The Brilliant Career of Thea Astley

Sydney, Australia. The compact, graying woman with the bright blue eyes is one of the first passengers off the tardy morning train in Sydney’s grim Central Station. Although we have never met, Thea Astley dashes straight toward me, apologizing a-mile-a-minute for her delayed train. “I knew you would be all right, though; Americans are smart. You would have checked the arrival board.”

We take to each other and, almost immediately, she invites me to return home to her land on the Southeast coast. “Oh, I should have invited you straightaway, but I thought you would be like those American journos on TV--like Barbara Walters.” Ten minutes later, we are sitting down to lunch in my flat, and the intense, 63-year-old writer refuses to let me get a question in edgewise as she pumps me with queries about my own novels. Finally, when she pauses to light her first cigarette, I manage to turn things around. This interview with one of Australia’s most heralded novelists is going to be more fun--and more difficult--than I reckoned.

First she tells me how much she enjoyed her stint as writer-in-residence at Memphis State University last spring. She will make her second bicentenary trip to the United States in November when she gives a reading with Thomas Keneally at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Five of her 10 novels have been published in the United States: “It’s Raining in Mango,” “The Acolyte,” “A Kindness Cup,” “The Slow Natives” and “Beachmasters.”

Here she has won many literary honors, including the prestigious Miles Franklin Award (named after the author of “My Brilliant Career”). While she suffers somewhat in the marketplace because she is regarded as a serious literary author or “writers’ writer,” all Australian authors are profiting from the growing wave of cultural nationalism. During the last 14 years, Australian books have progressed from 15% of national sales to 50%. She is delighted to tell me that her sixth novel, “A Kindness Cup,” about the massacre of Aboriginals by white settlers in central coastal Queensland, has been set on a state matriculation list.

Astley recently retired after 13 years as Fellow in Australian Literature at Sydney’s Macquarie University. Before that, she taught for 20 years in infant, primary and high schools. Currently she is writing full-time at her 6-acre bush retreat in West Cambewara. She and her husband, Jack, have been married 40 years, she tells me with satisfaction. “I picked him up after a chamber music concert in Brisbane.”

Astley’s work reflects a marvelous balance between acerbic and charitable, irreverent and zealous, politically astute and mournfully romantic. She loves jazz and classical music. “I’d die to be able to play piano like Oscar Peterson or to sing good Lieder.”

Her conversation is sardonically rough, and I imagine her as one of those sophisticated girls who used to sneak into the school bathroom to smoke. “No,” she tells me. “I didn’t start smoking until I was 40. I had to do something; I don’t drink or use drugs.” The contradictions between Astley’s self-presentation as the raspy-voiced social critic and the lady artist reflect the profound contrast between the opulently crude Queensland of her first 23 years, and the more proper ambiance of New South Wales, where she has spent most of her life.

Such tensions are eloquently expressed in “It’s Raining in Mango,” my favorite of her books. The tightly written, anti-saga follows four generations of the Laffey family in the brutal, seductive world of Northeastern Australia. “Cornelius Laffey is based on my Irish grandfather,” she tells me. “And Mango, where ‘Hunting the Wild Pineapple’ is also set, is actually Kuranda, a place inland from Cairns where Jack and I had a holiday house.”

Australians refer to Queensland as “the deep north,” comparing the region’s literature to Southern U.S. writing, but Astley’s work is more reminiscent of Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. Beginning with her first novel, “Girl With a Monkey,” published in 1958, Astley has been preoccupied by steamy dramas in the Australian tropics and neighboring Pacific islands. She writes with the passionate anger and the longing of a long-term exile.

Another Astley theme joining her work to Greene’s is her insider-outsider relationship with Roman Catholicism. Reared in strict Catholic schools, she is a vehement critic of the church’s capitalism and an unabashed fan of the Latin Mass. Her brother is a Jesuit, but she, herself, has lapsed.

“I still pray, of course. Don’t you pray?” she follows me into the kitchen as I make tea. “The church has provided a richness of metaphor for my writing. And the concept of sin is useful. You learn to examine your conscience when you are a baby, at 7. That allows you to see the ticks beneath the surface in other people.

“My ears are like radar dishes. I overhear something, and I feel I have to write it down.” She admires the short story form but finds the novel more compatible personally. “In a story, the craftsmanship is fully exposed. A novel is like charity; it covers a multitude of faults.” Her current project is another semi-historical novel, “about a woman connecting with something 100 years in the past.” She explains: “It came from hearing a radio announcer say he was about to play ‘a no-frills version of the ‘Rustle of Spring.’ ”

For Astley this is a particularly exciting time to be an Australian author. “The Australian writing scene is very vigorous now. A lot of that is due to the support of the Literature Board. It’s been a terrific boost that we can get published in the United States. Writers like Patrick White bring a great energy to the culture.” She says she also admires the novels of David Malouf, Rodney Hall and Elizabeth Jolley. “But I don’t review books. That’s tricky in a country as small as this.”

When Astley returns to New York this fall, it will be her fourth visit to the United States. Previously she has read at the Guggenheim Museum and the Chicago Public Library. Her early artistic influences included Hemingway, Steinbeck and Nabokov. “I like books with stories in them. Do you like Calvino? I don’t like Calvino or ‘Flaubert’s Parrot.’ I thought that was a wank.” Her favorite American contemporaries include Raymond Carver, Tom Robbins and Tess Gallagher.

Reflecting on distinctions between Australians and Americans, she says, “Americans are more polite. They use different slang. They have a different sense of humor. Ours is more understated and dry.” She is clearly appalled by Americans’ poor knowledge of her country’s geography. “I knew where New Orleans was when I was 13!”

When the taxi arrives to take us back to the station, she climbs in next to the driver, in typical Aussie egalitarian fashion. They swap heat stories about Queensland and Bombay. At Central Station, she dawdles by the gate, pressing me again about my own writing and my impressions of Australia. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to get on the train and come down to the bush with me now? Jack would love to meet you. You could spend the night.” I am at the point of giving in.