Introduction: The work of Thea Astley

Abstract

I am honoured and delighted to have been invited, along with Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, to edit this special issue of Queensland Review on the work of Thea Astley. I owe Jessica heartfelt thanks for her hard work and easy collegiality. Fifteen years since Astley’s death, the appearance of this collection of essays marks the development of a growing body of biographical and critical studies of her work. The essays complement Karen Lamb’s 2015 biography, Inventing Her Own Weather, and my critical monograph, The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016), as well as the collection of essays edited by myself and Paul Genoni, Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006). Most recently, Thea Astley: Selected Poems appeared in 2017, edited by Cheryl Taylor (who has an essay in this issue) and published by the University of Queensland Press (Astley’s publisher for many years). Most of Astley’s novels and story collections are in print, and they are being read in new ways, with new eyes and in new contexts. Text Publishing has brought out reprints of four of the novels in its Classics series, with introductions by novelists of today. Kate Grenville on A Kindness Cup (1974) emphasises Astley’s pioneering role as a historical novelist, particularly her capacity for ‘saying the unsayable’ about the violence of colonialism. Chloe Hooper, introducing The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), draws attention to the parallels between the account of the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2005, which she covered in her book The Tall Man (2008), and Astley’s novel based on a massacre on the island in 1930 and its long-term after-effects. Emily Maguire writes of Astley’s last novel, Drylands (1999), that we are now living in the ‘bleak’ future world that it envisaged, where ‘so little that is punishable in any ethical society is punished in this one’ – but that Astley writes with ‘the skill of a novelist with both immense compassion and knife-thrower levels of nerve’. Emerging novelist Jennifer Down had not previously read Reaching Tin River (1990), and her introduction to the novel conveys her surprised pleasure at the economy of the writing and its qualities: ‘acerbic but never cynical, tender but never sentimental, ironic but never cruel’. Other recent readers, who offer comments on It’s Raining in Mango (1987) on the Goodreads website (where all Astley’s novels are listed), express surprise that an Australian novelist in the 1980s should have taken such a powerfully critical stance on racist and sexist violence, or presented a gay man as a major character. In an age