AustLit

'This collection illustrates Thea Astley’s rarely acknowledged passion for poetry. The way verse contributed to her development as an Australian literary icon is often overlooked, let alone documented so insightfully. Editor, Cheryl Taylor, has compiled Selected Poems in so that Astley’s writing seems unearthed, precious and intimate. The poems are arranged in chronological order, along with careful biographical notes, documenting Astley’s growth from schoolgirl to celebrated and cerebral author. By tracing her making through her poems, the collection shows the formative writing processes that led to her renowned style. The book is an unfurling of Astley’s progress, in both writing and living.' (Introduction)

'Growing up in an Australian country town, one might think that Australian literature would be a key staple in the school syllabus. Sadly, this was not my experience, and it has been a shortcoming that I have only come to appreciate the extent of while at university. My forays into the tradition of great Australian literature constantly and pleasantly surprise me, and one recent discovery has been the work of Thea Astley. Astley was certainly a prolific novelist—having written fifteen books over the course of her career—but more importantly, she was an accomplished writer; a fact often overlooked despite her impressive collection of literary honours. Although she had been writing from the early 1960s until well into the late 1990s, my education up until now had provided me with scant opportunity to encounter this heavyweight of Australian literature. Before coming across Selected Poems, edited by Cheryl Taylor and introduced by Susan Wyndham, the name Thea Astley had sparked only the vaguest of recollections in my mind.

'Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.' (Publication abstract)