Thea Astley

Thea Astley once commented that, 'everybody is living on a cyclonic edge', and that many of her characters were 'always touching on the edges of cyclones'. In Queensland literature, cyclones often appear as tropes of apocalypse: new worlds of person and place are revealed out of the destruction of the old. In Astley's novel A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968), the tempestuous forces of personal cyclones, as well as those of the cyclone destroying the island around them, overtake a group of stranded cruise passengers, and consequently place and person assume unique meanings as the characters try to survive. Although one of her least-known works, A Boat Load of Home Folk is a profound novel of human experience in which Astley uses the elemental cyclone as a trope of apocalypse that is both an instrument of destruction and a catalyst of revelation.

Louise Poland and Ivor Indyk. ‘Rejected by America? Some Tensions in Australian–American Literary Relations’ in Reading Across the Pacific: Australian–United States Intellectual Histories, Eds Robert Dixon and Nicholas Birns, (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2010): 309–322.
'This chapter focuses on the period from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, a watershed period in Australia–US literary relations, which saw the publication in the US of Australian novelists Peter Carey, David Malouf, Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Beverley Farmer among others, but which was also crossed by tensions and contradictions which led to confusion, disappointment, lost opportunities, and sometimes the outright rejection of important Australian authors and their books. Among these tensions, we look at three in particular: the promising but limited role played by the multinational publisher (in this case Penguin Books) offering Australian titles through its US affiliate (Viking Penguin); the intervention by literary agents in Australia - US literary publishing relations; and the difference in values between the two cultures, which served to hinder the appreciation of important works of Australian writing.' (p. 309)

This article focuses directly on Thea Astley’s publishing history from the time of her involvement with Brisbane’s avant garde in the 1950s, her early inclusion in regional collections, and her emergence as a Miles Franklin prize-winning author, through the enabling pen and advocacy of one of Angus & Robertson (A&R)’s finest fiction editors, Beatrice Davis, to the establishment in the 1980s of Astley’s ultimate author-publisher relationship with Penguin Books and her own overseas literary agent. It will also examine the publishing trajectory of selected novels released and re-issued by the University of Queensland Press (UQP) and Penguin Books, and revisit the divides between writer and editor, publisher and publicist, and the dis/enabling inspiration of difference in the tropics, in the context of the gendered histories of publishing at A&R, Penguin Books and UQP.