seriously contemplate that particular escape route, a house of ill-repute being as much a prison for her as the narrow-minded regional community.

 

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A Descant for Gossips

© 1960

University of Queensland Press

Modern Classics. St Lucia, Queensland, 2015.

 

 

Helen Striebel, stuck somewhere south of Gympie, was held back by the destructive effect of the limited horizon of an isolated community. She spent months in her (Imbil) hotel and had little choice but to put up with the nauseating table manners of the other residents. No fleeing without breakfast for her.

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Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit. The Sixth Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture. Surry Hills, N.S.W: Wentworth Press, 1978.

 

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It’s Raining in Mango

© 1987

Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria,  2010.

 

 

 

Booktopia Review

Deep North Dreaming

This historical fiction begins at the height of the Bjelke-Petersen era with sixty-year-old Connie Laffey musing upon the lives of her forebears as far back as the arrival of her paternal grandfather, Cornelius, at Port Denison in 1861. Cornelius Laffey takes his wife and two young children to Cooktown at the start of the Palmer River goldrush in 1874 and abandons them four years later. Jessica Olive, his wife, raises their son and grandson – the teenage daughter having drowned in 1879. The reader is conducted through an anachronistic history of the coastal strip and hinterland from Cairns to Cooktown via the personal experience of various members of the Laffey family and their indigenous friends. Patrick White was a stickler for historical accuracy in his fiction. Thea Astley was not. Balking at an historical novel’s distorting the past is pedantry, of course, the more so in this case because much of the non-fiction about the time and place covered in ‘Mango’ is historically dubious.

Ebook extract:

This historical fiction begins at the height of the Bjelke-Petersen era with sixty-year-old Connie Laffey musing upon the lives of her forebears as far back as the arrival from Canada of her paternal grandfather, Cornelius, in Port Denison aboard the Jeannie Dove in 1861. Port Denison is Bowen. Cornelius Laffey marries Jessica Olive, an upper-middle-class young woman from Balmain. Astley’s maternal grandfather, Cornelius Lindsay, also a Canadian, married the daughter of a well-to-do Ballarat family.

In April 1874 Astley’s fictional Cornelius Laffey arrives with his wife and two children in Charco aboard the Florence Irving. Charco is Cooktown, the coastal gateway to the Palmer River goldfields. They have some trouble disembarking because a thousand men rush onto the ship, desperate to put Cooktown behind them. These were the diggers possessed of gold fever and no experience or understanding of Australia’s tropical North who had set off for the goldfields with insufficient food and water for the oncoming Wet Season (December 1873-April 1874). Even those with a packhorse had to contend with razor-sharp grasses that lacerated the animals’ legs. Having no sooner arrived, then, thousands left. But the hordes kept coming.

In May 1874, as the Dry began, William Hann delivered a herd of cattle to the Palmer River butchers and Arthur Ashwin arrived in Cooktown purchased a packhorse and immediately headed for the Palmer River, staying at O’Shaughnessy’s pub after completing the first 26 kilometres. Prepared for the privations of survival in the wild, even Ashwin was done over by a conman: the horse promptly died. One could not survive as a ‘hatter’ – going it alone; you needed to band together with others whom you could trust. Ashwin teamed up with the Masters brothers whom he’d known in Darwin a year earlier.

At Hell’s Gate the stench of dead horses that had plunged down the steep slope was made worse by foul smelling decomposing bodies of dead men in makeshift shallow graves. Ashwin and his mates were anxious about having seen an Aborigine, on their guard because the climb through the gap would leave them vulnerable, it being there that diggers were liable to be speared by the Aborigines or attacked by European desperadoes and opportunistic thieves.

Revolver Point yielded more gold than anywhere else on the Palmer early on and became a supply depot, Edwardstown, following the establishment of Jack Edwards’ butcher shop. The local mining warden, Phillip Sellheim, renamed it Maytown in 1874. Ashwin stocked up there and marvelled at the success of a fellow called Jones who had abandoned prospecting in favour of purchasing bullocks and selling meat to diggers. Everyone needed the basics – tea, flour, sugar and painkillers hauled by sellers to the goldfield on packhorses – but had to purchase extraneous items into the bargain. Packers had trouble enough negotiating Hell’s Gate and other treacherous pathways en route to the Palmer from Cooktown and were not going to lug cargo back down again so gave diggers no option but to purchase so many horseshoes and nails per pound of flour, etc.

When the Laffeys finally disembark in Cooktown they witness Chinese merchants tallying up groups of coolies whom they take to be unwilling beasts of burden. Arthur Ashwin reckons an educated Anglo-Chinese man whom he accompanied to Byerstown told him that Chinese businessmen imported gangs of ten-to-twenty n’er’do’well labourers from the homeland and employed them to mine gold for a year at a shilling per week. The businessmen met the cost of their workers’ passage to and from China and fed them into the bargain but any gold extracted belonged to the employer (who promptly smuggled it back home). At the completion of his year of service the labourer usually stayed on and kept whatever gold he dug up. Ashwin believed his informant was on the Palmer to purchase gold on behalf of a group of Chinese business associates in Victoria.

Ashwin was an old man recalling a conversation he’d had as a young man. His informant may have been the same Anglo-Chinese linguist who was at Cooktown and the Palmer in 1875 whom Noreen Kirkman, an academic, quotes saying that

“…the great majority of Chinese are not peons or tributers, but working for themselves. There are a number who have been brought here by their friends under agreement to work for a certain time to pay the expenses incurred.”

Suffice to say, the coolies were in Australia to meet family and community obligations back home before returning themselves.

Chinese businessmen flourished from Palmer River goldfields’ trade. Kirkman emphasises the role of guilds in organising Chinese labour relations, purchasing of supplies, and so on. Europeans such as Ashwin probably had no idea that “Chinese immigrants relied on members of kinship and district groups for mutual aid” and no doubt assumed that the Chinese were no less market driven than the rest, that increasing the expenses-to-revenue margin was the order of the day. Biased in favour of the Europeans, wardens were nevertheless constrained to provide their superiors with more or less reliable reports of what occurred on the goldfields and had a considerable degree of understanding of what went on in the communities under their jurisdiction.

The Laffeys remain in Cooktown, entertained in the homes of upper crust folk on Grassy Hill. Employed by a local newspaper and with the opportunity to have his reports published in a Sydney daily, Cornelius writes up what he gleans from maritime sources and men who’ve survived being set upon at Hell’s Gate. He does this for a year before uprooting his family for the goldfields, paying a packer to take them aboard his dray to Maytown.

En route, they camp out with whomever else happens to be on the road and one night Aborigines spear some of the hobbled horses. The travellers retaliate by chasing down and shooting any black – male or female, adult or child – whom they could catch, leaving them to die. Jessica Olive remonstrates but is ‘put straight’ by one of the campers who points out that it’s the only way the natives will learn that the white men’s horses are not to be slaughtered and eaten.

Ashwin, an experienced bushman whose instinct for survival governed all else, would have agreed with Jessica Olive’s fellow camper. To be fair, Ashwin notes, the Palmer River Aborigines had not been hostile until the legendary stolen fish incident. In Ghost Towns of Australia George Farwell credits the origin of the story to an article James Mulligan penned for the Queenslander newspaper in 1904. In June 1873 some men accompanying him on the Palmer River prospecting expedition pilfered fish from the blackfellas. Mulligan had told a somewhat different story in his 1875 memoir, Journal of Explorations, about coming upon “a darkie’s storehouse” in June 1873, examining its contents but leaving everything where they had found it. The tribesmen had responded by setting fire to the surrounding scrub and putting Mulligan and his men on guard. Noreen Kirkman says the origin of hostilities was not the June encounter but the atrocities committed by members of the Queensland Government expedition from the mouth of the Endeavour River to the Palmer goldfields in October 1873.

The forbidden fish explanation aided the authorities’ effort to cover-up the criminal behaviour of the Government expedition. Better for diggers like Ashwin to believe rumours heard on the grapevine pieced together with misleading newspaper reports than have the actual cause of the state of war which existed between the prospectors and tribesmen come to light. Governed by an Old Testament ‘eye-for-an-eye’ moral compass, Ashwin and his mates were satisfied with the unlikely Fall from the Garden of Eden account. The powers-that-be, unconcerned with ethics for the most part, are invariably grateful when those they rule have faith in dat old time religion.

Ashwin saw Chinese coolies on the Maytown track shouldering twenty-five-and-a-half kilogram bags of rice on either end of a bamboo pole (and one man carried double that amount). They were paid by the kilogram to supply Chinese storekeepers on the goldfields. En route to Maytown in early 1875, the Laffeys come upon the bloated corpses of coolies who’d been speared and Cornelius realises he has condemned his wife and children to a god-forsaken fate.

Astley’s fictional family arrive in Maytown to nothing but a few tents overlooking the Palmer River – canvas stores from which the diggers purchase supplies. Down below, hundreds of men scour the sand in search of precious metal. Reporting for the Charco Herald, Cornelius Laffey (like Arthur Ashwin before him) heads to the Byerstown goldrush, taking his young son, George, with him. The eight-year-old witnesses the gruesome aftermath of a ‘dispersion’, the indiscriminate murder of local tribesmen. Out of a paradoxical combination of naivety and a desire to cut the Gordian knot, Cornelius writes an honest report about the violent conflict between the diggers and first inhabitants, citing William Webb’s eye-witness account of whites cold-bloodedly killing blacks in the Normanby River Valley.

Cornelius is a figment of Thea Astley’s imagination. William Webb is not. A prospector, he accompanied the October 1873 Queensland Government expedition from Cooktown to the Palmer River led by Gold Commissioner Howard St George to survey a route to and proclaim the goldfields. The expeditioners began their assault on the Aborigines from the moment the Royal Navy unfurled its survey flags in the mouth of the Endeavour River. Upon their return to Cooktown, the Brisbane Telegraph reported that in an encounter with the Aborigines the expeditioners had “shot a lot” but William Webb did not provide his eye-witness account of what has become known as the Normanby River Battle Camp incident for another fifty-odd years.

Charles Heydon, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald eight weeks after the rumoured St George expedition shootings surfaced, accused the Queensland Government of implicitly condoning the extermination of the Palmer River natives. Heydon’s journalism career was a means to an end – that of supplementing his income while transitioning from banking to the Bar. Laffey’s is the end: his report contrasting the murderers’ barbarity with their Christian values is ignored, not run in the Charco Herald nor any other newspaper. Cornelius has challenged the powers-that-be, seeking to insert ethical considerations where they do not belong. He is persona non grata. His wife and children pay the price of his honest journalism: Cornelius deserts them – the final straw being the incessant howling of Harry, his adolescent daughter’s new baby. (Cornelius Lindsay abandoned his family too.)

Cornelius Laffey departs Cooktown for Brisbane aboard the Arawatta in September 1878 and Jessica Olive has to make do with domestic work up on Grassy Hill until she can scrape enough together to sail south, never looking back.

Within a week of her father’s flight from responsibility, Nadine Laffey boards the steamer Louisa in Cooktown and goes to Reeftown (Smithfield), earning her keep servicing diggers and packers at Kitty’s house-of-ill-repute. She perishes a year later when the brothel is swept down the Barron River and out to sea with the working girls inside. Nadine’s companion prostitute, the well-educated and knowledgeable Sylvia has much in common with the prostitute from Astley’s first novel, Girl with a Monkey.

Most of use are misled by the norms of civilised society in Sylvia’s view. Her father, for instance, had the same low opinion of prostitutes as his comfortably off business associates but was a supreme hypocrite, molesting the maids he employed and throwing his weight around while professing to be a devout Christian. Better to be honest, Sylvia tells her fellow working girls, and acknowledge the cash nexus underlying more than enough instances of sexual engagement. She goes on to quote William Blake’s pithy observation that

“Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.”

Jessica Olive sets sail from Cooktown in the late 1880s or early 90s to take charge of a Port Douglas pub and Astley shifts the focus from Monkey and Descant’s provincial hotel paying guests’ point of view to that of the proprietor: the local postal clerk, a paying guest, balks at Jessica Olive employing an Aborigine, Bidgi Mumbler, as the pub‘s odd jobs man. Business is brisk for a while but as the gold mines fail and the coastal terminus for the new railway to the Atherton Tableland is in Reeftown (Cairns) George moves to Kowrowa. Jessica Olive regards her son’s farming venture as an untenable proposition, believing that the settlers’ struggle to shoe-horn the strange new land into a colonial preconception is a pipe dream.

This is the Patrick White and David Malouf problem of being an Australian but with a characteristic Astley twist – Jessica Olive going on to note that this romanticising of settler drudgery is a masculine fantasy emanating from office block blokes down south. From this perspective Sylvia’s ambition to establish a brothel of her own and use the money to become a courtesan makes great sense. Had she not been an unwitting victim of circumstance, that is to say, Jessica Olive’s daughter may have enjoyed a better life than most colonial women, all things considered. May have. Instead, she lives on in memory as a source of provincial garden variety tittle tattle.

In the 1930s George’s daughter, Connie, lives at Herberton’s convent boarding school during the week and takes the train to Cairns each weekend. Thirteen years old, she spends every Saturday morning flirting with a grown man – an old Astley chestnut – in the School of Arts library. It’s the Depression and Connie’s uncle Harry (Nadine’s son) has had to turn away hundreds of men on the wallaby who regularly come to his Swiper’s Creek (Mossman) cane farm begging for work, life on the land being not much better than subsistence dwelling. Harry’s wife, Clytie, over-rules him in one instance – that of a particularly destitute swagman who’s walked down the Bump Track from Mount Molloy. He is Astley’s vehicle for introducing the historical incident in which the people of Cairns set upon 200 unemployed swagmen encamped at Parramatta Park – beating them with rake and pick handles as well as pelting them with bits of concrete and bottles. Predictably, newspapers carried editorials accusing the unemployed itinerants of harbouring communist sympathies but just as predictably the novel sidesteps the events giving rise to the townsfolks’ anger.

The novelist is not bound in the same way as the historian, it’s true, but the veracity of stories based on actual events is as much a problem for the reader of literary fiction as for the movie-goer. Timothy Bottoms provides a more matter of fact account of the events leading up to the attack on the unemployed itinerants in the ‘The Battle of Parramatta Park’ but the historical record of that time and place in which Mango is set bequeathed us by James V Mulligan, William Hill, Robert Logan Jack, Glenville Pike and Hector Holthouse, et al are a minefield of misinformation and need be thoroughly cross-referenced with the primary source based rigorous analyses of qualified researchers. Hector Holthouse’s 1967 non-fiction account of life on the hinterland goldfields of the Northern Queensland coastal ports of Cooktown, Port Douglas and Cairns seems to be the source of Mango’s brothel story, for instance – though Peter Bell reckons it’s all fiction, that Holthouse invented Kitty and the Smithfield cyclone. (There was major flooding of the Barron River at Smithfield in 1879, caused by a cyclone.) The Mango ships – Florence Irving, Arawatta, and Louisa – were real; the former pair docked in Cooktown, and the latter in Cairns. But Cornelius Laffey could not have departed Cooktown aboard the historical Arawatta in 1878 (because it was not built until 1889) any more than William Webb can have provided Cornelius with his eye-witness account of the Normanby River Battle Camp incident; they’re instances of the Astley anachronism phenomenon.

Mango is Kuranda. The town’s charming railway station is probably much like it had been when Jessica Olive arrived en route to visit her son at Kowrowa around the turn of the century. George collected his mother from the station and took her to his ‘Big Sands’ homestead in a horse-drawn cart. The railway line from Cairns had opened in 1891 and serves, nowadays, as a conduit between the tourism mecca and its hinterland satellite while being an attraction in its own right.

Kuranda’s charm begins and ends at the railway station. While resident in Kuranda, Thea Astley had engaged with the Mantaka Aboriginal community living adjacent to the Barron River but left town in the mid 1980s because of the ascendancy of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s autocratic Government and its promotion of the white shoe brigade. Their fine clothes belied the fact that some brigade members dirtied their hands at the old trough: the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission ‘National Inquiry into Racist Violence‘ report notes that in the mid 1980s the Kuranda police

“had been told to ‘clean up the town’. Such a move had been publicly called for by politicians and certain developers. Several new police with overt racist attitudes were posted to the town. There were allegations of serious police assaults and harassment, some of which resulted in complaints to the Police Complaints Tribunal.”

A Kuranda policeman stated

“I hate boongs, and the only thing worse than boongs is the sort of white scum that would mix with them.”

A “medical practitioner in Kuranda kept notes on more than twenty Aboriginal and Islander people who had gone to his surgery for treatment in relation to injuries allegedly caused by police violence.”

“The Inquiry noted police harassment of Aboriginal people in public places in Mareeba and Kuranda.”

The events that take place in that section of It’s Raining in Mango from which Astley’s novel takes its title occur in the early 1980s and climax in a pre-meditated vicious attack by local thugs on the indigenous Mumbler family and their friends, including Will Laffey (George’s son, Connie’s brother) in the Mango (Kuranda) hotel. The attack, aided and abetted by the barman, was implicitly condoned by the local police sergeant who arrested Billy Mumbler (Bidgi’s great-grandson) for riotous behaviour.”

 

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Reaching Tin River

© 1990

The Text Publishing Company

Text Classics. Melbourne, Victoria, 2018.

 

After an unsatisfactory journey to find and engage her mid-twentieth-century father, Reaching Tin River‘s narrator, Belle, sets out on a quest to unearth the secret of late nineteenth-century banker, pastoralist and politician, Gaden Lockyer. Like David Malouf’s Dulcie in Mrs Porter and the Rock, Thea Astley’s Belle is bemused by the motel room lavatory sash but where Astley’s fictional characters dwell for the most part in thinly disguised towns with made-up names, Malouf’s inhabit known locations such as the Valley of Lagoons.

Ludwig Leichhardt was the first European to make mention of the Valley of Lagoons (in May 1845 on the expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington). Thomas Murray-Prior – Queensland pastoralist, politician and Banjo Paterson’s aunt’s spouse – had accompanied Leichhardt to Moreton Bay in 1843.

Belle ranges across Queensland from Drenchings through Jericho Flats, Allbut and Sugarville to the seaside town – Tin River – where Lockyer came to rest in a nursing home in the 1920s. A figment of the author’s imagination, the terrain is nevertheless familiar – from Gladstone, Mackay, Rockhampton and Townsville on the east coast to the hinterland of Banana, Chillagoe, Cockatoo, Dingo, Hornet Bank, Taroom and Astley’s perennial Virgin Rock on Mount Zamia.

Belle wasn’t too enamoured of the standard of hygiene in a Taroom milkbar that served her a cup of tea. I spent a few days in Taroom in mid-August 2018 en route to Hornet Bank Station. Apart from an excellent Lions free-camp, well-run cafe and civilised pub, Taroom boasted an excellent Shire Council Office with helpful, friendly staff as well as a first-rate Information Centre where the fellow at the helm made a plausible case for the likely circumstances of Ludwig Leichhardt’s demise. In 1844 the hapless explorer (and inspiration for Patrick White’s Voss) blazed a Coolabah tree in what is now the main street of Taroom. It’s still there.

Thomas Murray-Prior lead the charge in the vengeance killing of hundreds of Aborigines at Hornet Bank in the mid-nineteenth century. His daughter, Rosa Praed, reworked actual events and people (such as her sister’s brother-in-law, the infamous Frank Jardine) into a series of Queensland outback novels at the turn of the century.

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Drylands

© 1999

Text Classics. Melbourne, Victoria.

Text Publishing Company, 2018.