Thea Astley, Selected Poems, edited by Cheryl Taylor, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2017, 167 pp., ISBN 9 7807 0225 9791, A$24.95.

writingwas throughher short story collectionHunting theWildPineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elementsof thenorth,andonthestrange livesof failinganddisappointedpeople.But the characters burrowed intomypsyche, as did the themes and ideasAstleywas exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past. Susan Sheridan insightfully examines the legacy of Astley’swriting and its confronting themes inThe Fiction of TheaAstley. Astley’s use of satire imaginatively playswith language to probe, through her distinctive use of small communities of characters, the paucity of existence and struggle for meaning in what at first appears to be an outlier Australiainherstories.Sheridanshowsthatthisisatrope, thattheregionalstandsforthe national, and read thisway connects the specific to amuchwider discourse. She rightly identifiesAstley asone ofAustralia’smost innovativewriters, linking her stylistic use of metaphor and irony, and what she terms ‘compressed prose’, to utilise landscape and place ‘to mirror and intensify the emotional states of the characters’ (2016, p. 7). The fecundityof the landscapereflects theemotionsandrelationshipsdepicted in the stories. Sheridan’s approach is to group Astley’s novels by theme, comparing the development of ideas through the use of literary experimentation in the novels. She points out how unique Astley was in her treatment of the aftermath of the colonial project and its reverberations within society. Her ideas around masculinity and its destructive force not only found expression in the North Queensland context where I first encountered it, but was evident in a running thread throughout all her work. Sheridan explores the evolution of Astley’s response to the patriarchal society in which she grew up and which informed her depiction of character, and how her growing awareness of feminism was reflected in that evolving use of character. Astley was not afraid to investigate difficult territory such as the dynamic coexistence between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North Queensland and in Vanuatuan postcolonial society. She explores the attempts of these groups to remake and understand themselves in a place permanently damaged by the violence of the past, which consequently left all these divergent cultures irrevocably altered. It is an important question around our collective identity with which we, as a nation, still have not come to terms. Astley’s writing in this space and Sheridan’s sensitive examination of these issues in Astley’s work make an important contribution to the work of understanding the impact of our shared past.